Everyone was talking about micro-cheating in online entanglements last month, but there’s a fine line between macro control and harmless flirting.

#MicroCheating

“No one should be thought-policed into only being allowed wank about their partner.

Last month the internet was alight with the term ‘micro-cheating’ – “a series of seemingly small actions indicating a person’s emotional or physical focus on someone outside their relationship” – concentrating especially on online entanglements. This read like another Storm Ophelia in a tea-cup, with discussions fixated exclusively on male behaviour within hetero couplings. It felt more like a macro controlling by the sexual thought police, whose anxieties of fantasy and desire incessantly regulate ‘sexuality’.

Being born into a sexuality that was socially deemed on the outside of ‘normality’, I have always enjoyed erotic and sexual freedoms that were beyond the limitations experienced by ‘normal’ hetersexual couples. Culturally, having had no socially-approved relationship and sexual roles, LGBTs facilitated a finding for ourselves what was right, horny, loving, or boring.

THE HOMOGENISING EFFECT

So, let’s be clear: any forms of cheating can only be defined and understood by the parameters and understandings established by the people within a relationship. Thus, a priority conversation for any relationship, is what is expected and fair for each, sharing where one’s jealousies lie, and how much they should be catered to. In other words what kind of couple are ‘we’ going to become? To me, such open all-up-for-grabs negotiations are part of a long, radical LGBT socio-sexual history that predates the homogenising effect of marriage ‘equality’.

The ‘microcheating’ feedback underlined to me an increasing macro cultural control over relationships, grounded solely on fears and insecurities. Any, and every, relationship should be fashioned in trusting desire. Couples confessing an infidelity are regularly surprised that I might question the invasion into the cheater’s phone or email that lead to the ‘discovery’ of the cheating (micro or otherwise). A relationship either has trust or it doesn’t. It is so important for each of us to have private lives, personal spaces, individual integrity, most especially within the deeply singular, and so often shamed gateways of our desires. Couples should share a sexuality together, but respect and value that no one can be everything for another always, most especially within sexual realms.

No one should be thought-policed into only being allowed wank about their partner.

A WANDERING RIGHT-CLICK

Undoubtedly a key signifier of a waning relationship is a wandering eye, or a wandering right-click. The challenge as a relationship gets older is for a mature appreciation and honouring of independent fantasies and desires without a lazy, clumsy escapist dependence on apps or pornography.

Everyone, coupled or uncoupled, wants to be fancied, desired, sought. Our online culture panders to this need, where cyber ‘value’ is dictated exclusively in numbers of ‘likes’, ‘hits’, ‘swipes’; ‘followers’ ‘retweets’. The appendaging of ‘smart’ phones to our being pulls us out of our individual intimate worlds into a cyberspace of surrogate avatar encounters.

Both ‘real’ and cyber worlds offer places to explore and express more of our desires and sexualities, through encounters or forums; within communities, or as liaisons. The micro-cheating conversations demand and police boundaries, without recognising our fascination with lingering around boundaries, flirting at the limits; with edging.

It not what you do that often hurts others, but how those things are done. This is where ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is a cowardly and precarious ‘open-relationship’ policy, because it avoids responsibility to your partner, and because it avoids honesty with yourself.

INFIDELITY EDGING

Micro-cheating judgements come from others. My considerations around infidelity edging are personal; recognising the thrill in flirting on the boundaries, whilst appreciating that thrill is established in the risks it holds. What we are toying with is never only a person or avatar, but our own security.

Whatever you do, I don’t judge, but explore firstly your ‘choice’ in doing what you do and secondly, your awareness of what you get from doing what you do. To edge with alcohol, drugs, sex, infidelity, life and death is thrilling because of what we could lose. In a relationship, especially with ourselves, the loss of trust wounds injuriously.

There is lots of sex, but there is only one trust. Trust isn’t something that cracks; it shatters. Whatever edging you enjoy, be aware of the price you pay in balancing the thrill you enjoy with the abyss you could fall into.