Cheaters, Criminals, and the Art of Not Getting Caught
Thursday, December 18, 2025.
A new study has confirmed something most betrayed partners already suspected long before peer review got involved: cheaters think an awful lot like criminals.
Not theatrically. No ski masks. No getaway cars.
Just the same mental choreography—the planning, the rationalizing, the careful management of risk—that criminologists have been studying for decades.
Cheating, it turns out, is less an accident of passion than a carefully managed violation.
Researchers analyzing online forum posts from self-identified cheaters found that infidelity follows a structure familiar to anyone who studies deviant behavior: strain, concealment, and justification.
Motive. Method. Excuse.
A classic.
Strain: Or, “I Deserved This”
Criminologists don’t generally believe people commit crimes because they wake up feeling villainous. They commit them because they feel pressured, deprived, resentful, or cornered—and eventually decide the rules are no longer serving them.
Cheaters reason the same way.
In the study, participants framed their affairs as responses to stress: dead bedrooms, demanding jobs, financial pressure, family obligations, emotional neglect. The affair wasn’t described as betrayal so much as self-care, a corrective measure for a life that had become intolerably unfair.
Many expressed what researchers politely call “cake-eating”—the desire to keep the stability of marriage while quietly supplementing its deficiencies elsewhere.
This isn’t rebellion.
It’s entitlement with footnotes.
Restrictive Deterrence: How to Cheat Like a Professional
Here’s where the comparison stops being metaphorical.
Cheaters don’t simply cheat. They manage risk.
They use burner phones, secret email accounts, and carefully chosen meeting locations. They behave especially well at home. They cultivate normalcy. Some gaslight—not always maliciously, sometimes defensively—because suspicion itself is the enemy.
Criminologists call this restrictive deterrence: adjusting behavior not to avoid wrongdoing, but to avoid consequences.
When discovery seems likely, the strategy shifts. Out comes “trickle truth.”
A kiss admitted. The rest delayed, diluted, or denied.
Counseling attended not to repair the relationship, but to signal contrition. Remorse deployed with an eye toward sentence reduction.
It closely resembles how a defendant hopes the judge appreciates their character references.
Neutralization: Or, How to Sleep at Night
People generally prefer to see themselves as decent. Cheaters are no exception.
So they explain themselves.
They deny responsibility (“I have needs”).
They deny injury (“If they never know, no one gets hurt”).
They deny the victim (“They were cold. Withholding. Difficult.”).
Some frame secrecy as kindness, arguing that confession would only cause pain—so silence becomes moral restraint. This logic appears in certain forms of fraud and theft as well, where perpetrators convince themselves it’s better if the victim never realizes what happened.
Others appeal to higher loyalties: true love, destiny, the affair partner who finally understands them.
Betrayal reframed as authenticity. Marriage reframed as an administrative detail.
The moral accounting is elaborate.
One suspects spreadsheets.
The Uncomfortable Part
What’s unsettling here isn’t that cheaters resemble criminals.
It’s that criminal reasoning turns out to be remarkably ordinary.
The same psychological machinery—strain, risk management, moral justification—operates just as smoothly in legal behavior as it does in illegal behavior.
Most folks already know how to justify harm, conceal it politely, and preserve a respectable self-image, provided the narrative is sufficiently persuasive.
This may explain why people who’ve been cheated on often say, “It felt like a crime.”
The shock wasn’t simply that rules were broken.
It was how methodically.
A Final Observation, Offered Quietly
Cheaters don’t usually think they’re bad people.
Criminals rarely do either. What they tend to believe is that their situation is so special.
And whenever someone decides the rules don’t apply to them—temporarily, discreetly, just this once—something interesting is already underway.
The difference between crime and infidelity, it turns out, isn’t the thinking.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
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