Modern Life: What is Micro-Cheating? By Charlotte Metcalf
In our day, you were cheating if you were caught red-handed in bed with the wrong person. Nowadays, cheating is far more nuanced, with layers of tiny betrayals or ‘micro-cheats’.
Young people connect online, often by liking someone’s Instagram photograph or TikTok post, as well as responding to Snapchat messages. Yet if you have declared you are committed to someone, those actions are then deemed micro- cheats – and you’ll know immediately if it’s happening to you.
If you are following your beloved’s social media profile online – which you are certain to be – you can see instantly if his or her number of followers or friends has increased. You can quickly ascertain who the new friend is – and woe betide your beloved if it’s a good-looking person. That is a micro-cheat.
Today, there are numerous means of meeting people virtually, and a correspondingly large number of ways of tracking people’s activity and catching them out. If your partner has claimed to have blocked an ex, and then that ex’s name pops up in a group comment on a shared post while you’re watching a movie or TikTok video together on your phone, your partner has lied and micro-cheated.
This ability to monitor who’s doing what with whom, has created an atmosphere in which even a minor infidelity is not to be tolerated.
My 19-year-old daughter, approached by three boys on a Greek beach, refused to divulge her ‘Snap’ or allow them to sit down with her, on the basis that she has a boyfriend. In fact, the ‘boyfriend’ was not even ‘officially’ her boyfriend, given there is a whole other set of rules around what constitutes an ‘official’ relationship. Secondly, how her boyfriend was supposed to find out about such an old- fashioned, non-virtual approach, I am not at all sure. But that’s beside the point because today’s generation feels a strong obligation to these draconian rules of amorous engagement.
In the same way, she turned down the offer of a friendly mum who suggested her son take her out with his group of friends to get to know more people on the island we were holidaying on. Even though it was merely a social, friendly gesture, any kind of one-to-one contact with a member of the opposite sex can be construed as a micro-cheat.
Given most oldies spent their entire youth chatting people up both socially and sexually, most of us forged many good, lasting friendships with the opposite sex. My daughter sees my large cohort of men friends as proof I am a flirt, and flirting is no longer acceptable unless you have made it very plain on every online platform that you are single.
Living via social media means it’s never been easier to track other people’s movements. In our day, you’d have to hire a private detective to discover what young people can find out in a micro-second.
This constant surveillance means we’re moving inexorably into a morally prescriptive age with the growing ability to police and punish every micro-cheat.
Charlotte Metcalf
