Everyone hates cheaters. To cheat (and get caught) is to render oneself instantly despisable. The deceit, the skullduggery, the intimate betrayal! Most of us are personally familiar with an explosive affair upending our lives, or the lives of loved ones. Hating cheaters is easy, almost comforting in its near-universality. Affairs aren’t typically afforded the assumption of moral ambiguity; they create clear, easy narratives of Villain and Victim, Wronger and Wronged. “There is only one exception, it seems, to this golden rule: Cheating is okay if you end up with the love of your life,” writes Shannon Keating, who fell in love with a stranger she went on to marry while in a relationship with someone else. “Most casual affair-havers can’t pull it off, but a rare few play the long game, proving that, through decades of mutual adoration, they were drawn to cheat not by baser instincts but the highest possible call known to humankind: true love.” In a 2024 essay, Keating explores her hypothesis that ‘time + commitment = cheating forgiven by society’: nymag.visitlink.me/KV24eA