Last summer, a friend called bearing bad news: Her two-year relationship was finished. In between insisting that she was, in fact, totally fine, and that everything was probably for the best, she told me that her (now ex-) partner had accused her of cheating. My friend had not, to be clear, slept with anybody else, or gone on any illicit dates. But her partner, consumed by suspicion when it came to my friend's platonic relationships, had gone through my friend's phone and stumbled upon old messages that were too affectionate, too 'flirty.' She broke up with my friend that night. Some people might feel sympathetic toward my friend's ex. Others might find the entire ordeal, to use the technical term, absurd. Whatever the stance, a growing number of mental-health influencers are giving language to the debate: What my friend did, they say, was 'micro-cheating.' As with plain old infidelity, micro-cheating is tricky to define; behavior that is fair game to one person might be egregious...
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