I recently had a discussion regarding cheating the other day, and the issue of "cheating without sex" cropped up. (For those of you who scratched your head in wonderment like I did--so shoot me--it's essentially falling in love/lust/limerence with someone while in another relationship, yet failing to physically act on it.)

I'm still not so sure I buy the whole "cheating without sex" thing. After all, it's the act of sex that most people get heated about. If a man were to say to his wife, "I'm just having dinner with a female colleague," despite the fact that he may very well have strong affections for her, the wife is not instinctually going to be preoccupied with that aspect of their meetings. She's going to want to know if he's fucking around on her. So in my mind, and in a lot of other people's minds, the actual act(s) of coitus seems to be the deal-breaker.

As far as I'm concerned, the concept of "non-sexual cheating" is a misnomer. It's probably possible to be in love with two people (though I never have, and I'd arguably say that you can't be in the same type of love with two people unless it's platonic at its basic level), but in most cases we just call that "moving on." If you fall for another person and are in a relationship, this probably means that things between you and the former were kaputsky before you chanced upon the third party. Besides, our society extols non-sexual cheating/"moving on" by immortalizing the notion in countless romantic comedies and dramas, and in some cases the couples do actually cheat sexually--we still cheer it on for the sake of real love.

For example, the closest thing America has to a royal couple, if you followed their unfolding liaison, seems to be the product of such a relationship (i.e., they claim there was no sex before the finality of Mr. Smith's divorce) according to their own word. At the same time, rampant fanatics who label themselves "Team Actress From Friends With Good Hair and Fashion Sense Which Are Offset By Undeniably Ferret-Like Eyes" will foam at the mouth that there was sexual cheating involved (I plead Benefit of the Doubt).

So why is it okay for fictional characters, in whom we vicariously invest our hopes and dreams, to "cheat without sex" (and in the case of The Notebook, quite blatantly with sex), but real-life people are condemned for less? Should we make people suffer socially because their needs change and they just happen to come to this realization by meeting someone who awakens such within them but are respectful enough not to cross the sexual threshold?

In my opinion, one should only feel bad if they were not immediately truthful with their significant other. But chemistry is chemistry, and the transpiration of such between two people is not something planned, and I daresay it shouldn't be beaten down with a sense of propriety that mostly has to do with hurt pride and the failure to acknowledge that it's time to move on.