Is cheating always a bad thing?

It’s been a long time since I’ve made a mistake. Spelling errors, sure. Overspending, maybe. Ghosting friends for a week, absolutely. But real mistakes? Tangible, potentially life-altering mistakes? None. Not since I was 21 and I quit a degree in veterinary medicine to move to New York with a thousand dollars in the bank.

Now that I’m on the cusp of turning 30, I’ve found myself looking back over the past decade and trying to extract some sort of life lesson. And along the way, I realised that the last seven years have been a process of slowly staving off the potential to make mistakes. Today, I can cook. I have a (very shit) car. I hang up my clothes. No longer do I spend nights ricocheting between hookups, faking illness to get out of my friend’s amateur Shakespeare productions, or maxing out my overdraft.

This is largely good. It’s too anxiety-inducing to exist in a web of white lies (trust me), and waiting for the STI test text message to drop every Monday was doing nothing for my smoking habit. But a little bit of me misses the feeling of f*cking up—and of learning something in the process.

Which brings me to the question: is cheating always bad? In a recent conversation with a very wise, very chic once-divorced friend of mine over a martini, we got to discussing a new phase I’ve entered in my relationship: something that’s popularly called “ethical non-monogamy.” My friend, who has been both the cheater and the cheatee in many marriages, scoffed. “Why does it have to be ethical? Whatever happened to hiding in the wardrobe, lipstick-stained collars, breathless meets in the darkest part of the restaurant? It’s worked for centuries.”

It would be easy to explain away her point, citing many a famed love doctor or sex guru—or even season three of Sex and the City, and that lunch between Carrie and Natasha. Everything in our culture points to the idea that cheating is bad.

And I agree, for the most part. I agree that we should try to be as honest with each other as possible. But the more I thought about my friend’s outrageous opinion, the more I realised I agreed with it. Now, for the record, I have never cheated. I have, however, been cheated on twice, and by two people I was very, very much in love with. But neither time did the cheating end the relationship. See, I grew up with the deeply naive opinion that cheating always had to equal dumping. But in my experience, the cheating in both scenarios actually led both relationships to places of more nuance, more equity, and perhaps most importantly, a place where desires could be discussed more freely.