What Does Cheating Mean When Love Isn’t Exclusive?
Have you ever wondered about the lack of communication or consent around cheating in heteronormative relationships versus the very upfront, on-the-table discussion that happens around cheating in polyamorous relationships? It's a sensitive, complex topic. Here, we dive deeper on cheating in polyamorous relationships. For more on the subject as a whole, listen to the “Cheating” episode of the Yoga Therapy podcast.
This article is written by Mel Fielding (they/she), Yoga to Cope Board Member. Mel is a queer, non-binary, poly, MDD-girlie (non-gendered, cries a lot) in the process of obtaining their Master's in Mental Health Counseling & Wellness. They are super passionate about working with queer, poly, and gender non-conforming individuals to process and heal from trauma (both personal and systemic) and develop new ways of relating in the world.
What is cheating, exactly? Most people would say that having sex with someone other than your partner is cheating. But, what else? Some people consider flirting cheating, while others see it as harmless. Some may view developing strong emotional or romantic bonds with another as an “emotional affair,” others may say well there was no physical contact so it’s not cheating cheating. Some may equate their partner liking photos of another to cheating, others might find this irrelevant. Don’t get me started on how people view porn. The list goes on.
People disagree about what counts as sex, flirting, emotional intimacy, and betrayal. How can we universally agree on what constitutes cheating? There’s no concrete definition for cheating that I can think of because well, we all have our own shit that makes us have our individual rules and boundaries and values around cheating. At the end of the day, cheating hurts because it is a betrayal of our trust and the plethora of emotions that come with that. So for me, cheating is the rupturing of relationship agreements and the ensuing betrayal of trust.
Relationships require mutual agreement
I am polyamorous with two partners, so cheating is a funny thing to me. Not “haha” funny, but more “I think about it a lot” funny. I’ve been told that I am cheating on my husband with my other partner—to which I laugh, because, what in the actual fuck are you saying? We’re all consenting adults here…but I digress on the harmful “poly is cheating” narrative. I have also been asked on dating apps if “anything goes” since I fuck people other than my husband, implying that because I don’t follow the societal romantic script presented to me (i.e., finding my one true love and forsaking all others), I must not have any rules whatsoever for my sexual or romantic conduct.
sigh.
When I say cheating is about breaking agreements, I also mean cheating is about power and consent. There is an explicit—yet unspoken—agreement in monogamy: Don’t have sex with another person. But part of the problem stems from the lack of clarity: Your partner should just know, right? It’s baked into the societal script. In polyamory, cheating is not necessarily about sex with someone else (though it can be!!), it turns into what power you’re trying to use, whose consent are you not getting, and/or what agreements are you breaking.
I think most relationships have some mutual agreements, whether they’re called compromises or negotiations or something else, between those in the couple in order to move in alignment together. Monogamy has a bunch peppered in, but Foucault, a French philosopher known for his ideals on the relationship between knowledge and power, would have us pause and ask:
Did we actually choose these rules, or did we inherit them?
Are they based on mutual agreement?
Do they exist because of the societal myth of what a relationship should entail?
Did you consent?
Do you agree?
Have the influences of modern power (in this case, the discourses of monogamy, commitment, faithfulness, and/or sexuality) been dictating and influencing your experiences, beliefs, feelings?
Set boundaries and explore what’s tolerable
We all have our own boundaries around what we will or won’t accept as cheating. Poly folks tend to be more upfront around those, because breaking them may look different. They may not though. My partners can sleep with other people and it’s not cheating because we don’t have that as part of our cheating script. But, hell hath no fury if my partner watches a show we were going to watch together with his girlfriend. Is that cheating? It sure as shit feels just as bad in my lizard brain. And that's really what it boils down to.
Did you break a boundary of mine or an agreement we set together in engaging a specific way with another person? Is there a rupture we now need to work to repair? Cheating isn’t about the act itself; it’s about whether a shared expectation was violated.
This all should go without saying, but this is just one experience (mine). Talk to 20 poly people and they’ll all tell you slightly different definitions of cheating for them. But therein also lies the beauty of it—because we took out the monogamy discourse around sex, we get the freedom to decide (and crucially, to express to others) what constitutes cheating for us, individually. Since you can’t really practice poly relationships without some degree of self-exploration around what is tolerable (or not), I find poly folks can name and share the things most taken for granted in the mono-normative discourse.
Define cheating and have open conversations
Polyamory doesn’t eliminate cheating by any means, but it does make us define it more intentionally. The thing is, monogamous people can do this, too. Instead of relying on assumptions from a mono-normative script, you can define what cheating is and why it constitutes cheating for you. Is it a lack of safety? Jealousy? Past experiences rearing their heads? Maybe it’s someone else’s voice telling you that’s just the way it is. And maybe you’ve never questioned if you agree with the discourse because of how definitively it is presented as fact.
We can ask, “What really matters to me? What feels like a betrayal? Why? Where is my line?”
Cheating isn’t a fixed thing; it’s a spectrum of behaviors. We can set boundaries, choosing what is and is not acceptable to us. And, we have to communicate those to our partners—explicitly and openly—so they can opt in, too.