I enjoy hearing people discuss casual crushes, budding courtships, anniversary commemorations and even monumental breakups. However, one thing always bothers me about relationship talk — the way that people talk about cheating, blowing it up to be the single greatest offense one can do to another in a romantic relationship. This kind of thinking, I argue, is unproductive: We should have more empathy for cheaters. Everyone has the capacity to cheat, and recognizing that fact will lead us to become more appreciative of our relationships with others.
To get ahead of the critics, I’m not endorsing or excusing cheating on one’s partner, especially not in serious situations like marriage; instead, I’m advocating for reducing the taboo around infidelity. Cheating has been elevated to one of the greatest offenses one could ever commit in a relationship, when it’s really just another iteration of our fallibility as humans. Like it or not, the concept of infidelity exists precisely because we are all prone to making mistakes. We cannot pretend we are always capable of being perfect, or that every mistake that harms another makes a person automatically evil.
Nobody likes to admit it, but everyone has succumbed to temptation at some point in their lives.
In order to have an honest conversation about cheating, it’s important to dissect exactly what the word evokes. Cheating is the conscious act of pursuing romantic or sexual contact with a person outside of a relationship, crossing the boundary of exclusivity one has agreed upon with their partner(s). This can be done malevolently — meaning that one actually does not care about their committed partner — or offhandedly, in a singular moment of carelessness or weakness.
Malevolent cheating would imply that someone is repeatedly cheating, or carrying on an affair, out of carelessness or hurtful intent towards their committed partner. The problem here is not a singular act of infidelity, but instead its repeated, intentional and abusive occurrences, which result in an inherently toxic relationship. I’m not trying to make a case for empathy in these situations, as that is obviously wrong. Rather, singular instances of infidelity, in which the perpetrators instantly realize they made a mistake, are what I’m interested in examining.
We’re told we must resist temptation when we’re in a committed, monogamous relationship; I agree. But I also don’t expect everyone to be perfect all the time. Nobody likes to admit it, but everyone has succumbed to temptation at some point in their lives. We cheat on games, tests, diets, personal resolutions — we know it’s bad, but we do it anyway. Is cheating really as unthinkable as we tell ourselves it is?
Sometimes, instant gratification is irresistible. Even if you haven’t had a single experience of infidelity from either perspective, you can understand the basic mechanisms at play when one is tempted to do something they shouldn’t. To state that you are too good to cheat is to pretend to be perfect, totally above temptation. To me, that seems like an awfully sanctimonious and unrealistic position to take.
Cheating is feared because it preys on people’s latent vulnerabilities about their relationship — the worry that one is not actually satisfactory to their partner, for instance. It’s also usually accompanied by acts of dishonesty to cover up the event of unfaithfulness. When one cheats, it is the betrayal of one’s previous promise and the betrayal of their partner’s trust; it reveals a temporary lapse in judgment.
The fact that cheating is so stigmatized might lead one to avoid telling their partner altogether, in the hopes that the incident will go unnoticed and the relationship can stay intact. If people are worried about being immediately marked an evil person for a momentary transgression, they are less likely to want to do the right thing and fess up to their mistake, therefore making their original offense worse and misleading their partner even further. This is the most obvious disadvantage of condemning cheating on such absolute and general terms.
Paradoxically, turning cheating into the most serious offense one can commit doesn’t lessen the amount of cheaters in the world, but instead increases the amount of lying that happens to cover up such an egregious mistake. Recognizing the fact that one of the risks of getting into a relationship is that we are liable as human beings to hurt each other shouldn’t encourage more people to be dishonest. It should instead foster a more understanding conversation regarding betrayals in relationships and ultimately lessen the pain caused by an instance of infidelity.
The defensive tirade against cheating also discourages an honest examination of what the act of cheating might evoke in the perpetrator. An occurrence of infidelity exposes a problem in a relationship — what did the cheater seek out in someone else that was missing in their partner? Do they, perhaps, appreciate their partner in a new way after making such an egregious mistake? If taken seriously, a discussion about cheating — an unfortunate occurrence — can be turned into a tool for useful introspection for a couple.
A large part of the reason why people get so anxious about infidelity is because they believe the very act will forever taint a relationship. In reality, if an instance of cheating occurs, the conditions that allowed for that to happen would be the real inciting factor of a break up. People are well within their rights to break up with their partner after being cheated on — but that doesn’t mean the cheating incident is the only thing to blame. Additionally, recognition of this fact might lead others to be able to work through the problems in their relationship exposed by the act of infidelity, if they so choose.
My aim is not to enable cheaters, nor is it to soothe guilty consciences. I’m also not trying to convince people to let their partners cheat on them, nor am I saying that humans are incapable of being monogamous; just because everyone has the capacity to cheat doesn’t mean they ever will. What I advocate for is a more empathetic view of our partners: They aren’t perfect, and neither are we. That shouldn’t scare us off from commitment.
The most important part of a relationship is honesty, and I think that the moral outrage surrounding cheating is often performative and impedes frank discussions between couples. We fear our own fallibility, and we fear the possibility of being hurt by another person; this is what drives so many people to insist that they would never cheat, because they hope that their partner will also never cheat on them. To state such a definite claim is to be intentionally ignorant to the reality that we can all make mistakes at any point.
I don’t want to sound pessimistic by saying that we all have the capacity to hurt other people. My belief isn’t rooted in a pessimism about the human condition, but rather an optimism about how we are all united in our own imperfect natures. In her essay “Labor, Work, and Action,” Hannah Arendt wrote about the precariousness of life, which essentially exists as a network of human relationships and actions. Notably, she wrote: “The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving, and the remedy for unpredictability is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.”
I find myself thinking of this quote often in my daily life. It’s stressful to think that we can’t predict what another person might do to us, and that any transgression we commit is inherently irrevocable. We can’t erase our previous actions, and we can’t make others act the way we want them to. We can’t pretend that everyone will treat us perfectly, all the time; we also can’t lie to ourselves and say that we will never hurt another soul, intentionally or unintentionally. The solution? Forgiveness and commitment. These two concepts only exist precisely because we are fallible human beings, and we recognize that we don’t need to be perfect to be happy.
Despite our shortcomings, we strive to create relationships with other people and build trust. We commit ourselves to the people we love, we live and make plans with our friends, we make promises to each other and strive to fulfill them. In the case we fall short, we ask for forgiveness; we recognize that we are all imperfect, and we forgive one another for our weaknesses. I’d say the most romantic thing you can do this Valentine’s Day is to tell your crush or your partner that you’re not perfect, and neither are they. Don’t allow fear, however, to stop you from pursuing an honest and empathetic relationship.
