Is Kissing Cheating?

Does kissing someone mean cheating in the modern world? A study involving 5,000 people has revealed a huge gap in how younger and older generations of lovers view cheating.

Flirting, kissing, and watching porn. Which of them are considered to be cheating?

In the world where divorce rates are on the rise and people turn to alcohol to find comfort after they were cheated on, Relate, the relationships charity, decided to survey people on what cheating really is.

As it turns out, 91 percent of women place kissing on the same footing as cheating, while a staggering one man in five don’t think kissing constitutes cheating, according to the Daily Mail.

Opinions between the two sexes have split. With so many man thinking kissing someone is not a relationship-ruining matter, as many as two thirds of all couples think their relationship would not be able to survive if they were cheated on.

However, a staggering 93 percent of relationship experts believe couples can survive cheating by either partner and regain trust in their relationship.

But folks kissing other people outside of their relationship is apparently the least of couples’ problems, as there’s also flirting and watching porn.

Just like with kissing, more women think that flirting with other people and watching porn (starring other people, of course) should be treated as their partner being unfaithful.

But the major gap in opinions on cheating between genders is not the only interesting takeaway from the study.

Apparently, older and younger generations of couples view cheating differently. A staggering 45 percent of the Tinder generation – people aged 16- to 24-years-old – believe that their partner flirting with someone else is cheating.

Older couples, meanwhile, are less possessive than their younger counterparts, as only 31 percent said they considered flirting to be cheating.

Interestingly, the Huffington Post reported in 2015 that a study found that women initiated 69 percent of divorces, while men only 31 percent. And considering that the fair share of all divorces stem from cheating, it’s not so surprising that one in five men consider kissing to be not that big of a deal.

Even more bizarrely, seven percent of couples don’t consider having sex with someone else as cheating.

The issue of watching porn while in a relationship also divided the two genders, as 20 percent of women said their partner having fun all by themselves meant they were being unfaithful. Only 11 percent of men said the same thing about their partner.

The study was meant to serve as yet another piece of evidence that schools in the U.K. have to dedicate more time educating young students about sex, relationships, and cheating, while adults should have easier access to relationship counselling.

One third of people surveyed said they had been cheated on, though the study does not seem to specify if kissing also counted as cheating for those people. Nearly 10 percent revealed they were suspicious that their partner could be cheating on them.

The study comes just weeks after a sex survey revealed the shocking statistic that one in five men don’t think that oral sex is considered to be cheating – that’s the same amount of men that don’t think kissing counts as an act of infidelity!

The shock sex study, which was conducted for Superdrug’s Online Doctor and reported by The Sun, had a different opinion about men who think that it’s fine to kiss someone other than your partner.

The study found that one in three men don’t consider kissing to be cheating.

The shock sex study also found that Europeans are much more tolerant towards cheating than Americans, as only 85.6 percent of European women think vaginal sex is cheating, while 99 percent of American women consider it to be cheating.

[Featured Image by Photographee.eu/Shutterstock]