Musings on modern betrayal at 30,000 feet
I’m writing this while my four-year-old sleeps on my lap, mid-flight from Bali, still turning over a conversation I overheard in the boarding queue. A woman, voice tight with genuine distress, confiding to her friend that her boyfriend had committed the unforgivable: he’d followed a girl he went to high school with on Instagram. She used the word “cheating.” And she meant it.
Fourteen years of sitting across from couples and individuals in various states of relational crisis has taught me that we’ve stretched the definition of infidelity so far it’s lost all shape, all meaning. We’ve taken something that once had boundaries - however imperfect, however patriarchally poisoned - and turned it into a catch-all for every uncomfortable feeling we’d rather not examine.
It’s infinitely easier to call something cheating than to ask why your partner liking someone’s photograph sends your nervous system into full catastrophe mode.
The evolution is almost darkly poetic when you trace it back. Centuries of women being murdered for the same sexual autonomy men were celebrated for having. The double standard wasn’t subtle - it was carved into law, into religion, into the very foundations of how we understood partnership. Women as property, their sexuality as currency that depreciated with use. Men as entitled explorers, their wandering encouraged as biological imperative.
And now? Now we’ve overcorrected into a space where following an ex-partner constitutes betrayal. Where having coffee with someone who happens to share your genitalia is grounds for relationship termination. Where a double-tap on a screen becomes evidence of emotional treason.
I’ve watched it unfold in real time. The man who genuinely believed his wife’s lunch with a male colleague was infidelity. The woman convinced that her partner’s Instagram like on a friend’s beach photo represented a fundamental breach of trust. They arrive at these conclusions with absolute conviction, and underneath that conviction is something most of us would do anything to avoid looking at directly.
Fear. Bone-deep, ancestral terror that we are not enough.
So we control. We create rules that feel like boundaries but function as chains. We call it respect when really, it’s just sophisticated manipulation dressed in the language of partnership. Dealing with the internal work—the excavation of why we feel threatened, why we’ve placed our entire sense of worth in someone else’s hands—that’s fucking excruciating. Much simpler to forbid Johnny from having female friends. Much cleaner to ensure Samantha only socialises with men when their girlfriends are present, like some bizarre double-date surveillance system.
And I understand it. I do. We’re raised on fairy tales where love conquers all, where finding “the one” means never experiencing desire or connection outside that sacred bond. We’re sold monogamy as the only legitimate path, forsaking all others until death or Netflix passwords do us part. The cultural script is powerful. The shame around deviating from it is crushing.
This is the part where people’s heads explode, where we enter territory most refuse to tread: some people who cheat are just arseholes. Genuinely thoughtless humans who prioritise momentary pleasure over their partner’s wellbeing. Those people exist, and they deserve the judgment they receive.
But some—and this is the nuance that makes people uncomfortable—some people cheat because they’ve been emotionally abandoned for years and finally, in a moment of weakness or clarity, they felt something. Some cheat because they lack the courage for honest conversation, terrified of the fallout. I’ve sat with a woman who had a mastectomy and sought a stranger specifically because she couldn’t bear her husband seeing her altered body, couldn’t risk his judgment, needed to feel desired without the weight of long-term care attached. She called it cheating. I called it survival.
Humans are catastrophically complex. We’re walking contradictions, capable of loving deeply while simultaneously destroying what we love. We’re loyal and selfish, committed and restless, certain and terrified all at once.
Infidelity contains all of this complexity, but we’ve decided it’s easier to flatten it into a binary. Cheater or faithful. Villain or victim. Black or white.
The truth, the uncomfortable truth that makes people squirm in their seats, is that most relationships don’t operate on conscious love. They operate on habit. On fear of being alone. On sunken cost fallacy. On the sheer inertia of shared Netflix accounts and joint furniture purchases. If we actually applied “if they loved me they wouldn’t…” as a litmus test, half of all partnerships would implode immediately. Real love requires presence, emotional availability, ongoing choice. And most people are just showing up, going through motions, resenting each other quietly over who last emptied the dishwasher.
I’ve seen this hundreds of times. Not theory. Not some philosophical musing I conjured while reading Esther Perel. Actual evidence from actual humans sitting across from me, unraveling the stories they’ve told themselves about what their relationship actually is versus what they claim it to be.
And yet we cling to our expanded definitions of cheating because it lets us avoid the real work. The work of building genuine self-worth. The work of communicating needs before resentment calcifies into contempt. The work of acknowledging that perhaps, just perhaps, our partner’s entire existence shouldn’t revolve around managing our insecurities.
I know this will attract rage. People despise having their certainties challenged, especially around something as emotionally charged as infidelity. But after fourteen years of watching relationships implode over Instagram follows whilst couples who’ve emotionally checked out years ago stay together out of sheer stubbornness, I’m less interested in being liked than in being honest.
Maybe we need a new language. One that distinguishes between actual betrayal and the projection of our unhealed wounds. One that acknowledges the difference between someone deliberately deceiving you and someone simply existing in a way that triggers your deepest fears.
My four-year-old just stirred, readjusting against my shoulder. They know nothing of these complications yet. Knows only that love feels safe, that connection is simple when you haven’t yet learned to armour against it.
Perhaps that’s the real tragedy. Not that people cheat, but that we’ve forgotten how to love without fear, without control, without turning every human interaction into a potential threat. We’ve lost the ability to trust, not because trust is impossible, but because we’ve never learned to trust ourselves first.
And until we do that work, until we’re willing to sit with our own demons instead of policing someone else’s social media activity, we’ll keep expanding the definition of cheating until it encompasses everything except the one thing it should: actually looking at ourselves.
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