There was a time when having an affair required a certain amount of effort. You needed somewhere to go, a reasonably convincing excuse for being there and, ideally, a spouse who didn’t ask too many questions.
Now you need a phone.
You can conduct an entire second relationship while sitting beside your wife watching television. You can pay a stranger to send you personalized sexual content while your husband is upstairs putting the children to bed. You can spend two years exchanging intimate messages with someone you’ve never met and convince yourself it isn’t infidelity because, technically, no one has taken off their pants.
Technology has done remarkable things for human communication. It’s also given people an extraordinary number of ways to behave badly without leaving the house.
And if you’ve spent any time reading women’s conversations online lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking marriage has become a loosely supervised arrangement between two people and several undisclosed third parties.
The stories are everywhere. Husbands with secret OnlyFans accounts. Wives having emotional affairs with coworkers. Men paying for personalized videos from women young enough to be their daughters. Women discovering that the person sleeping beside them has been maintaining an entirely different life behind a six-digit passcode.
Which raises a reasonable question.
Is everyone cheating?
The answer, inconveniently, is no.
But the numbers are interesting.
Apparently, We’ve Been Doing This for a While
In May 2025, YouGov published a survey examining Americans’ experiences with infidelity.
Approximately 53% said they’d been cheated on at some point in their lives. Roughly a third acknowledged having cheated themselves.
Those are impressive numbers for a society that continues to treat infidelity as an astonishing breach of human behavior rather than something we’ve been doing, with considerable enthusiasm, for thousands of years.
But before declaring that half the country is living with an adulterer, a distinction is necessary.
The survey asked about people’s experiences across relationships, not whether their current spouse is having an affair.
The boyfriend who cheated on you during sophomore year counts. So does the woman who had an affair during a marriage that ended 20 years ago.
The figures also depend on what respondents understand cheating to mean.
Still, it’s difficult to look at those numbers and maintain that infidelity is an unusual occurrence.
It isn’t.
What is less clear is whether we’re doing more of it.
The Numbers Don’t Support the Panic
For all the online evidence suggesting that fidelity has become an antiquated hobby, the longer-term statistics tell a rather different story.
An analysis of General Social Survey data published by the Institute for Family Studies in 2025 examined adults between 25 and 54 who had ever been married.
In the 1990s, approximately 17% reported having had sex with someone other than their spouse while married.
By the 2010s, that figure had fallen to about 14%.
In 2021 and 2022, it was approximately 13%.
Reported sexual infidelity, at least among this group, had declined.
Men accounted for much of the change. Historically more likely to report extramarital sex, they appear to have become somewhat less likely to do so. Women’s reported rates remained comparatively stable.
Before anyone congratulates modern marriage on its moral progress, however, we should examine what these surveys are measuring.
Sex.
Specifically, sex with someone other than one’s spouse.
They don’t necessarily account for the married man who spends $1,200 watching one particular woman perform sexual acts online. Or the wife who spends three hours every evening telling a male coworker things she hasn’t told her husband in years.
Those relationships occupy a strange territory in modern marriage.
Nothing physical has happened, so the people involved insist nothing has happened.
Their spouses are often less persuaded.
We’ve Developed an Entire Industry Around the Technicality
Consider OnlyFans.
The platform has made it possible for creators to sell sexual content directly to subscribers, sometimes including personalized material and private communication.
There is nothing inherently mysterious about the business model. People pay for content. Creators earn money.
The complications begin when a married person becomes particularly interested in one creator, starts spending money in secret and develops what they describe as an emotional attachment.
Imagine discovering your husband has been paying to see the same woman for two years.
Not occasionally watching pornography. Not stumbling across an attractive stranger on Instagram.
Deliberately seeking out one woman, subscribing to her content, spending more than a thousand dollars and concealing the arrangement.
When confronted, he explains that he was infatuated.
Infatuated.
A remarkable word to introduce into a conversation with the person you married.
Some women would consider this cheating. Others would classify it as pornography. A few would be more offended by the money than the sexual interest, particularly if the household budget has been a recurring subject of marital disagreement.
And some would point out that the woman receiving the money is probably not sitting around dreaming about this man’s future with her.
She’s working.
He may be imagining a relationship. She may be managing a customer.
Both things can be true.
What interests me isn’t whether every marriage should adopt the same definition of infidelity.
It’s how often people appear to discover their partner’s definition only after something has gone wrong.
Apparently, Cheating Now Requires a Committee to Define It
In a 2022 YouGov survey, 83% of Americans considered sending sexually suggestive messages to someone else cheating.
Another 73% considered developing an intense emotional attachment outside the relationship cheating.
That leaves a considerable number of people who disagree.
Which is how we end up with conversations in which one spouse is devastated and the other is explaining, with the confidence of a defense attorney, that the messages weren’t technically sexual.
Or that the woman is merely a friend.
Or that paying for intimate content doesn’t count because there’s no physical contact.
There are legitimate differences in how couples approach pornography, flirting and outside friendships. Some couples are comfortable with arrangements others would find intolerable.
The problem isn’t necessarily the difference.
It’s the secrecy.
If you believe your spouse would object to something, deliberately conceal it and then insist it was harmless once discovered, you’ve created a problem considerably larger than the original behavior.
You knew enough to hide it.
That doesn’t automatically make it an affair.
It does make the argument that nothing was wrong rather difficult to take seriously.
We’re Also Watching Other People’s Marriages Collapse for Entertainment
One of the more peculiar developments of modern life is our collective enthusiasm for watching strangers get caught.
In July 2025, footage from a Coldplay concert showed two corporate executives embracing on a stadium kiss cam before abruptly attempting to hide from the camera.
The video spread across the internet. Their identities became public. The circumstances of their personal relationships became the subject of enormous speculation.
Millions of people who had never heard of either executive suddenly developed strong opinions about their private lives.
It was an extraordinary amount of attention for a few seconds of concert footage.
But it revealed something about the way we consume infidelity.
We don’t simply disapprove of it.
We’re fascinated by it.
We watch the videos, read the comments, examine the screenshots and speculate about the unsuspecting spouse at home.
The public humiliation becomes part of the entertainment.
And social media has made these stories endlessly available.
Years ago, a woman might have discovered her husband’s affair and told three friends.
Today, she can describe the contents of his phone to 40,000 strangers before breakfast.
She’ll receive hundreds of responses.
Some will tell her to leave immediately. Some will recommend counseling. Some will explain that men are naturally visual creatures, a defense that seems to emerge whenever a grown man is asked to account for his decisions.
A few will accuse her of contributing to the problem.
And somewhere in the comments, another woman will announce that she has just checked her husband’s phone.
The internet has turned private betrayal into public participation.
It has also created a rather misleading impression of how many marriages are falling apart.
People whose spouses have not been conducting secret relationships rarely post detailed accounts of their uneventful evenings.
There isn’t much viral potential in Husband Came Home From Work, Ate Dinner, Remained Faithful.
Women Are Hardly Innocent Bystanders
We should also dispose of the comforting idea that infidelity is primarily something men do to women.
Women have affairs.
They have them with coworkers, former boyfriends, married men, strangers and people they insist are only friends.
Some are physical. Some are emotional. Some begin in marriages that have been unhappy for years. Others happen in marriages that appear, at least to everyone outside them, perfectly satisfactory.
The General Social Survey data suggest the historical gender gap in reported extramarital sex has narrowed among adults in their prime working and family-raising years.
That doesn’t establish that women and men cheat at identical rates across all ages.
But it does make the familiar division between unfaithful men and long-suffering women considerably less convincing.
Human beings are remarkably skilled at explaining why their own behavior is different from the behavior they condemn in others.
The man who would be furious to discover his wife sending intimate photographs to another person might see no contradiction in purchasing them himself.
The woman who considers her husband’s flirtation with a coworker unforgivable might describe her own emotionally intimate friendship with another man as something she needs because her husband doesn’t listen.
The details differ.
The talent for self-justification is universal.
And Then Everyone Has Advice About Whether You Should Leave
Few subjects inspire greater certainty in people who aren’t personally experiencing them.
Discover an affair and someone will tell you to pack his belongings immediately.
Another person will insist that marriage requires forgiveness.
A third will recommend therapy, preferably before you’ve had time to finish explaining what happened.
The truth is less satisfying.
Some marriages survive infidelity. Others don’t.
Some couples rebuild trust through sustained honesty, changed behavior and professional support.
Others spend years trying to recover something that never quite returns.
And plenty of people discover that what they imagined they would do is entirely different from what they do when the situation involves their own spouse, children, finances and history.
It’s easy to declare a zero-tolerance policy from the comfort of somebody else’s marriage.
Living through the consequences is another matter.
So, Is Everyone Cheating?
No.
The available evidence doesn’t support the claim that sexual infidelity has suddenly become more common. Some of the longer-term data suggest the opposite.
But the ways people form secret attachments, pursue sexual attention and conceal their behavior have expanded considerably.
So have the ways their partners discover it.
A marriage once might have been threatened by a relationship conducted in hotel rooms and hurried telephone calls.
Now it might be threatened by a subscription, a messaging app or an online connection that one person insists exists entirely in their imagination.
And while the technology has changed, the underlying behavior is depressingly familiar.
People want attention. They want excitement. They want to feel desired. Some are unhappy. Some are bored. Some are perfectly content and still make decisions they know would devastate their partners.
Then, when discovered, they begin negotiating definitions.
Was it physical? Was it emotional? Was it pornography? Was it a fantasy? Was it really cheating?
Perhaps the more revealing question is the one that tends to get buried beneath all that legalistic nonsense.
If there was nothing wrong with it, why was it a secret?
That’s not a definitive test of infidelity. People conceal things for all sorts of reasons, and not every secret is an affair.
But in a marriage where one person has been quietly maintaining a sexual or romantic interest in someone else, it’s a reasonable place to begin.
We may not be cheating more than previous generations.
We’ve simply acquired better technology for doing it, better technology for discovering it and an apparently inexhaustible appetite for discussing everybody else’s version of it.
The human capacity for betrayal remains much as it ever was.
Only the receipts have improved.
