Is It Only Human To Cheat?

Cheater = monster, right? Not so fast—there are more nuances to infidelity than we allow ourselves to think.

- Cheekie Albay

Nadia* knows all too well the savage destruction infidelity brings—she has been cheated on four times, and it has hurt like a mother f*cker each time. When with friends, she swears off the offending exes; to her, they are dead and their good standing with her could never be redeemed.

That is easy enough for her to say when the vino is flowing and the girlfriends are blubbering about their own romantic sorrows at the hands of men. What is harder for Nadia to declare is that she was once a cheater herself.

Granted, she was a teenager then, it was her first relationship, she didn’t know any better. But bottomline was, she still cheated: went behind a boyfriend’s back, lied to him about being home when she was really out with another man, and felt the thrill of being with someone and the ensuing guilt of having betrayed the other.

But Nadia doesn’t consider herself a bad person. She made mistakes, that much she admits, but a bad person? The kind of despicable, morally inept monster that the grapevine and relationship articles paint out to be? Surely not. Which is why she’s not so certain she should paint her cheating exes as such, either.

It is easy to bandy moral absolutes around when talking about cheating, because for people who’ve been devastated by infidelity, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone you loved so much could hurt you so hard. But to dismiss the cheater as inherently bad is grossly oversimplifying why cheating happens in the first place.

EVOLUTION IS IN THE EQUATION

Selena Gomez may lament that the heart wants what it wants, but when it comes to love, it’s really the brain that does all that wanting, and it doesn’t just want one thing— it wants three things.