At first glance, that leniency might read as hypocrisy. (After all, cheating is immoral—full stop.) But relationship experts like Vienna Pharaon, LMFT, a New York–based therapist and author of The Origins of You, say perspectives tend to shift once the “bad guy” is someone we know personally—and understand as a full, complicated human being.
“People can be great friends and maybe not-so-great partners,” Pharaon says, largely because romantic relationships expose parts of ourselves that platonic ones don’t. With a partner, the stakes are higher with expectations around sex, exclusivity, long-term commitment, shared finances, and domestic labor.
Friendships, while just as intimate and meaningful, operate under a looser set of rules, Pharaon explains. There’s no explicit agreement on exclusivity, no universally agreed-upon definition of platonic loyalty, and far less pressure to merge your lives completely. Because of that, a person’s actions in romantic relationships don’t necessarily translate into how they’ll treat those they care about platonically.
Through this lens, Pharaon says she “rarely sees someone just snap their fingers and end an otherwise healthy friendship for just cheating”—at least, not in isolation or without wanting context. More often, it’s not the affair itself that breaks the bond but what it exposes.
That includes red flags that were easier to ignore before—like realizing the friend whose reckless flirting you once laughed off as chaotic, quirky, and “on-brand” might actually just not care who gets hurt, as one person explained to me. While reflecting on what led to the end of a five-year friendship, another woman recalls her cuffed friend grinding on strangers during what was supposed to be a wholesome girls’ trip.
“She knew what she was doing, and it made everyone else in the group uncomfortable,” she tells me, noting that she was met with defensiveness and even shouting when gently bringing up her concerns. “I took this as my sign to distance myself,” she explains, not because the moment revealed something entirely new, but because it made her friend’s “my way or no one else’s way” attitude impossible to ignore.
