According to a 2016 YouGov study, approximately one in five people admitted to cheating on a partner. The further I dug into studies and surveys about infidelity, the more shocked I became about what people do and do not consider cheating.
According to a Deseret News survey, roughly 73 percent of people consider cheating to be having a one-night stand with someone other than your partner, meaning the other 27 percent don’t consider the one-night stand to be cheating. What the actual hell is going on here?
The definition of cheating gets blurred even further between the sexes. In the aforementioned Deseret News survey, females were more likely to consider something cheating. In fact, they indicated this in every scenario posed by the survey. For example, 70 percent of women considered maintaining a dating profile as cheating while only 55 percent of men felt this way. Similarly, only 63 percent of men considered sending sexually explicit messages to someone else as cheating while 74 percent of women felt the same way.
While it’s no surprise men are less likely to consider something cheating, it is shocking what people consider cheating in general. Despite being a college student in 2017, it is still baffling to me 31 percent of people don’t consider sexting cheating and 27 percent don’t consider a one-night stand cheating.
I don’t know what alternate universe these people are living in, but it seems a significant part of our population has devolved into blatant and utter stupidity.
In recent years there has been a push to make polyamory a legitimate alternative to traditional monogamous versions of relationships. The studies above indicate, at the very least, people are more open to licentious behavior while involved with a partner. Even if people never put themselves in these situations, it is disturbing to think some people don’t consider a one-night stand with someone other their partner to be cheating.
The value of traditional relationship aspects like truth and loyalty have eroded because more emphasis has been placed on self-indulgence and self-gratification. Cheating cannot be definitively defined because the people who do cheat want to have plausible deniability when caught.
It’s simple: no one wants to be monogamous anymore. Being with one person exclusively is hard work and requires sacrificing personal gratification, and it can probably be boring and repetitive to be sexually involved with one person for a long period of time. These are all valid arguments, but they’re misguided ones at best.
Entering a committed monogamous relationship with someone introduces intangibles exclusive to such a relationship. Having multiple romantic entanglments might be fun, but they lack trust. There is no way to commit to multiple partners and please everyone. It is an impossible task that is
undermining family building and child rearing all across America.
Cheating is the manifestation of the polygamous cultural surge. The more monogamy is undermined and trashed as archaic and unhappy, the more often people are going to consider cheating to gain happiness. It’s a great secular lie that having multiple partners or sleeping with numerous lovers will make you happier than being with one person. If our society continues to devalue monogamy, cheating will increase. If two people cannot decide what counts as
cheating, the more likely someone will flirt with the line or claim ignorance when caught.
Cheating affects lives, breaks trust and has no place in society. Unfortunately, the militant war on monogamy is more likely to encourage people to cheat. And when they do, they might not even consider their actions as cheating. This isn’t going to bode well for our generation —less people will marry, and less
people will have children.
Jacob Maranto is 21-year-old mass communication senior from Plaquemine, Louisiana.
