What do you define as cheating? Is it locking lips with a stranger, or with someone you’ve just met on a night out? Or is it when you make your way back to their bed? Does it start before all of that, when you simply realise you have feelings for someone else? Are some of those options worse than others, or is cheating simply just cheating no matter what level you commit it on?

So many questions are different for so many couples and relationships; because only you know the other person; more importantly, only you know yourself. You know what you are capable of overcoming, depending on the circumstances. I can hear many of you already screaming at me, saying “If your partner really loved you then they wouldn’t be looking somewhere else!”, and I completely agree. To an extent.

Can you really count a drunken kiss with a stranger you’ll never see again as the same as being emotionally attached to someone you had previously only thought of as a friend (until recently, that is)? I’m not trying to change what you deem as right or wrong but it’s something that got me thinking. A friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend after developing feelings for someone else, but recently said that she hadn’t fought for the relationship. Was there something still there for her to fight for?

When you turn to someone else for the love and support, and have such intense feelings of attraction for someone other than your boyfriend that you begin contemplating acting on them, is there anything truly left in your relationship, even though nothing physical has happened with this other man? Now, consider a drunken mistake of a kiss with someone you never intend to see again – which you don’t remember doing. Which one do you deem as worse? Or are they the same?

I am not saying that constantly going out and getting with strangers is justifiable. It’s not. Nor am I saying that if you do cheat that it should be kept a secret. It shouldn’t. Honesty is still integral to any relationship, but I think you also need to be honest to yourself and realise whether you are actually as invested in the relationship as you think. Personally, I think that having feelings for someone else is worse, even though they may not have been acted upon.

I have spoken about this subject with my boyfriend. It’s not a comfortable one and nor do we see it as a way of allowing the other to go out and have fun with someone else with the other’s blessing. We simply recognise that we place varying importance on different actions. In our minds, it is not necessarily as simple as “cheating is cheating”. Things are rarely as black and white as that.

When it comes to cheating, the circumstances are always different; as are the two people involved in the relationship. There are so many questions, so many uncertainties and so many ways in which your relationship will be affected in the future, if you stay together, that is! You know what it is that you believe, and what you expect from your other half, but ultimately; you know what it is that you can forgive.