> Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him.

Which kinda blew my mind. I understand cheating as a I-messed-up thing or as a my-partner-literally-and-believably-threatened-suicide-if-I-left-them thing but an ongoing, decades long deception? Man. That's wild.

I used to knew someone like this. "Love and sex are different, separate things." It taught me to be more guarded about who I associate with.

Cheating on someone is just such a noisy signal. You don’t know why, or what’s wrong with the relationship. You mostly don’t know who is cheating, at best you have a biased sample. You don’t know what they are like to their parents or children, or frankly even their partners - are they loyal to them in other ways, caring for them when they need it?

Relationships are super complicated and judging them from outside takes a psychology degree and extra training. I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable.

Agreed, I wouldn't either.

However the point of my comment was to explain that the variables rarely are boolean and never come in isolation (unless someone talks to you about someone else whom you never even heard of).

For me all these traits don't necessarily mean anything. You can like children and pets and still be a mass murderer, you can hate children and pets and be the most honest, most cordial person on earth.

When using outside traits to form an image about people your confidence in that image should never be exceptionally high. However cheating is not an outside trait, it is behavior.

A single imstance of observed behavior will still not say much. But at some point the confidence raises. If a stranger yells once at the waitress that adds one data point with low confidence to my list. If I cannot judge the situation because I didn't see what it was about that confidence might be close to nonexistent. Even if I fully recognize the situation I still can't be totally confident, maybe the guy has a bad day, maybe he has a history with the waitress etc.

However if I see the same guy being mean to different people for a prolonged period of time, my confidence in all other explainations will naturally fall and my confidence in the theory that the guy is mean will rise.

That doesn't mean the guy is an asshole everywhere in his life. Maybe he is super caring with his kids or old mother etc.

Don't get me wrong, two wrongs never make a right, but the reasons why people behave the way they do tell more about a person than their actual behavior. Cheating is never right, but sometimes what it tells you about the person is more them being a tragic person than a bad person. It depends.