Cheating isn’t always the end of a relationship. It’s time to rethink infidelity

Nothing ruffles feathers quite like a celebrity cheating scandal. It’s an entire industry in and of itself, resulting in an endless stream of column inches, viral social media discussions, and occasionally even merch – I was “Team Jen”, for the record. The stakes are rarely higher, the drama never quite so delicious. They’re not in short supply, either, thanks to a high-speed rumour mill of famous people getting frisky with one another while otherwise engaged, so to speak.

The latest brouhaha surrounds McFly’s Danny Jones, who was seemingly caught on camera kissing Love Island’s Maura Higgins at a Brit Awards afterparty earlier this month. Jones, 39, has been married to former Miss England model Georgia Horsley since 2014; the couple share a seven-year-old son together. According to reports, he was seen alongside Higgins at the Sony Music party at 4am on 2 March.

As of yet, nobody involved has addressed the speculation, which has only fuelled the discourse. Horsley released an episode of her podcast, Mum’s the Word!, hours after reports of her husband’s alleged infidelity emerged. In the episode, she speaks about her son, Cooper, and doesn’t mention Jones directly. That was enough for fans to presume the rumours were correct.

Meanwhile, the podcaster has uploaded one Instagram post since the debacle unfolded: a photo of Cooper captioned with a blue love heart emoji. Thousands of fellow celebrities commented on the post, offering their support. Horsley has since turned the comments off. On Tuesday, the couple were photographed in public together for the first time, drinking coffee on a walk. Higgins, meanwhile, has stayed somewhat silent aside from posting about a trip to LA.

To speculate over what any of this might mean is a waste of time – it’s also none of our business – though that doesn’t seem to be stopping thousands of people on social media from doing just that. One TikTok video showing Jones and Higgins together during I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! has more than 12,000 views. We don’t know what happened, how or why. What I do know, though, is that all the outrage spawned by this showdown is the latest indication of just how wrong we are about cheating and what it means for relationships.

More than half of us have been cheated on while in monogamous relationships, according to a US YouGov poll. That’s a lot of people. But for most of them, it wasn’t the death knell for their relationship: 58 per cent of those surveyed whose partners broke up with them because of their cheating said they eventually got back together with the person. This might sound like a shock. If it does, well, I’m afraid to say you might need to take another look at your views around cheating – and the archaic relationship ideals informing them.

A few years ago, I read The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity by Esther Perel, the world-renowned psychotherapist and podcaster. In that book, by drawing on her work with clients, Perel posits a new thesis about cheating: that instead of being the thing to destroy a relationship, it might actually be the thing that saves it. “Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become,” she writes.

Perel’s work was groundbreaking for the challenge it posed to long-held beliefs around why people cheat. Because instead of it being about something lacking in the relationship, it’s usually about something lacking in the person cheating. Generally, as the book explains, this boils down to a lack of self-worth, which, in some cases, cultivates a proclivity toward self-destruction.

Yes, occasionally, this could lead to the dissolution of a relationship. But, as we might well soon see with Jones and Horsley, it often doesn’t. They wouldn’t be the first celebrity couple to overcome an alleged kissing scandal either. Consider Dominic West and his wife, Catherine FitzGerald, who famously put on a united front after photos emerged of him appearing to lock lips with his The Pursuit of Love co-star Lily James in 2020. After the images were published, West and FitzGerald addressed paparazzi gathered outside their home by sharing a kiss and placing a handwritten sign outside their home that read: “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you. Catherine and Dominic.” Other couples to stay strong amid cheating rumours include Beyoncé) and Jay-Z, Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo, and even Bill and Hillary Clinton – make of them what you will; they’re still together!

Cheating can be the wake-up call a relationship needs to continue. It can foster healthier, more open discussions about what has and hasn’t been working in the relationship, while also bringing couples closer together. It could be the thing that pushes you to seek out therapy, either as a couple or an individual, which could uncover all sorts of important personal discoveries that push your life in a new direction. In short, it might alert you to a problem and put you on a path to fixing it.

Of course, this depends on myriad factors, like how much lying has accompanied the cheating, consequently deepening the betrayal. You’re far more likely to be able to forgive someone for cheating if they divulge it immediately, for example, than if they hide it from you for years. It also depends on how the cheating came to light: did your partner tell you directly? Or did you find out from someone else? And, if we’re really going to get into the minutiae of it all, I suppose it also matters how far the cheating was taken. One kiss is obviously quite different to a full-blown affair.

If the stars align, though, and both of you are equipped with sturdy communication skills and a heady amount of self-awareness, there’s no reason why cheating can’t actually improve your relationship. This has been the case for many of Perel’s clients. “One theme comes up repeatedly: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity,” she writes. “For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and is more often described as an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.”

Who knows what will happen to Jones and Horsley? Or any other future celebrity couples who inevitably get caught up in similar debacles? But we do know that it doesn’t help any of us to think of infidelity in such binary terms. Human beings are complicated, as are the relationships we have with one another. Sometimes, we’ll get it wrong. And when we do, it’s not helpful to jump to conclusions so that we can create clear victims and villains, rupturing families in the process. Life just isn’t like that. Because, as Perel puts it: when we cheat “We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.”