I realised during a night out last summer that none of the three women I was chatting with shared the same idea of what constituted cheating. All of us were in monogamous relationships, two with men and two with women, but each had a different impression of what counted as infidelity. The one who had been married for 10 years said she didn’t care or want to know unless penetration was involved. One said she considered watching porn cheating, a position so at odds with her trendy self-presentation that the rest of us glanced at her askew, trying to figure out if being prudish was a new kind of kink. Another said her line was simple: any physical touch beyond a friendly hug. She didn’t mind close or regular communication with others, because she considered such things impossible and unattractive to police.
I said that anything I felt the need to hide would strike me as a problem. The hidden thing could be sex, or it could be a dinner plan I might conveniently omit when relaying my plans for the week. This seems the only reasonable barometer to me, given how individual and varied boundaries are among different couples. But is it a good enough litmus test, I wondered later, when there are things I don’t want my partner to know that have nothing to do with infidelity? Impulses and thoughts that reveal my laziness and inadequacy and selfishness, for instance, but don’t reveal any attraction to another person. How to decide what is reasonable to subsume into the ultimate unknowability of another, and what needs to be in the open? What is cheating, anyway?
