At first glance, this leniency may seem like hypocrisy. (After all, cheating is unethical, full stop.) But relationship experts love it Pharaoh Vienna, LMFTa New York-based therapist and author Your assetsLet’s say that perspectives tend to shift once the “bad guy” becomes someone we know personally—and understand as a full, complex human being.
“People can be great friends and maybe not-so-great partners,” Pharaoh says, largely because romantic relationships reveal parts of ourselves that platonic relationships don’t. With a partner, the risks are higher with expectations about sex, exclusivity, Long term commitmentShared finances and household work.
Pharaoh explains that friendships, while intimate and meaningful, operate under a looser set of rules. There’s no explicit agreement on exclusivity, no universally agreed-upon definition of platonic loyalty, and much less pressure to fully integrate your lives. For this reason, a person’s actions in romantic relationships do not necessarily translate to how he treats those he is interested in in a platonic way.
Through this lens, Pharaoh says she “rarely sees someone snapping their fingers and ending a healthy friendship.” only “Cheating” – at least, not in isolation or without context. Often, it’s not the issue itself that breaks the bond, but rather what it reveals.
This includes red flags that were easier to ignore before — like realizing that the friend whose reckless flirting you once laughed off as messy, weird, and “on-brand” may not actually care who gets hurt, as one person explained to me. While contemplating what led to the end of a five-year friendship, another woman remembers her tied-up friend grinding up against strangers during what was supposed to be a girls’ trip.
“She knew what she was doing, and it made everyone in the group uncomfortable,” she told me, noting that she was met with defensiveness and even yelling when she gently brought up her concerns. “I took this as a sign to turn away,” she explains, not because that moment revealed something entirely new, but because it made it impossible to ignore her friend’s “my way or no one else’s way” attitude.
