When a person gets married, they hope to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. That’s how all the Disney movies and romantic comedies portray marriage, right?
But unfortunately, for many people, it doesn’t work out that way.
Most couples start out crazy in love, and they think that feeling will last forever.
Even if they know that feeling of infatuation may wear off, they at least expect to have a loyal partner by their side for the rest of our lives.
Sure, some couples do live happily ever after. There are little old couples walking around hand-in-hand just as in love as the day they met.
But for many, that is not their story.
If a marriage goes downhill over the years, there can be many reasons.
It could simply be because they have grown apart, or because they focused too much on raising children and forgot to nurture each other.
Or, it could be the reason many people dread the most – cheating
What is Cheating?
This may seem like an obvious question, but in today’s world, it is not as clear-cut.
Usually, people think of physical indiscretions when they think of cheating. This could be anything from hand-holding to kissing to full-out sex.
That’s the easy way to describe cheating.
But there’s another kind of cheating where there is a little more gray area, and that is emotional cheating.
The problem with emotional cheating is that many people have different standards for it, which we will discuss in a moment.
Regardless, most people expect their partner to remain emotionally loyal to them, and to not get too close to another person.
The Gray Area
Here are some examples of behaviors that might fall into the “gray area” for some people. In other words, some people might consider these cheating, while others may not.
- Flirting or romantically teasing another person
- Talking to or meeting with your ex(es)
- Texting other people too much
- Touching or grabbing other people
- Buying presents for other people
- Going out with others too often
- Talking to a person (or people) online too often
- Engaging in pornography
- Going out on a “date” (or date-like activity) with someone else
- Going to clubs and dancing/grinding with other people
- Asking other people for their phone numbers
As you can see, some of these are worse than others.
Some people might not care about the above behaviors (or even notice), while others might see them as all-out cheating.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Even if these don’t involve any sort of physical contact, many people do consider these things a betrayal to their relationships, and thus, “cheating
