So it turns out I was right (I knew I would be!) – my best friend is a cheat. Upon discussion, he revealed that he couldn’t share his infidelity with me because he knew how strongly I felt about the subject. He’s not wrong, I have very strong feelings about cheating. But not because I’ve been on the receiving end of it, or for that matter, been a perpetrator of it. It is simply because I’m of the view that cheating is wrong under any circumstance – there just has to be a better way..

Now I’m a social sciences teacher, so I understand why cheating might occur. I can fully appreciate the evolutionary argument that males have evolved to be sexually promiscuous or the sociological view that monogamy is a social construct. I can empathise with individuals who are so deeply unhappy in their relationship that they go on to seek comfort in places (and with people) they most probably shouldn’t. And I can even understand that some people thrive on taking (high cost) risks or that they lose interest in their current relationship. But what I can’t seem to get my head around is that we are all taught to treat each other how we would want to be treated – none of us would want to be cheated on so why would we do it to another person?

I have given some real thought to those involved in cheating. To start with we have the ‘cheater’; they carry with them an insecurity so deep that the easiest way for them to deal with it is to press the self destruct button, they escape into another person to runaway from themselves. And then there’s the ‘victim’ who never really finds peace with having been cheated on; they may feel the need to protect their heart when entering new relationships, not realising that by keeping it on lock, they have closed themselves off from ever experiencing love. Finally, we have the ‘other’ person who always seems to come in second place; they make a perfect little stop gap for anybody in the marketplace to cheat, but they are never good enough to complete the journey with – it seems that everybody forgets that the other person would like to go the distance too..

Whilst I know that cheating is far more complex than I have described above, and humans even more so, I find myself asking a simple question. Would I want to deal with my inadequacies at the expense of other people’s feelings? The thing is, cheating doesn’t just happen. It isn’t an automatic reaction that we have no control over. Just as we make the decision to cheat, we can make the decision to work on our relationship; to acknowledge our unhappiness and live and breathe in that space rather than make to escape. If as a society, we continue to place a greater stigma on communicating our dissatisfaction in our relationship rather than cheating on our partner, the latter will become a commonplace solution for dealing with a difficult situation. Sadly, for all the people involved, this will cost them their peace of mind until they are ready to face the real truth.