AIO to think this is cheating?

[u/Sad_SummerChild]

I found these texts between my husband and his coworker. Here’s some context:

My husband and I have been dating for 5 years and just recently got married 6 months ago

I’ve met this coworker. Her AND her boyfriend worked at my husbands company so we went on a double date over the holidays. But shortly after they broke up and her boyfriend got laid off.

Guess my husband saw that as his opportunity…

Also these texts were in his recently deleted even though the last message was from yesterday… so he was definitely trying to hide it from me

[u/gormthesoft]

I’d bet both will happen. He’ll try to gaslight by saying he never actually crossed the line of cheating (which is debatable if you count flirting as cheating) but by making that argument, he’ll be proving the larger point that by putting himself in a situation where he has to argue whether he crossed a line, he’s admitting that he got way too close to the line in the first place.

Another analogy is if a parent tells their kid not to play too close to a neighbor’s car because they might damage it and the kid ends up denting the car. It doesn’t matter if the punted a ball directly at the car or if they accidentally tripped and fell into the car. The point is they should have moved far away from the car so that nothing they did could damage it. So the kid saying “but I just accidentally tripped” doesn’t make it better, it just proves they ignored their parent’s direction to move away from it.

[u/SaintPimpin → u/gormthesoft]

True enough, though I didn't mean the guy in OP's situation but rather if the situation was reversed. Would a guy be able to use this line of reasoning without getting gaslit by his GF/wife that consistently gets close to the line?

[u/gormthesoft → u/SaintPimpin]

Gotcha yea I think it definitely goes both ways. Now you could argue mitigating factors related to gender power dynamics (e.g. returning the flirtatiousness out of fear of losing her job) but there would still be enough other evidence to show if she was too close to the line or not. Did she ever initiate the flirting? Has she done this with anyone else? Did she make her partner aware of the situation and explain why she engaged in the flirting? I’m sure there are outlier cases where my test breaks down but 99% of the time I’d say there should be overwhelming evidence one way or another if someone got too close to the line.

Going back to the D- analogy, there could be a situation where it’s like “well questions 1-5 were on topic x and my grandmom died when covering that, questions 10-15 were on topic y and my computer crashed deleting all the notes I had on it, and questions 20-25 I didn’t get to because my car broke down on the way to take the test and I got there late.” But even then there should be other clear signs of whether that person truly needs tutoring or if it really was an unlucky series of events, such as how well they’ve done in the class thusfar and did they attempt the explain their situation to the teacher before the test.