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E-mail Flirtation: Are You Cheating?
A therapist explains the slippery slope from borderline to actual cheating.
by Nona Willis-Aronowitz
Sometimes the French really do live up to their adulterous reputations. Even the French president, Jacques Chirac, has publicly admitted to having extramarital affairs—news that barely caused a stir in France. In American culture, though, a full-blown affair—involving love, intercourse, or both—can end relationships faster than you can say, “cheater!”
We have been taught that the definition of cheating starts with a kiss, and that a physical tryst is the ultimate betrayal. But a lot of other flirtatious behavior can cross into the grey zone. Anything from sexy text messages and phone sex to a lap dance from a stripper and intense lunches with a coworker may not be immediate cause for a break-up, but these acts may be enough to make people re-evaluate what constitutes being unfaithful.
Take Eva, 25, a curator who lives in Chicago. Knee-deep into her relationship with her boyfriend, Rob, she started to feel restless. The sex with Rob was passionless and infrequent. Eva still loved him, but felt a need to jumpstart her love life. One day, she found a three-word email from an ex-boyfriend in her inbox: “How are you?” What started as innocent catch-up emails escalated into graphic reveries about their racy sexual past. Eva felt a thrill she hadn’t felt for months in her relationship with Rob. The ex-boyfriend lived in Italy, so the exchanges never resulted in a face-to-face meeting. Late at night, though, she wondered, “Am I a cheater?”
“There are two rules of thumb: if one of you is doing something that would make the other uncomfortable, it’s wrong,” says Dr. Bethany Marshall, a marriage and family therapist and author of the forthcoming Deal Breakers: When to Work on a Relationship and When to Walk Away. “And if you or he is getting emotional and sexual satisfaction outside the relationship, that’s a bad sign, too.”
What is dangerous about “cheating light,” as Marshall calls it, is that it can easily intensify into something more. “Don’t minimize these interactions,” Marshall advises. “The person who is doing it is going to get emboldened over time…borderline cheating activity should be taken as a warning signal of what’s to come.” She’s right: Eva’s sexy emails to her ex-boyfriend in Italy didn’t end there. “The first time I ever ventured into the territory of non-physical cheating on Rob was through these emails. But once I started down the path, I never looked back.” Eva’s computer cheating with one ex, she believes, led her to have sex with another ex a month later. “It was the deception, not the physical activity, that was the breaking point,” says Eva. “Once I betrayed his trust virtually, it was easy to do it physically.” Eventually, Eva’s relationship with Rob imploded and, after three years, he moved out.Meanwhile, Chirac’s devil-may-care admission of infidelity–which he claims never threatened his relationship with his wife–begs the question whether cheating is culturally or individually relative. Is there a universal danger zone? That is, if one partner feels guilty about his or her own questionable behavior, can it still be cheating even if the other partner doesn’t feel jealous? “I deal with people who try open relationships all the time. Some people are not born with the jealousy gene,” Marshall points out. “But regardless, if one person is expending emotional or sexual energy outside the relationship to compensate for something missing, it’s going to destroy their union.”
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1 sheryl // Jan 2, 2008 at 7:05 pm
What if your guy says he going is going to delete his profile from the dating site we met on. but doesn’t. You do however, but showing your gf his pic in your mail you find he is still active?
2 Michael // Apr 23, 2007 at 4:07 am
Lis, it’s not cheating if there isn’t any sex involved. Adults need emotional intimacy with others. Some may find more of a connection with females or with males, but ideally, everyone has at least some friends of both sexes. You mention age too, as if it were a determiner of his values. It’s not. Like it or not, these are people he relates to, at least in their setting.
I would venture to say that your husband loves you very much, but is reluctant to share his friends with you for the following reasons: A) You obviously respond poorly to him having close friends of the opposite sex. B) His friends are just that - his friends. They are obviously providing a connection that you are not. This doesn’t mean that your connections with him aren’t essential, but different people provide different value to the human psyche. He is going to enjoy doing things that you do not, and enjoy conversations about topics you would find disinteresting, and it is only appropriate that he find that outlet somewhere else. C) He can’t trust you enough to know that you would treat his friends with honor. You snoop in his messages and pester him with questions until it’s simply a lot easier to pretend he doesn’t need one-on-one interaction with others than to deal with your response to it all.
Certainly , if he has a philandering mind, your husband might be at risk to leave or have an affair, but that is regardless of whether or not he is permitted freedom or locked down by you. I can say with certainty though that the more restrictive and unreasonable you are, the more likely he is to find someone else, if not simply to escape the suffocation he finds at home.
Love your man, respect him, and above all love and respect his friends, that they might find no fault in you. For if they do, they will certainly share a friend’s confidence that he would certainly be better off somewhere else…
3 Jack // Apr 21, 2007 at 11:38 pm
The bottom line is that most, if not all men think about being with other women. The ones that don’t act on it are usually too afraid of what they will lose to risk it. But the desire to do so is still there. Usually this desire stems not from the fact that something is missing from the current relationship or marraige, but rather because men want to experience something new, for the first time, a “cherry high”. And, it doesn’t matter how many romantic weekends you plan or special little things you do, a five year old relationship will never be new again. And any psychobabble to the contrary is a load of crap. Ladies, you might not like this little reality sandwich, but this is what is going on in the mind of your man.
4 Amy // Apr 21, 2007 at 8:46 am
While surfing the net this morning I stumbled across tangomag.com and being a married woman, I clicked on the “married” tab. I found the postings about cheating and had to dive in. After reading some of these stories, I feel compelled to share mine.
My husband and I have been married just under 2 years and while most of the time we have a wonderful relationship, there was a time when I caught him red-handed cheating.
We both spend a lot of time online, and always in separate rooms. I spend my evenings playing card games on this one particular site but he, on the other hand, used to spend his evenings watching videos of girls … he always said they were just chatting. One evening I caught him with his “boy parts” exposed and on webcam. On the outside, I told him to do whatever he wanted, and if exposing himself on webcam made him happy then so be it. On the inside I was screaming, “Why am I not enough for you?”
I let it rest for a while until one day he asked me to take a weekend off and go visit a single female friend. We went, and she took us to this nightclub where the dancers, both male and female, were not fully dressed. She dragged me up to the male stage and while some guy was shaking his rear in my face … all I could do was turn my head away. I told her that male strippers just “don’t do it for me” and we went back to the table. My husband, on the other hand is a normal red-blooded man and asked for my permission to visit the female dancer area. Figuring nothing would happen, I said fine. He went, then came back to our table and told me he felt some dancer up. (And had fun doing it.) This didn’t bother me … after all, he was going home with me.
Later that evening, we got back to the friend’s house and our hostess was complaining of a backache and decided she was going to bed. My husband proceeded to go into her bedroom to “tell her goodnight” and after about 15 minutes, I peeked my head in her room and asked if everything was alright. She was flat on her back, and my husband was bent over her bed. All I looked at was his face - and when he answered me “yes it’s fine” the tone in his voice told me to leave.
He came out of the bedroom about 2 minutes later and found me sitting on the couch … LIVID. I KNEW something was going on in there but I did not see the whole scene, only his face. I again asked him what happened and he told me. His response was “It just happened.” To this, I say bull feces … it was his decision to reach between her legs. He apologized for the rest of the evening, of course, after showing me the result of his actions … he was ready for sex from me. I on the other hand didn’t even want to be in the same room with him, let alone have sex.
We woke up the next morning and I told him that we had to leave - I could not sit in that house one second longer. He said goodbye to his friend and we were on our way home. That was a 5 hour trip - probably the shortest trip we’ve ever taken together because we talked the whole way home. I finally confessed all of my feelings, how I thought he betrayed me, and how insecure I really am. I told him how hurt I was because he was not the man I married any more. We had stopped talking to each other, and had stopped being romantic. I told him that things needed to change, or I was moving out.
It has been 3 months since “the incident” - one we never bring up any more. While we are on the road to healing and fixing our marriage, there is still a huge part of me that has not, nor will I ever forgive him for the things he’s done. However, we are working on communicating with one another. Our sex life is almost non-existent but that doesn’t bother either one of us. I would rather him not touch me until I am the only woman he will ever see and want.
5 Jason // Apr 16, 2007 at 10:22 pm
K, what you’re doing kind of skirts the line, but the more important thing is that you know you’re partner doesn’t like it. If they don’t like it, don’t do it. They obviously see it as cheating and it’s hard enough for them to be 20 hours away and still trust you, so if you value your relationship you shouldn’t put strain on it by upsetting your partner over coffee and flirting. Even when you’re having a big disagreement with your partner, you should NOT allow that to be an excuse for you to be inappropriate with other men.
Also, if a guy sends you anything with a heart on it, he wants more than friendship and you know you can’t give more than friendship, so don’t accept the gifts. Flowers are ok as long as it’s platonic, but with guys it’s usually not.
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