Ari Paez, 29, had been dating her boyfriend Jake* (not his real name) for about six months but had increasingly grown suspicious of his interactions with his ex-girlfriend.
“I would see her name pop up on his phone quite often,” she says. “At first I was a little sketched out so I snooped on his phone but it all seemed very friendly, the messages weren’t really flirtatious, so I tried to be the cool girl and be like ‘some people are friends with their ex’ it doesn’t mean anything.”
But the uneasy feeling in her stomach that something was awry only continued to grow when Jake and his ex would go on trips together.
“There would always be a third person with them so I told myself they are just a group of friends,” she said.
Finally, she confronted him about whether there was someone else.
“He tried to reassure me and say ‘no, no, it’s fine’ but about a month later I got a message from him saying ‘I am so sorry but there is someone in my life right now.’ He didn’t say who it was but I knew who it was.”
Paez had been the victim of microcheating. Jake had not been sleeping with anyone else but his constant communications with his ex-girlfriend had essentially helped derail his current relationship.
While the concept of microcheating might be a relatively new relationship buzz phrase, experts say it helps cover those inappropriate actions of attention and affection for someone else outside of your relationship but stops short of a sexual affair.
Australian psychologist Melanie Schilling first coined the term “microcheating” around 2017. What followed was countless articles and internet chatter, with many believing unless you swap bodily fluids with someone outside your relationship you are not guilty of cheating.
However, microcheating could be lying about your relationship status, liking a provocative photo on social media, giving your phone number to someone you are attracted to, taking off your wedding ring when you are out, flirting with a person you meet at a bar, or keeping in constant communication with an old flame.
Claudia de Llano M.A., a licensed marriage and family therapist and the author of The Seven Destinies of Love, says she defines microcheating with her clients as “a boundary crossing that negatively impacts the fidelity or trust in a relationship.”
“People often talk about the fidelity part but I think with microcheating the trust element is a really big part of it. With this new buzz term running around we are all wondering if we are microcheaters,” de Llano said. “But I think when you are giving someone else special attention and oversharing intimacies, this is where it crosses the border into microcheating because we are actively seeking fulfillment outside the relationship.”
De Llano says it is not always the act itself, but the intention behind the act, that is the real indication of whether this is a red flag for your relationship.
Dr. Lee Phillips, psychotherapist and certified sex and couples therapist, says it is important for couples to have a clear conversation from the start about what they define as cheating, because it differs for each person.
“So many couples come in to see me and there has been cheating and I say to them ‘did you ever discuss the definition of cheating and what it means to you’ and most of them say ‘no we never did that’. I often think if they had had that conversation they probably wouldn’t be sitting in front of me.”
Phillips acknowledges it can be a difficult chat to have when you are first getting to know someone so he says a good way into it is to ask “what was your last relationship like?”
“That often sparks that conversation about the other person’s expectations out of a partner, and what they are and are not comfortable with.”
He says couples who have been together for a long time should check in with each other in a non confrontational way if they feel like their partner has been disconnecting from them.
“I had a friend who would wake up in the middle of the night and her partner would be on his laptop and one night she got up and he put his laptop down quickly. So the next day she asked him what were you looking at on your laptop and he said he was watching porn but when she asked him what type of porn he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her,” Phillips says. “It turns out he had a thing for women in cheetah yoga pants. So she went out and got a pair of these cheetah yoga pants and when he came home she had them on and it turned him on and they had great sex. If you approach these things with curiosity and not judgment they can actually help strengthen your connection.”
He says while it is hard to predict how widespread microcheating is—cheaters after all aren’t the most honest about their actions, even on surveys—he says he has noticed a big increase of microcheating and full-on infidelity coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I have certainly seen more infidelity come into my practice since the height of the pandemic, and that is mostly between cis gendered heterosexual couples because most of my gay male couples are in open relationships. We really did see a decrease in people having sex but Pornhub went through the roof. People were kind of masturbating on their own and not having sex with their partners because they were always together.”
Caroline Madden, a marriage therapist from California, told The Swaddle that the pandemic gave people pause to see what they were getting out of their relationship and what validation they were receiving from outside sources.
“Since the pandemic started… I have many clients confide in me that they are surprised at how much they miss certain coworkers. It turns out that the ‘special friend’ at the office was acting as a Band-Aid on a bad marriage by meeting their needs for respect, appreciation, and emotional connection,” she said.
Dr. Tammy Nelson PhD, a sex and relationship expert and the author of many books, including When You Are The One Who Cheats, says microcheating may not be an indication that your relationship is over but a warning sign that you need to look at why you are seeking attention from people other than your partner.
“You may be married but you are not dead. You are going to be attracted to other people, that is just part of being human. The issue is what do you pursue as a result of that. Are there repeated interactions with that person, do you take their phone number… if your partner knew about it would they be upset and if so why?”
“It is one thing to find yourself in a bar flirting with someone you meet, but it is another thing to pursue it while denying the option that your partner might be able to fill that role for you,” she said.
For Ari Paez, her experience with her ex has made her more open with her current boyfriend of two years, Tom McBrearty.
Tom McBrearty and Ari Paez.
Courtesy of Tom McBrearty“I have been microcheated on, and I have also been fully cheated on. So being completely honest about your exes is a big thing for me,” she says.
McBrearty, 30, told The Daily Beast that meant being honest with Paez about a past relationship where he may not have technically microcheated, but admits lying to an ex-girlfriend who he couldn’t break up with.
“There was no emotional cheating with me and anyone else, but there was a lack of emotional depth between me and my partner at the time,” he said. “I was being dishonest. I was inventing work for myself to do. I was the head of growth for this company, and I quite literally developed a foreign work program getting engineers and back office workers in Serbia to do work for us in off hours so I would have something to do overnight and on paper to save the company money. But I did it, not to save the company money—that was a happy coincidence. I did it to give myself something to do in the evenings so I could avoid intimacy with her.”
Both Paez and McBrearty say their experiences in their past relationships have taught them to be completely honest with each other.
“We are extremely transparent with each other, and—it sounds clichéd—but we are each other’s best friend,” McBrearty said. “She knows pretty much everything I am doing because we talk about it. That helps preclude any paranoia about microcheating.”
