Cheating is cheating – isn’t it? It’s straightforward, if you’re in a committed relationship (friends with benefits type arrangements need not read on) with someone and you deliberately choose to have sexual interaction with someone else, that’s cheating? Yes, of course it is, the definition hasn’t suddenly become redundant, but what has happened is that the goalposts of cheating have been made slightly larger.
Probably in response to all the cheating prospects out there, the boundaries of ‘cheating’ have changed. There’s all the social media opportunities, how many people do you know who ‘met’ on Insta? Because there’s a fair few! Gone are the days when you only connected with your nearest and dearest online, now you’re likely to have all manner people on your social medias and we’re willing to bet that you don’t know at least half of them and probably less. Then there are the myriad dating sites, sites designed specifically for forming illicit relationships with someone else and that’s before we’ve even got to the dating apps. Tinder, Bumble, Grindr are all words that have probably entered your lexicon before. So what is micro-cheating and where does it fit into this slightly sordid picture?
Imagine this: you’re in a settled relationship. It might be a marriage of many years, it might be something comparatively new, it’s the commitment we’re talking about, it’s an exclusive relationship that you have. Now imagine one of these scenarios:
- Someone catches your eye. Someone you work with, maybe, someone you see regularly at the gym, or maybe it’s a friend of a friend. Or just a friend.
- Someone approaches you (metaphorically) and expresses an interest.
- Someone you’ve looking at regularly online gives you the opportunity to take it further.
- Someone you’ve always been close to has suggested taking your friendship/relationship to the next level.
The first thing you’re likely to do is think “What do I want from this person? Is it completely above board?” If you then admit to yourself that it quite possibly isn’t, that’s your first step into the cheating arena, you’ve paid your ticket and you’re in. But, for now you’re just in the cheap seats at the back, you can slip out quietly and quickly and without being noticed. The dangerous territory is further down, when you’re more invested, when you have more desire to stay there and see the whole thing through and it’s more difficult to leave.
Micro-cheating can be defined in a few different ways, but ultimately it comes down to hovering near the boundaries that have been agreed in your relationship. This has many different guises: it could be sending a flirty message to someone you fancy when you well know that your partner wouldn’t approve. In this situation it’s likely that this person has come up in conversation before and therefore there’s still a tinge of deceit about what you’re doing.
It could be deliberately engaging with someone your partner doesn’t know in an inappropriate relationship, knowing exactly how far you’d like to take it without actually doing it.
It could be fishing about online, just to ‘see what’s out there’.
These are all examples of straying too close to the boundary lines. A lot of people don’t consider it an affair if there’s been no physical consummation of it, but actually, having a strong emotional connection to another person is defined as an ‘emotional affair’, and is often more upsetting to the unsuspecting partner than a one off afternoon of hotel sex. Regardless, you’ll find a lot of people who consider an ‘emotional affair’ a relatively small act of cheating – hence the name ‘micro-cheating’. It isn’t in a category of its own, rather it’s a sub-category to what is accepted cheating behaviour.
So, are you guilty of this micro-offence? It might make for an uncomfortable assessment of your thoughts, but if you’ve done/feel one of the following then you might indeed be guilty:
- 1.You fantasise about this person (not necessarily anything wrong with that if that’s all it is) and make an effort to get their attention in real life, acknowledging that your feelings are not exactly platonic.
- 2.You explore the opportunities out there for cheating, even though you have no exact plans to go through with anything. Lots of people surf the net for adult dating sites or porn sites or those specifically set up for having a forbidden fling, without admitting to themselves that they have any actual intention of taking advantage of one of these opportunities.
- 3.You’re actively thinking about what could happen and start wondering about what contraception you might use.
- 4.You think about this person constantly and regularly stalk them online to get your ‘fix’.
- 5.You exchange messages/emails with them knowing that you want it to go further.
At this point a lot of people will pull back and realise that actually, they aren’t interested in having any sort of relationship outside of their main one. Sometimes it takes a stab of reality to wake them up – usually either they realise that they really don’t want to do it, despite their initial excitement, or their partner finds something and makes it quite clear what the consequences will be if it should go any further or happen again.
If you do think that you might be guilty of micro-cheating then all is not lost. Cut the contact, delete those messages and emails, block the person if need be. Or stop your surfing around seeing what you could do. Erase your history to give you a metaphorical clean slate and change your behaviour. 9/10 people don’t want to lose their marriage/relationship so it’s imperative to recognise what’s going on and stop it before it’s too late.
