The Language of Betrayal (Part 2): Does Cheating Exist in Polyamory?

There are people who say that cheating does not exist in polyamory. As a lifelong polyamorist, I’ve always found that claim a little suspicious. It tends to originate from two distinct quarters, and both tell us more about the speaker than about polyamory itself.

From my polyamory coaching work, I’ve observed that the first group is often composed of the newly non-monogamous, usually cis-heterosexual men, though not exclusively, who grew up in households where the simple act of naming one’s needs was dangerous. They learned early that desire was something to conceal, until hiding became a habit. Patriarchal conditioning then compounds this by stunting men’s emotional development, depriving them of both the language and the spaces needed to practice vulnerability. What emerges are adults who long for intimacy but lack the emotional scaffolding to express it safely or clearly. For this group, “cheating” in non-monogamy doesn’t register as betrayal, because secrecy itself has long been their only form of safety. So when the moment arrives to speak with candor about whom they wish to sleep with or how they hope to romantically deepen a connection, their old instincts to conceal win out. They act first, disclose later, and call it courage when it is only cowardice in finer dress, leaving their partners blindsided and hurt by truth’s late arrival. For trust is a fragile edifice built upon planks of transparency and ropes of predictability. When one of those cords snaps, the whole structure sways. Being surprised by something you thought you’d be informed about isn’t just disappointing; it’s destabilizing.

The second camp tends to be monogamous people who can only imagine polyamory through their own framework. To them, if cheating signifies any emotional or sexual act beyond the sanctioned pair, then polyamory itself appears as little more than an elaborate license for deceit, open cheating, perfumed treachery. But this, I would argue, is akin to accusing basketball of violating the rules of hockey. The matter is not whether the ball may be touched by hand, but that each game is governed by its own understanding of fair play. What is deemed “offside” in one arena may be perfectly legitimate in another. So it is with relationships; each form of intimacy defines its own boundaries of fidelity.

Even in monogamy, cheating doesn’t have a universal definition. For one couple, it might mean watching porn. For another, only the physical act itself carries transgression. Some believe fantasies are harmless birds, beautiful if caged within the mind. Others see them as wolves prowling the perimeter of the heart.

Within polyamory, however, cheating assumes a different nature altogether. In polyamory, cheating has little to do with numbers. To cheat, in this context, is to violate the agreements that lovers have composed together, those living charters that govern how they will engage with others, whether sexually, romantically, or emotionally. The act itself is less significant than the secrecy that surrounds it.

Recently, polyamory content creator Evita Lavitaloca Sawyers posed a thought experiment that stuck with me: does “cheating” exist in polyamory, or is that a monogamous hangover? Why not just call it lying? After all, cheating carries monogamous weight.

I confess I am drawn to such semantic puzzles. As a decolonization educator with an English degree, I’m fascinated by the politics of language, how words evolve, whose values they reinforce, and what they reveal about our collective consciousness. As my mentor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o often said, “Language creates culture.”

Consult, then, the dictionary. To cheat is to:
1. practice fraud or deceit.
2. violate rules or regulations.
3. be sexually unfaithful.

It’s that third meaning that dominates modern usage. But it made me wonder: why don’t we say unfaithful instead? I love nothing more than doing etymology research. What ghosts of history have rendered that older term obsolete and what does that reveal of culture?

In the long centuries between the medieval and Victorian eras, adultery was the preferred word in English for what we now call cheating. It referred chiefly to a married woman’s transgression with another man, a crime not of passion but of property. Men could, in theory, be accused as well, but it was women whose bodies bore the legal burden, for adultery threatened inheritance and the sanctity of lineage. It was not love that was being defended, but ownership.

Around the year 1828, the word adultery began to retreat from conversation and was replaced gradually by unfaithful. Once, the word had meant disloyalty to one’s faith, to God himself, before it migrated into the domain of marriage. The shift, I suspect, mirrored the moral upheavals of the nineteenth century, when Western societies exchanged divine authority for scientific reason and the romantic ideal of companionate love. Fidelity was no longer a covenant with heaven; it had become a vow between spouses who were now expected to find in each other what people once sought from the church and the village, a sense of care, belonging, and moral order.

Then around 1934, the word cheat began replacing unfaithful. Etymologically, cheat comes from the Latin excadere, meaning “to fall away” or “to lapse.” You can almost hear how it became shorthand for someone falling away from the discipline of monogamy. I imagine it gained popularity in the early 20th century as lapses in marriage became more normalized. People were staying together longer, and it’s hard to maintain that discipline, especially as the crime of adultery stopped being enforced.

So yes, in that light, using cheating in polyamory sounds a bit misplaced. We’re not striving to uphold monogamy’s moral discipline.

And yet, I still think cheating works. It captures a very specific kind of rupture: the moment your partner acts in secret against the agreements about intimacy you built together. Other words such as adultery, affair, infidelity, philandering, or womanizing assume a single-partner framework. Meanwhile, betrayal, transgression, lying, or deception could describe anything from taxes to forgetting to feed the cat.

Cheating names a particular wound: a betrayal of erotic and emotional transparency. When someone says, “I was cheated on,” you know exactly what kind of heartbreak they mean.

Perhaps, in time, a new vocabulary will emerge, one native to non-monogamous culture, unburdened by the theology of sin and the economics of ownership, something that doesn’t trace back to falling from grace but to breaking consent. In every age, love writes its own commandments, and each generation must learn anew what it means to break them. Until then, cheating remains our imperfect placeholder for that feeling when honesty collapses and the architecture of trust comes tumbling down because of how your partner engaged intimately with someone else.

If this piece resonated with you, tap the ❤️ so I know it landed. What stayed with you the most? I’d love to read your reflections in the comments. And if it sparked new insights, share it with someone exploring what polyamory, consent, and love can look like through a decolonial lens.