Is Flirting Cheating?

It can be hard to know what counts as flirting, let alone when flirting crosses the line into cheating territory. For example, recently, a friend told me about a text she’d seen from her boyfriend to his coworker. “Your haircut looks hot,” it said. Upset, she asked him what he’d meant. “Nothing,” he shrugged. “I was just giving her a compliment.” My friend tried to brush it off, but the bad feeling lingered. They broke up a few weeks later. “The text wasn’t the only reason, but it didn’t help. I couldn’t get past the idea that he was flirting behind my back. I lost trust ,” she says.

Of course, paying someone a compliment isn’t always inherently flirtatious. For my friend, it came down to the choice of words. “If he’d said her haircut looked ‘nice,’ maybe I wouldn’t have cared as much,”