A few weeks ago, I was zoning out, scrolling through Instagram stories. Among the usual photos of dinner recipes, museum pictures, and selfies, I saw a post that stopped me cold in my tracks. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion said that her then-boyfriend, basketball player Klay Thompson, cheated on her.
The group chats activated immediately. My friends and I were stunned. We’d watch this couple work out together, celebrate the holidays, and even purchase a home through our tiny screens. Eventually, the shock turned to rage. The thing is: We don’t actually know these people.
This is not the first time I’ve gotten worked up about a stranger’s cheating scandal. Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval. Halle Berry and Eric Benét. Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Even a random couple at a Coldplay concert raised the blood pressure of outside observers.
Americans are divided about a lot, but when it comes to cheating, we’re in agreement: Don’t do it. And changes in technology mean that, for some, the definition of infidelity is widening. Writer Zoe Yu detailed this shift in a recent article she penned for The Atlantic about something called “microcheating.”
“Just like regular cheating, microcheating is sort of nebulous and really hard to pin down because what goes for cheating in one relationship might not actually count as cheating in another one,” she wrote. “One person might think that flirting with someone over text is cheating, another person might not. This varies, I think, a lot from relationship to relationship.”
What other actions follow under the umbrella of microcheating? And how is technology shaping the way we think about our romantic relationships? We discuss that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
Is microcheating a purely digital thing?
It’s not purely digital, but I think because of how tech-driven a lot of our relationships now are, a lot of these small behaviors that might constitute a breach in the exclusivity of a relationship are very much digital.
This can mean having an online dating account or subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans. Then there are these emerging little behaviors, like hitting like on someone’s Instagram post or sliding up on someone’s story.
Sliding up on a story?
Sliding up on someone’s story. As someone who’s firmly in the Gen Z cohort, I was explaining to one of my older millennial friends just how much meaning is suffused into something as tiny as a story.
A lot of Gen Zers will sit around and be like, “Oh my gosh, what does it mean that he liked my story? What does it mean that he slid up and responded with so-and-so emoji?” I think it’s because a lot of the time, the first ways that we were socialized with each other — at least in the Gen Z demographic — were actually through tech.
It’s interesting because on one hand, I think it’s very easy to sort of roll your eyes. But I’m not above seeing someone cute and going back to a post from a year ago, hitting “like,” and seeing what happens. I think we’ve all received the little looking sideways emoji on a picture of ourselves we posted. But it also seems like a lot to track. Does this mean people are tracking their partners’ likes and other online activity?
Yeah. I think one defining feature of microcheating is how one-sided it is; people are very much in an investigative mindset.
What’s really interesting about cheating is that people are attempting to assign meaning to something that is actually a lot more complex. I don’t deny there is information that you can glean from someone’s online behavior and the way that they present themselves publicly on a profile, but also the human reality is much more complicated and much more hairy.
I think one aspect of microcheating is that it boils down all of the human contradictions and irregularities and things that you might not understand about a person into these very reductive data points. What’s interesting is that the entire premise of microcheating is couched on the assumption that if you snoop and you find something, this is uncorrupted evidence.
How much of this is actually less about the relationship itself and more about embarrassment? Everything is very public-facing. I think of conversations with my friends where it’s just like, “I really like this guy. I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.”
That’s like the whole Sabrina Carpenter song, right?
Yes!
You might not actually object to your boyfriend liking some girl’s post. What you actually might be concerned about is the message that it’s sending to this person, given the social meaning that we’ve now assigned collectively to likes and comments and follows.
You might not actually think, “Oh, my boyfriend might be attracted to this person because he’s following her on Instagram.” It might actually be the fear of “How is this going to reflect on me? How is this going to embarrass me and how is it going to affect the way that other people see my relationship and whether or not my significant other is sufficiently loyal?”
Is it possible to have a full life online without microcheating? Is it reasonable to expect people not to post or share memes or do whatever it is we do online if we also want to be in a relationship?
I think the bar for exclusivity has gotten inordinately high, to the point where people are demanding an exclusivity of emotion, of attraction, and you can’t actually share a laugh or share a private moment with anyone outside of this romantic relationship that is supposed to be at the center of your life.
I think this is actually super damaging because it closes off all of these really, really great relationships, friendships that are outside of a romantic concept, but you can’t really reach for if you think that every kind of small behavior might be potentially suspect.
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