Words by Alice Hall

Cheating…it’s the worst, right? And yet, it’s a practice that never seems to go away – portrayed on screen so often that it’s most of our worst fears in a relationship. I’m sure nearly everyone remembers Carrie Bradshaw hooking up with Big behind Aidan’s back in season three of Sex and The City. Or Chad Michael Murray’s One Tree Hill character Lucas Scott, who was an egregious cheater. If that didn’t give you trust issues from your early teens, no doubt the endless reports of celebrity cheating scandals have.

And now, there’s even more ways that cheaters seemingly get away with it – mostly due to technology. Recently, a feature on WhatsApp called ‘Chat Lock’ went viral after many felt it enabled bad behaviour in relationships – the feature allows users to hide chats that are only accessible by password, with anyone else using the phone unable to see the chat unless they know the password to type into the search bar.

Then there’s secret messaging apps like Plato, which is disguised as a gaming app, or Telegram which enables users to hide chats. Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp all have disappearing message functions so chats can’t be recorded. 

Of course, there’s also the clearer signs – a person being suspicious about their phone, never leaving it face up, or having names saved under codes. While that might encourage a person who thinks they’re being cheated on to attempt to go through the phone, a pro tip for you: if they have an iPad, go through that instead – the messages are synced and cheaters are less likely to remember to hide their bad behaviour.

Off-screen, it’s hard to gauge how common cheating is because, naturally, so few people own up to it. According to various studies, around 20% of married men and 13% of married women report cheating on their spouses, meaning roughly one in five marriages experiences infidelity at some point. In relationships, that figure increases drastically – in one 2021 survey of more than 400 people, 45% in monogamous relationships had engaged in an affair. It’s a scary world out there, guys.

One of these people is Clara*. She cheated on her ex-boyfriend, who was five years older than her, multiple times when they were together as teenagers and never told him – managing to get away with it.

‘It was always when I was on nights out with my friends,’ she explains. ‘Many of them didn’t approve of the relationship due to the age gap, so I was encouraged to cheat if I ever met anyone I liked as I was still so young, and he was quite possessive. He didn’t want me to move into university halls and be surrounded by new people. I always ended up cheating with boys who were closer to my age.’

In a survey by Emucasino study, participants were questioned on whether they had kept their infidelity a secret. One in five respondents revealed they waited over a month to tell their partner, while one in ten never ended up telling their partner at all – only 9 per cent confessed within a month.

In the survey, people were only asked at what point did the respondents reveal their infidelity to their partner, which doesn’t account for those who got caught in the act. The data also showed that 7.8 per cent of respondents hid their infidelity for between one and three months and 4.8 per cent hid it for over a year.

Clara explains she didn’t think about her ex-boyfriend at the time she was cheating, because she was ‘young’ and just ‘living life as a young adult’ but admits she ‘would always be consumed with guilt afterwards.’ She said she never told him about the cheating, and was confident he wouldn’t find out because, due to the age gap in their relationship, they mixed in different circles. ‘I think I cheated as I felt trapped, and all my mates would pull on nights out so I wanted to,’ she adds.

‘I did eventually tell him about one, as I wanted to split with him anyway and ended up with the person I cheated with,’ she says. ‘I mainly told him because he wouldn’t have let me go otherwise.’

However, for the most part Clara decided to keep her infidelity a secret because she doesn’t think ‘passing on the guilt to someone else is helpful.’ She adds ‘I always wanted to stay with him despite cheating, right up until it got to the point where I couldn’t be with him any longer due to the possessiveness and being in different stages of life. He wanted kids by the time I was starting university and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.’ However, there were some near misses. ‘I once almost got caught because I’d gone back to a male friends house after a night out, he couldn’t get hold of me and knew I wasn’t home,’ she recalls.

Of course, there’s no denying that cheating sucks, and no one wants to be cheated on. But unlike the black and white way it’s often portrayed in the movies, there’s actually lots of reasons why people cheat. One 2021 study revealed a range of reasons, including anger, self-esteem, lack of love, low commitment, need for variety, neglect, sexual desire, and situation or circumstance.

In Clara’s relationship, for example, she’s convinced the infidelity went both ways.  ‘I caught him out a few times but he would deny cheating to the death,’ she says. ‘Once I set up a fake msn messenger account of a girl and added him and he immediately changed his picture from me and him, to a topless one of just him and started bitching about me to her! So I always had my doubts.’

Of course, cheating also comes in many forms. There’s the obvious, physical type of cheating, that involves sexual contact with a third party. However, emotional affairs are also becoming more common (and accessible) thanks to social media. Broadly speaking, an emotional affair describes a situation in which someone in a relationship develops an important emotional connection with someone other than their partner, in a way that crosses a line without always becoming physical. This could look like relying on them for advice,  or leaving mildly flirty comments on their social media posts that don’t outright suggest anything, but would make your partner feel uncomfortable.

According to a YouGov study, around 15% of British adults reported engaging in emotional infidelity (forming an emotional connection with someone outside their relationship), while 44% of respondents considered such behaviour to be cheating.

How does Clara look back now on her own experiences of cheating, over ten years on? ‘I just feel like I was young. I was with someone I shouldn’t have been with as he was so much older,’ she says.

*names have been changed