Micro-cheating

Micro-cheating means small acts that are not quite cheating but break what a couple expects: secret chats, hiding that you're taken, a dating profile kept live. Where the line sits depends on what you agreed. Surveys show people agree at the ends and split in the middle, and in the threads we read, secrecy usually tips it.

Updated October 6, 2026

Means

Small acts that break what a couple expects

First seen

2008 (Urban Dictionary, April 9, 2008, in a physical sense); current sense by 2016 (Thought Catalog, March 30, 2016); popularized by Australian dating expert Melanie Schilling (HuffPost Australia, August 15, 2017) and a January 2018 press wave

Related terms

DTR (define the relationship), Orbiting, Monkey branching, Cookie jarring, Red flags

In Swedish

Mikrootrohet

Micro-cheating is the name for small acts that stop short of cheating but break what a partner expected: a chat kept out of sight, a contact saved under a code, a dating profile nobody deleted. Of the ranking pages we read on October 5, 2026, most list signs, as if the line were fixed.

In practice it is an argument about an agreement nobody wrote down. In both surveys we read, the ends of the scale drew the most agreement. Most people count explicit messages and a live dating profile, and few call following an ex cheating every time. The middle is split. In our reading of the surveys and threads, two things seem to move an act along it: whether it is hidden, and whether the two of you had agreed to be exclusive at all, which is what a DTR talk is for. The scale table puts eleven behaviors in order, with the survey figures behind each.

Signs of micro-cheating, with examples

The definition most pages quote ran in HuffPost Australia on August 15, 2017. Melanie Schilling, an Australian dating expert, told the site: “Micro-cheating is a series of seemingly small actions that indicate a person is emotionally or physically focused on someone outside their relationship” (HuffPost Australia, 2017). Her examples were secretly connecting with someone on social media, sharing private jokes, downplaying how serious your relationship is, and entering someone’s name in your phone under a code. The article added texting someone without your partner knowing and lying about your relationship status. Whether texting someone is cheating has its own answer. Nearly every item has the same feature. The partner is not supposed to know.

We found no canonical list, of 21 signs or any other number. The best-known long one, “33 Ways Your Boyfriend Is Micro-Cheating (And Totally Getting Away With It),” ran on Thought Catalog on June 23, 2016. Its author later added a note: “It is satire, written in jest because I found the whole ‘micro-cheating’ phenomenon to be totally absurd when it started trending years ago” (Berliet, 2016).

The forums are calmer about the small stuff. On Mumsnet, a British parenting forum, a thread started January 26, 2023, with about 47 replies, asked whether liking other girls’ Instagram pictures was cheating, and one reply answered: “No, I wouldn’t class it as cheating” (Mumsnet, January 2023). On The Student Room, a UK student forum, a thread started June 30, 2021, with about 8 replies, asked whether a boyfriend was microcheating, and one reply questioned the word itself: “Microcheating is a word?” (The Student Room, June 2021).

Our reading of two surveys and the forum threads, not a rule.

The middle column is our summary. The surveys asked adults in general about a spouse or partner, not couples about each other, and a thread is a handful of people with opinions.

Is micro-cheating cheating? Where couples draw the line

Two surveys asked about specific acts, and both found settled ends and a split middle. Deseret News, a US newspaper, commissioned one: a questionnaire designed by Y2 Analytics, answered by 1,000 US adults on YouGov’s national panel, released April 12, 2017, with a margin of error of 3.1 points (Deseret News, 2017b). It asked how often each activity “would be cheating on a spouse or partner” (Deseret News, 2017a). YouGov asked 1,882 Britons on July 9 and 10, 2026, whether each act was harmless, cheating, or “not harmless but also not cheating” (YouGov, 2026a; YouGov, 2026b). The countries, years, wording and answer scales differ, so we read no trend from one to the other. The full act-by-act table, with four more surveys, is in our guide to what counts as cheating.

Within each survey, age mattered. In the US, the oldest group was strictest about an active dating profile: 75% of the Silent Generation called it always cheating, against 55% of Millennials; the deck does not give the subgroup sizes (Deseret News, 2017a). In the UK, 45% of 18- to 29-year-olds called flirting cheating, against 26% of all adults (YouGov, 2026b).

People also judge themselves more kindly. Thompson and O’Sullivan surveyed 810 online respondents recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants judged their own hypothetical acts more leniently than the same acts by a partner, but only for emotional or affectionate and technology or online behaviors, not sexual or solitary ones. Many reported having done things they themselves counted as infidelity (Thompson & O’Sullivan, 2016a). Our reading: this is the fight in several of the threads we read. A like from your phone is nothing; the same like from theirs is a question.

And people differ from each other. Kruger and colleagues had 456 heterosexual undergraduates at two public Midwestern US universities rate 27 behaviors from 0 to 100% on whether they were cheating. Sexual intercourse averaged 97.7%, talking on the phone several times a week 40.1%, sharing secrets 36.5% and giving someone $5 8.1%. Higher attachment anxiety, a trait measure, went with higher ratings on 18 of the 27 items, and women rated ten items higher than men did (Kruger et al., 2013). That measures how strict people are, not who is right. The professionals split as well: seven experienced couple counselors, in the UK according to Time, gave “a rich web of conflicting definitions of infidelity” (Moller & Vossler, 2015; Time, 2018).

Where the threads do agree, it is usually on secrecy. In a Mumsnet thread started September 19, 2024, with about 15 replies, one reply said “It’s difficult to say without knowing what the messages said,” and another drew the line at hiding: “if you hide it or lie then that is cheating” (Mumsnet, September 2024).

All of this assumes there was an agreement. Before anyone has agreed to be exclusive, most of these acts break nothing, because there is nothing to break. In a Mumsnet thread started April 23, 2026, with about 112 replies, a poster found a partner’s Hinge profile active four and a half months after they had agreed, as she understood it, to be exclusive. One suggested line for ending it was “I’ve been made aware that we aren’t on the same page regarding commitment.” (Mumsnet, April 2026). On The Student Room, a thread started November 17, 2021, with about 4 replies, came from someone whose date had given a vague yes to being exclusive and was still on Tinder, and one reply asked: “Why were you logging on if you’re in an exclusive relationship with her?” (The Student Room, November 2021). Our reading: in both, the agreement was clearer to one side than to the other. If you are in a talking stage or a situationship, the exclusivity talk comes first. Casual dating, roster dating and FWB are usually not exclusive by design, so a live profile there may be the arrangement working.

Micro-cheating vs emotional cheating vs cheating

We found no standard list of five types. The researchers we read use three or four groups. Wilson and colleagues found three in how people rated dating infidelity: “Ambiguous, Deceptive, and Explicit behaviors” (Wilson et al., 2011). Thompson and O’Sullivan found four, “sexual/explicit behaviors, technology/online behaviors, emotional/affectionate behaviors, and solitary behaviors,” with men more lenient than women (Thompson & O’Sullivan, 2016b). Whitty asked 1,117 participants about online and offline acts and found that “online acts of betrayal do not fall into a discrete category of their own” (Whitty, 2003). The ratings sorted by kind (sexual, emotional or pornography) rather than by screen.

Our view: micro-cheating is a new name for roughly the ambiguous and deceptive zones, the small hidden acts before anything explicit happens.

Emotional cheating overlaps it. It usually means a deep attachment to someone else, with or without anything physical. In the 2026 UK survey, 52% counted forming a deep emotional attachment with someone else as cheating, and 40% said so of developing romantic feelings without acting on them (YouGov, 2026b). The private jokes and the long chats are often how that attachment shows.

Four neighbors on this site get confused with it:

• Orbiting is watching someone’s posts and stories without talking to them.
• Breadcrumbing is the occasional text that keeps someone warm.
• Cookie jarring is keeping someone in reserve in case the main thing fails.
• Monkey branching is lining up the next partner before leaving the current one.

Done in secret inside a relationship, any of them can be what someone means by micro-cheating.

What to do about it

1. Check whether there was a deal. If neither of you said “exclusive,” a live profile or a flirty chat breaks no agreement. The talk you need is the one about what this is.
2. Say what you saw and what you thought the deal was. Leave out what you think it says about them. One of ours, not tested at scale: “I saw the chat with your ex. I thought we didn’t keep chats like that from each other.” That is two facts and no verdict, which leaves room for an answer you did not expect.
3. Agree on two or three things, not thirty-three. Our rule of thumb: name the few acts that matter to both of you, out loud. Respondents in the surveys disagreed about the middle, and in the 2016 study people on average judged their own acts more leniently than a partner’s. One of ours, not tested at scale: “Liking photos is fine by me. Hiding the phone when I walk in is not.”
4. Do not go through the phone. Plenty of people do. In Pew’s survey of 4,860 US adults, run October 16 to 28, 2019, 34% of partnered adults said they had looked through a partner’s phone without the partner knowing, 42% of women and 25% of men. Seven in ten US adults said doing so is rarely (28%) or never (42%) acceptable (Pew Research Center, 2020). A Cornell pilot study of forum posts found a belief in the discussions that “proof of (in)fidelity can be found on a partner’s smartphone,” and that this orientation “then justifies surveillance and hacking of a partner’s phone” (Foster et al., 2023). Our view: the phone answers one question and starts a different argument.
5. Decide where on the scale it sits. We found no study of forgiving micro-cheating. Our view: most of the middle of the table is a conversation, not an offense, and the top rows are what most respondents called cheating. In a study of 338 married or cohabiting people from 176 families, infidelity-related behaviors on social media went with lower marital satisfaction (McDaniel et al., 2017). It shows the two travel together, not which came first.
6. If checking turns into control or fear, get help first. The helplines for the US and the UK are in the last step on our red flags page. If you decide to end it, lines for that are in how to end a situationship.

What the research says

We found no study of micro-cheating by name. The studies here measured what people count as cheating, which is the next best thing.

The word is older than its current meaning. The earliest dated use we found is an Urban Dictionary entry from April 9, 2008, in a physical sense: “When someone cheats on a partner, but just a little bit. Like copping a feel or kissing.” (Urban Dictionary, 2008). The current sense is there by March 30, 2016, when Jillian Paulson wrote on Thought Catalog that “Micro-cheating isn’t technically cheating, because there isn’t actual penetration or kissing or anything of that sort, but it’s a semi-sneaky manner of fooling around on your partner” (Paulson, 2016). The satirical list of 33 followed in June, and Schilling’s definition in HuffPost Australia in August 2017. That article does not say she coined the term, and the uses above are older.

A January 2018 press wave did the rest. Fox News ran “‘Micro-cheating’ worries romantics as latest relationship woe” on January 13, 2018, citing an interview Schilling had given on January 11 (Fox News, 2018). By July 31, 2018, Time had an explainer headlined “Micro-Cheating Could Be Ruining Your Relationship. Here’s What to Do About It” (Time, 2018). Wiktionary lists the verb micro-cheat, “To show signs of attraction or focus on someone other than one’s romantic partner,” with its earliest quotation from January 16, 2018 (Wiktionary). We found no entry in Merriam-Webster, Collins, Cambridge or Dictionary.com when we checked on October 5, 2026.

One more study fits the photo-liking rows. Muise, Christofides and Desmarais surveyed 308 undergraduates in a University of Guelph study and found that “increased Facebook use significantly predicts Facebook-related jealousy” (Muise et al., 2009). Predicts is meant statistically: more use went with more jealousy. The authors’ explanation is a loop, in which a feed hands you ambiguous information about a partner and checking it turns up more.

The limits matter. Most of the study samples are students or paid online survey takers, and the two big surveys asked adults in general rather than people who are dating. We read Kruger and colleagues in full and the survey results at source. We read the other studies in abstract or on the publisher’s page, and McDaniel and colleagues only in abstract excerpts. We found no study of forgiving micro-cheating and none that tests secrecy as the deciding factor, although secrecy is what Schilling’s examples and the threads keep coming back to.