The New Infidelity
Last summer, a friend called bearing bad news: Her two-year relationship was finished. In between insisting that she was, in fact, totally fine, and that everything was probably for the best, she told me that her (now ex-) partner had accused her of cheating.
My friend had not, to be clear, slept with anybody else, or gone on any illicit dates. But her partner, consumed by suspicion when it came to my friend’s platonic relationships, had gone through my friend’s phone and stumbled upon old messages that were too affectionate, too “flirty.” She broke up with my friend that night.
Some people might feel sympathetic toward my friend’s ex. Others might find the entire ordeal, to use the technical term, absurd. Whatever the stance, a growing number of mental-health influencers are giving language to the debate: What my friend did, they say, was “micro-cheating.”
As with plain old infidelity, micro-cheating is tricky to define; behavior that is fair game to one person might be egregious treachery to another. Many people have attempted to catalog it anyway. According to a number of lifestyle publications, a micro-cheater could be someone who, while in a relationship, maintains an active Hinge profile or sends explicit pictures to another person. Or, they could have done something that might otherwise seem banal: “liking” someone else’s Instagram post, perhaps, or messaging a colleague about something other than work. In a Vogue article advising readers on how to properly recognize a micro-cheater, a couples therapist concluded that micro-cheating could be anything, really: “a glance, a laugh, or non-sexual touching that’s too familiar or intimate.”
[Read: Why happy people cheat]
Whether something amounts to cheating is ultimately up to the people in a relationship to decide. But with micro-cheating, the general consensus seems to be that the cheating has nothing to do with a glaring physical transgression. (The prefix, micro, does a lot of work here.) It is defined by subtlety and generally takes place digitally. For some of my friends, the celebrities a romantic partner follows can be just as big a dealbreaker as parenting or financial choices—following Instagram models, in their calculus, fundamentally reveals as much about long-term compatibility as a poker addiction. To catch micro-cheaters, people often hunt for indiscretions: scrolling through the entire list of accounts that their partner follows, or watching for a partner’s single like on another person’s Instagram post. What appear to be gray-area online behaviors, the thinking goes, are in reality small but infinitely telling betrayals.
The outrage over micro-cheating, and the mushrooming of what people consider acts of disloyalty, seems to be braced by a sincere belief: that data can reliably represent a person’s desires. When so many aspects of a romantic interaction take place online, a like or follow may no longer seem like a friendly tap but a virtual representation of amorous interest. Occasionally, one might discover that a partner really is looking elsewhere. Most of the time, though, an obsessive close-reading of digital activity reveals less about cheating than it does about the bleak field of modern dating: Many people distrust their partners and are ill-equipped to talk about it.
In the past, people’s secret desires tended to remain hidden. You couldn’t prove that your partner had gazed longingly after someone else or had left their hand for a beat too long on another person’s shoulder. Today, many romantic acts are distilled into data points and excised for meaning. Certain gestures are unambiguous—on dating apps, to swipe right, in Tinder parlance, is to demonstrate interest. Other moves are open for interpretation. Comments might be just comments, for instance, or they could be archives of flirtations. “What’s newly bizarre is that the infrastructure of our social lives is set up to record,” Quinn White, an assistant professor of philosophy, told me. (He explores the ethics of love and relationships at Harvard, where I am a student.) What was once opaque and ephemeral can now, in theory, be measured.
The logic of micro-cheating goes something like this: Your partner’s every move online says something significant about them. These actions make legible their innermost thoughts, which are visible, traceable, and recoverable as evidence. Many young women will post about checking to see if their boyfriend has recently followed another girl on social media—because, of course, if he does, he must like what he sees. “A man that truly loves you will never look at another woman,” says one Instagram post with more than 100,000 likes. In a Cosmopolitan article commending the perks of dating a man without social-media accounts, the writer triumphantly declares, “I’ve never had to compete with the likes of Emily Ratajkowski and Bella Hadid.”
On some level, the idea that someone’s social-media habits say something about them holds true—a person who comments with heart-eye emoji under Kylie Jenner’s posts is probably different from a person who doesn’t. And algorithms of course make endless inferences about people’s online behavior: If Amazon knows what you want to buy—sometimes even before you do—based on past browsing history, then couldn’t an Instagram follow mean something deeper too?
[Read: The tyranny of the relationship gap]
When it comes to love, a parcel of information can be harder to read. “Technology makes us think that people are laid out in all of their entirety, for us to know them in all of these ways,” Luke Brunning, who co-runs the Centre for Love, Sex, and Relationships at the University of Leeds, told me. “And I just don’t think it’s true.” Consumers might seem reducible to neat, tidy profiles with a concrete set of tastes and needs. People—with their idiosyncrasies, confusions, and contradictions—aren’t as readily whittled down. The same algorithm that can tell you what pair of shoes you might like can’t tell you anything worth knowing about how your partner feels about someone else.
Someone preoccupied with catching a micro-cheater might commit a transgression of their own: denying their partner the “privacy,” as Brunning put it, that is “central to being a human being.” Although the internet might feel public, Brunning continued, it can also be an avenue for someone “to maintain a relationship with their own self, their own feelings and mind and imaginings and thoughts.” This may not be a cause for suspicion so much as it is a simple fact of existing.
There are parts of a person’s life that are complex and even inscrutable, that cannot be fully accessed or mined for meaning. Micro-cheating, in its misguided effort to make everything intelligible, presents a restrictive sense of what being in a committed relationship means. Exclusivity, in this imagining, is not just an exclusivity of behavior but an exclusivity of attention, thought, and feeling. It is, Brunning said, a mandate “to not have emotions caused by other people.” According to the most vocal agitators against micro-cheating, a sufficiently loyal partner should not, say, follow anyone attractive on social media (or even register another person’s attractiveness), should not text a friend a meme that they might find funny, and should not have inside jokes with co-workers. They should be less a living, breathing person than a one-dimensional, anti-social, ever-affirming sycophant to their one and only true love.
[Read: The bots that women use in a world of unsatisfying men]
Perhaps obsession with checking a partner’s digital footprint was inevitable. The internet offers more avenues to cheat than ever before—easier access to eligible singles, messaging platforms via which to surreptitiously chat up old flames. Women, who tend to lead micro-cheating discourse, are also navigating a dating world that puts their safety and reputation more at risk when a romantic relationship goes awry. In this atmosphere, the line between paranoia and self-protection can be difficult to discern. A partner’s request to keep their phone private could easily seem like confirmation for suspicions of duplicitous behavior. And a very real, eternal human fear lies beneath the micro-cheating accusations: that you can spend years with somebody and never truly know them.
People shock, betray, and destabilize. They can have emotional responses and enigmatic attractions that seem to come out of nowhere. They can do things that are wholly incongruous with how you thought they would behave. This fundamental unpredictability is a “scary reality,” Brunning said. And technology “almost defers that reality for us,” he added, by making people think that they can divine all they need to know from a handful of data signals.
The irony is that as much as technology might make people more aware of potentially offensive behavior, it also helps them avoid methods that could make them feel more secure in their relationships: engaging with their partner, communicating with them, and trying, together, to love well. In the poem “Chance Meeting,” by Susan Browne, a woman slowly approaches her lover on the street. She notices the parts of him that are tenderly familiar—his brown eyes, his smiling mouth, the way that he shoves his hands into his pockets. She muses to herself, “I know his loneliness / like mine, human and sad, / but different, too, his private pain / and pleasure I can never enter.” Follows and comments are unlikely to offer any real passage into this inner world. All we can do is ask, and wait patiently, to be let in.