The way the Coldplay-CEO-HR-Kisscam scandal sent the internet into a frenzy made one thing clear: many weren’t just reacting to what they saw… they were reacting to what they felt.
Beneath the memes and moral outrage was something raw. Something personal.
Now, company ethics and power dynamics are a serious concern—and they deserve their own reckoning.
But beyond that, the cultural conversation around cheating has been loud, moralistic, and frankly, far too shallow for far too long. And it’s time we unpacked cheating for what it really is. This is not for the faint hearted. Because if we truly want to understand why cheating happens, not just point fingers when it does we have to be willing to look deeper. Beneath the drama. Beyond the headlines. And sometimes, into ourselves.
We’ve been taught that cheating is about who slept with whom. That it's about betrayal, broken trust, dramatic reveals, and the righteous anger of the one who got “cheated on.”
But what if that’s not really where cheating begins? What if cheating is something we do long before any physical boundary is crossed? What if the deepest form of betrayal isn’t sleeping with someone else but abandoning the self?
Let me explain. We cheat all the time - not necessarily with our bodies, but with our energy, our truth, our presence.
We cheat when we look at our partner as someone to own. We cheat when we expect them to be our therapist, our parent, our motivator, our validation machine, our status symbol, our emotional safety net. All at once.
We cheat when we carry quiet expectations that we never voiced, and then hold secret resentments when they’re not met.
We cheat when we stay in a relationship because it’s familiar, convenient, socially “perfect,” or simply because we’re scared to face our own loneliness.
We cheat when we start to manage and manipulate out of fear - trying to shape the other into something more palatable, more stable, more manageable. As if love is a project plan.
We cheat when we withhold. Our words. Our hearts. Our vulnerability.
We cheat when we refuse to evolve and silently punish the other for doing so.
We cheat when we use the relationship as a means to an end—success, babies, a curated life on Instagram, or proof that we’re “good people.”
We cheat when we reduce love to rules, to labels, to performative monogamy while letting the soul connection quietly die out.
Here’s the hardest part: by the time someone cheats in the way we recognize as cheating (yes, the dramatic version), the real betrayal has been happening for a while. Often invisibly. Quietly. Sometimes by both people. And that’s the part no one wants to talk about.
The person who got “cheated on” may also have abandoned the relationship. Checked out emotionally. Replaced intimacy with routine. Avoided hard conversations. Turned a blind eye to what wasn’t working.
That doesn’t make cheating okay. But it does mean we need a more honest lens. Not just a moral one. But a psychological one. Because real fidelity isn’t just physical. It’s emotional. Energetic. Existential.
It's about showing up. Telling the truth. Not just to the other, but to yourself.
It’s about asking:
Am I using this relationship to avoid myself?
Am I trying to control someone instead of meeting them?
Am I loving from wholeness, or performing safety?
And above all am I relating from fear, or from presence?
Love isn’t a checklist. It’s not a job contract. It’s a living, breathing mirror that shows you everything you’re ready (and not ready) to see about yourself.
And relationships? They’re not here to make you feel secure forever. They’re here to wake you up. To burn through illusion. To call you back into the raw, radical intimacy of being alive.
So maybe next time we talk about “cheating,” we can drop the moral panic and look deeper.
Because before you ever “cheated” on someone else you may have already left yourself.
