Is kissing someone else considered cheating?

Most people would say yes, duh. Unequivocally. But, as with most things, it’s maybe not that simple.

When I first posted this question on Twitter, I got a deluge of disclaimer-y responses from women: “A peck on the cheek is OK, but if mouths and saliva are involved, it’s dodgy.” “If you wouldn’t do it with Grandma, then yes.”
So that’s good news, right? If you plant one on Great Aunt Rena at the next family bar mitzvah, your girlfriend won’t key your car? (Granted, the fact that its okayness had to be stated somewhat implies that if you kiss a Megan Fox lookalike at an afterparty, murder/suicide is on the table.) The gendered responses I got are backed up by a poll by YouGov, which found that while 60 percent of men feel that kissing someone other than your partner is okay, only 34 percent of women agree.

That’s not to say we all don’t fuck up occasionally. Liz, 26, had been married for three years when she, her husband, and some friends drank their way through nine innings of a major-league baseball game. They hit some bars afterward, and Liz—whose husband doesn’t dance—ended up dancing with a girlfriend. “I woke up with hazy recollections of dancing with and kissing a guy, my friend pulling me away to the bathroom, and also puking on the side of the road on the way home.”

But there’s some necessary context, says Liz: “This incident came a couple of weeks after my husband confessed to sleeping with a mutual friend before we were married, [and] I think a petty and also very drunk part of me thought it was okay because it made us even.” Still: “[If I were sober] I would never have made the choice to hurt him like that.” They worked it out. But if it had been more than kissing, Liz said, they would have needed external help to move on, like a counselor.

This is understandable, considering even the word adultery signifies way more grown-up activities than kissing. Like a husband getting a Pavlovian boner under the table whenever he hears the phrase “business trip to Tulsa,” or a Real Housewife lookalike and her personal trainer, for some married people, the rule seems to be that it’s not cheating if you don’t need a room at the Hyatt Regency to do it.
But for unmarried, monogamous couples in their twenties and thirties, it’s somewhat less clear. There are no financial or familial obstacles holding you together. You could marry or split up on any given day, and it would be a clean break, at least on paper.

“I think there should be a little room for honest whoopsies in relationships,” says Sam, 27, whose longtime girlfriend, Kelsey*, kissed their best guy friend. “She came to me two days later, very apologetic and open about the fact that they were drunk and that it didn’t mean much more than that. We talked, and it was fine and we moved on.”
*Some names have been changed.

“I don’t think a lot of guys think kissing is cheating,” says Olivia, 27, whose boyfriend copped to kissing a rando “without thinking” six months into their relationship. “Our relationship means so much more than a kiss in a club, so I had to weigh whether it was worth breaking up over.” They worked it out, but if it had been more than kissing, she says she couldn’t have forgiven him.
“There’s a complicated exchange of information when we kiss,” says Gordon Gallup, psychology professor at SUNY Albany with an expertise in reproductive competition and the biology of interpersonal attraction. When you kiss someone, various biological mechanisms kick in that determine whether or not you’d be a good genetic match. “The majority of both men and women have experienced an attraction to someone, only to discover that after they kissed, they’re no longer interested.”
Hence, funny enough, Gallup winds up making the same distinction as the girls on Twitter. If it’s one quick kiss, that means the match failed on one or both ends—no harm, no foul. But if it progresses to full makeout, that means the first evolutionary hurdle is overcome—which begets multiple makeouts, which then begets the Hyatt Regency—and then it becomes a different story.
I tell him why this seems to me like such a silly distinction to make: Even if the match fails, it still indicates a certain level of dissatisfaction. Or a selfish disregard of the partner’s feelings. Or maybe it’s even a passive-aggressive way to get you to break up with the other person without truly crossing over into the dark side (i.e. full-on fucking someone else). The intentions are there, so doesn’t it count?
“I think there should be a little room for honest whoopsies in relationships.”
Not from an evolutionary perspective, he argues. In his field of study, infidelity is defined by reproductive cost. For example, if a female with a child is abandoned by a man in favor of a different mate, then she’s actually lost something (him). And if a male provides for a female who’s having sex with other males—or even unknowingly provides for another male’s child—he’s losing food and resources without the benefit of reproducing.
Sam (the guy whose girlfriend kissed her friend) unknowingly echoes this: “If everything’s so concrete and strict, then you’ll never learn what the gray areas look like once the stakes are raised toward marriage and kids.” Maybe that 60 percent of permissive men are thinking more along Gallup’s evolutionary scale and less from an emotional perspective.

Of course, thinking, breathing humans are more complicated than the calculus of our reproductive organs. Younger folks, it’s worth noting, are more likely to consider kissing cheating, according to that YouGov poll, and Gallup has found that more people—women in particular—remember their first kiss more clearly than their first sexual experience. But by our late twenties, most of us have traded in starry-eyed romanticism for pragmatism. We can understand that cheating, like most things, is relative. (By this logic, it’s no wonder old people are banging so much. Imagine the nihilism that kicks in once you’ve started using Brown Betty for the Hair Down There.)

Tell me what do you think ?