The new cheating: How WhatsApp and social media have us all sneaking around

As Gabriel García Márquez once said, “one must be unfaithful, but never disloyal.” The phrase is a wonderful one-liner, but in terms of defining the two terms, it’s a bit flawed. Some studies have attempted to parse the same distinction: in April, Diversual announced that its study about sexual habits in Spain found that 28.97% of respondents had been unfaithful at some point, meaning they’d had a sexual relationship with a person who wasn’t their regular partner. Gleeden, a dating site for people who are in a relationship, has made similar efforts to study Spanish attitudes towards so-called “micro-infidelities,” acts that don’t involve physical sex with a third person, but are located in an ethical gray area. For example, secretly staying in contact with a former partner, consuming pornography, and sexting: 79% of those who have been involved in the latter say it does provide them with some emotional connection.

The definition of fidelity varies from relationship to relationship. Fifty-five percent of members of couples surveyed by Gleeden had never addressed it directly, or spoken of their monogamic limits. The platform’s poll differentiated between three types of infidelity: physical, emotional, and digital. “Emotional infidelity, in general terms, takes place when a person connects emotionally with someone who is not their partner, even if there is no physical or sexual contact. Some people see having more trust and sharing more secrets with a person who is not their partner as infidelity,” Silvia Rúbies, head of communications at Gleeden, told EL PAÍS.

U.S. psychologist Shirley Glass has studied emotional infidelity throughout her career, and says that people who share parts of themselves that they’ve never revealed to their partner, as well as those who seek support and consolation with another person, are effectively, being unfaithful. “Emotional intimacy is the first warning sign that betrayal is imminent. Still, the majority of people don’t recognize what they’ve gotten themselves into until physical intimacy takes place,” she writes in Not “Just Friends”: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity (2004). “The majority of people erroneously think that infidelity is not really infidelity unless there’s sexual contact. While women tend to consider any emotional intimacy as infidelity, it’s more common for men to deny any infidelity has taken place until they’ve had a sexual relationship. But in the new infidelity, affairs don’t have to be sexual. Some of the connections that only take place on the internet are primarily emotional. The most devastating relationships that take place outside of marriage involve the heart, mind and body, and those are the kind of affairs that are becoming more common. Nowadays, romantic affairs are becoming more frequent and serious than before, because more men are getting involved emotionally and more women, sexually,” she warns in her book.

According to Andrea Vicente, author of the Spanish-language book Quien bien te quiere te hará feliz (Whoever loves you well will make you happy, 2024), an emotional affair takes place when one member of a couple establishes a deep connection with another person, sharing personal and intimate parts of their lives. “It’s not necessary for there to be physical contact for a situation to become problematic. The effect it can have on a couple is equally troubling,” she says. Vicente thinks the term “emotional affair” can be used to describe when a bond with another person becomes something that is hidden or minimized to one’s partner, and when one begins to share things with the other person that they’d never reveal within their relationship. “The other relationship becomes a parallel emotional refuge that, even if it doesn’t involve sex, creates a dynamic that excludes the official partner,” she says.

In the era of social media and WhatsApp, it’s common for one member of a relationship to take out their phone, even during romantic dinners, a practice called phubbing (a fusion of “phone” and “snubbing”). A University of Münster study found that becoming distracted during such shared moments with one’s partner can lead to the non-phone-wielding individual feeling “distrust and ostracism.” “Social media has created a gray area for relationships. Nowadays, it’s extremely easy to re-establish contact with former partners or people from one’s past, but it’s also easy to connect with new people, someone you meet in a casual environment or who adds you on social media. These platforms offer direct access to constant private conversations, which can quickly go from banal to emotional. All it takes is a message, a photo or a casual comment to open the door to a more intimate exchange. In many cases, it begins as a game or inoffensive conversation, but without realizing it, an emotionally intense relationship can result,” says Vincente. “This kind of connection begins intruding into territory that should be exclusive to one’s partner and, in the process, creates a connection that can begin to occupy a parallel emotional space. It’s the infamous ‘forbidden conversation,’ in which one shares secrets and emotions previously reserved for one’s partner. The ease with which such emotional relationships are established, whether they’re with someone from one’s past or a new acquaintance, is one of the complexities of being in a partnership in the digital age,” she says.

The problem with this kind of affairs is that they expose pre-existing cracks in relationships and are even sometimes mistakenly perceived as an attempt to save a relationship that has long since foundered. “His emails gave me hope, a reason to get through the day,” writer Kelly McMasters told The Wall Street Journal, claiming she’d initially written to her high school boyfriend without knowing whether he’d even respond. When he did, she didn’t tell him she was in a relationship, and failed to mention the renewed contact to her husband.

Though the throwback relationship was never physically consummated, McMasters did wind up getting divorced. She didn’t break up her marriage in order to get back together with her ex, but their messages helped her to get through a terrible moment in her marriage, and to realize that she was capable of being “stronger, more fun, and brilliant”. “It was what helped me end it,” she said.

One of the questions Vicente gets asked most frequently is why so many people see emotional intimacy as a worse betrayal than sex itself. “It’s a vulnerable space and one that many people reserve for their partner. When that exclusivity is broken and someone else steps into its space, they feel betrayed, they see it as having lost their area of trust and complicity, which impacts the very heart of the relationship,” she says.

Rubíes says that for many women, emotional connection is the basis of a relationship. “That’s why when it takes place with other people, even through messaging, it can be very serious. For men too, but to a lesser extent,” she says.

You can even have an emotional affair with a bot. Some virtual lovers are able to provide support that one’s actual partner can’t, becoming the one people go to for consolation when their relationship isn’t in its best moment. So says a Reddit user, who shares that his chats with an AI woman made him “a better man” because “she” showed him the importance of speaking, listening, and being listened to. It saved his marriage, he says.

Infidelity is as old as humankind. You can’t think or say anything new about it that hasn’t already been covered, as writes Maggie O’Farrell. But perhaps in a hyper-connected society in which WhatsApp and artificial intelligence can tempt any of us with profound and immediate conversations, we should reconsider the true meaning of being unfaithful.

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