The micro-cheating phenomenon

Have you 'liked' a model's beach photos on Instagram, exchanged direct messages with an ex-partner, or had semi-flirty chats with a colleague? Then be careful, you might be "micro-cheating".

These "seemingly small betrayals" are being classified under a relationship "buzzword", said Self. But what is micro-cheating and is all this behaviour so sinister?

'Small breaches of trust'

Microcheating is a term popularised by Australian psychologist Melanie Schilling. Speaking to HuffPost Australia in 2017, she described it as "a series of seemingly small actions" that "indicate a person is emotionally or physically focused" on someone "outside their relationship".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

These are "small breaches of trust" in a relationship that "don't pass the threshold into a physical affair", said Psychology Today – for instance, someone "may leave their wedding ring at home when they go out alone".

The advance of technology and the work-from-home era has created more opportunities for micro-cheating. It can involve "liking a co-worker’s photo on social media", sending them private messages, or "checking in" with them on Slack "more often than before", said Associated Press.

As well as "furtive social media chatting", it also could mean "lingering too long at the water cooler" to chat with a particular colleague, sharing intimate details of your own relationship, or "dressing up if you know you'll see someone".

'There isn’t a right and wrong in relationships'

Possibly, but these behaviours "may fall into an ethical grey area", said Psychology Today, so they can "sometimes be difficult to identify, confront, and discuss".

"There isn't a right and wrong in relationships", Abby Medcalf, a psychologist and host of the "Relationships Made Easy" podcast, told Associated Press, but it's "cheating" if your partner "doesn't like it, or doesn't know about it, or wouldn't like it if they knew about it".

It can be unintentional, because someone who feels "dissatisfied or unfulfilled" in a relationship may be "trying to meet those needs" or "get satisfied elsewhere" without "fully consciously realising it", Molly Burrets, a clinical psychologist specialising in couples therapy, told CBS News.

Wendy Walsh, a relationship expert and psychology professor, said that it's actually quite natural, because all people "keep in the back of their minds a backup mate" and "an idea that if something happened in their relationship", there is someone "they could call".

'Digital habits' or 'signs of disloyalty'

Jealous couples are "monitoring and investigating" each other's "digital habits" for "signs of disloyalty", said Washington Post, and because almost "everything we do online leaves a trail", those "breadcrumbs" can "become a sign of infidelity – real or perceived".

A 2018 study suggested that women may be more emotionally affected by online micro-cheating behaviour than men, and that women may also be more jealous after deciding that their partner is micro-cheating.

Burretts said that micro-cheating can be avoided by honest conversations early in a relationship. "A lot of times we go in expecting that we both have the same concept of what exclusivity means", she said, "and we often don't". So defining the term "exclusivity", discussing what it means in the relationship, and setting boundaries can help.