Why are we all so weird about cheating?

Before I begin, let me state that I think betraying someone is bad. Hurting someone you love – or someone you don’t know personally – is awful. But it happens. We all have the capacity to hurt people we love and we often do even when we don’t mean to. To some extent, I think we all understand this; or more accurately, we are trying to understand this. For example, we can see glimpses of this through the prominence of advocacy for prison abolition since the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. More and more of us are coming to understand that people do horrible things, but those mistakes should not define them, nor does it justify hiding them away from society or sentencing them to death. Slowly but surely, we are beginning to question carceral logic. But when it comes to cheating, all of that understanding seemingly goes out the window, especially on the internet.

Last week, as I am sure you are all aware, a video by 28-year-old Grace Springer went viral. Springer had caught the moment where Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and his chief people officer Kristen Cabot were cuddling while watching Coldplay perform in Massachusetts, projected onto the jumbo screen along with other fans. When the camera showed Byron holding Cabot tightly, they jolted in horror and hid from the camera. Chris Martin jokingly wondered if they were just shy or having an affair. The latter seemed to be correct. The video quickly went viral, and they were both doxxed. This past weekend, Astronomer announced that Byron was stepping down from his role at the company, which honestly makes a lot of sense. He was in a position of power and apparently having an inappropriate relationship with his employee. What doesn’t make sense, however, is the internet’s reaction to this incident.

Since the video was posted on Wednesday (16 July), it has gained 50 million views, and Cabot and Byron have been subjected to brutal harassment. On LinkedIn, people are commenting on Cabot’s page, calling her a golddigger and Byron a loser. “In the span of less than 24 hours, you’ve killed all your credibility, your marriage, and your job. I hope they throw the book at both of you,” one person writes, suggesting that Cabot and Byron have committed a crime so heinous that they should be pilloried and effectively ostracised from society. But isn’t this a disproportionate response to their (alleged) actions?

Writer Amanda Montei highlighted the nonsensical ways we attempt to punish and scold those who have cheated in her essay on the film Babygirl for her Substack newsletter, Mad Woman. She mentions that when Romy (Nicole Kidman) reveals her affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson) to her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, he yells at her and asserts that she has jeopardised their children and kicks her out. Montei simply asks, “How exactly has she hurt her children?” By having the kind of sex she actually wants to have? By acting and living for herself and not her children or husband? These are very different situations, obviously, and I am not here to cast moral judgement on these behaviours. But why should someone be stripped of everything for behaving the “wrong” way?

This harassment and belief that those who cheat should be punished to the highest degree is an incredibly common line of thought. Last year, when it was revealed that Barry Keoghan and Sabrina Carpenter were no longer dating, rumours swirled that he had cheated on her. As a result, Keogan was subjected to mass harassment from Carpenter’s fans to the point where they would sit outside his ex-girlfriend and child’s home to intimidate them. Ariana Grande faced similar abuse for her relationship with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater, with people asserting that she is not a “girl’s girl” as she supposedly “steals men from relationships and marriages”.

Many people genuinely believe that they are morally superior to these individuals (whose relationships they know nothing about yet cast heavy judgement upon) and think they are doing the ‘victims’, ie those being cheated on, a favour. Springer, who recorded the video of Byron and Cabot, told the Sun: “I hope their partners can heal from this and get a second chance at the happiness they deserve with their future still in front of them.” She continues: “I hope, for them, my video was a blessing in disguise.”

What kind of blessing is a video that prompts the mass harassment of one’s family? What kind of blessing is making someone’s personal life content for public consumption? What kind of blessing is having a bunch of strangers project their own insecurities around cheating onto you and your family, when they don’t know the whole story or even the half of it? Because that’s what’s really going on here – the people who have been relentlessly attacking Byron and Cabot or Keoghan or Grande aren’t advocating for justice for the partners who they think have been hurt, they are acting purely for themselves; centring their fears around cheating or getting triggered by their own experiences with it. Some are using this situation, as people on LinkedIn are, to prove that they are better and more reliable than those who cheat. As our political editor James Grieg wrote last year about a similar incident: “Whenever this kind of thing goes viral, no one actually cares about the injured party – the thrill of self-righteousness is far more important. If you really have to film people in public without their consent, please don’t pretend that it has anything to do with justice at all.” 

We now live in a world where it is becoming increasingly probable that we will be recorded in public. That someone will deem a mistake you have made as bad enough to post online and report to the rest of the world, or they will post something you did that they think is funny or embarrassing, without a second thought, that will live on the internet forever. You could receive positive virality, or negative virality, that sees you chastised, doxxed or even fired from work. Posting things online that pertain to other people without their consent has become as normal as breathing, and potentially, people will only understand the severity of making a mistake that lives on the internet forever when it happens to them. When they are being bullied so badly that it doesn’t seem like people want them to be held accountable for their actions, but for them to not exist anymore. Becoming a puritanical social media cop will not save you from this fate either; if anything, you are ensuring your own demise.