When Andrea Cosentino was on a three-day bus tour of Ireland with other twenty-somethings, the guide asked those in a relationship to raise their hand.
“If you’re looking for love, these people are off-limits,” the guide said.
Cosentino’s hand shot up. She’d been in a happily committed, monogamous relationship with Brian (whose surname is withheld for privacy reasons) for eight years.
Little did she know that an Australian man on the bus, Malcolm Smith, would tempt her out of fidelity and into an affair.
News stories about alleged affairs have long provoked strong reactions.
Jude Law was never quite able to escape the shadow cast by his cheating on Sienna Miller with his children’s nanny, Daisy Wright, back in 2005. Kristin Stewart was demonised for being caught with married director Rupert Sanders while dating Robert Pattinson. If you know who Khloe Kardashian and Tristan Thompson are, there’s a good chance it’s because of his repeated infidelity while they were together.
And one of the biggest water cooler stories of 2025 was the Coldplay “kiss-cam” scandal, where a female HR manager was caught on the concert jumbo screen mid-embrace with her married chief executive.
So why do we care so much about other people cheating?
“Nobody’s business”
Cosentino’s affair almost never happened. Smith missed the tour bus on day two, but luckily found his way back to the group in Dublin. “Everyone in the pub wanted to hear his story. I thought: I’m not giving this guy the time of day!” Cosentino recalls. “Then I got chatting to him later that night and we actually really connected; I could really talk to him. I quickly realised: I really like this guy. We stayed up all night together, made plans to eat the next day and spend that day together.”
Cosentino, now 44 and living in Hurstbridge, Victoria, has been with Smith for 18 years. They have two children, aged 11 and 15.
She paid little mind to what anyone else thought. “It’s nobody’s business I had an affair – it’s between me and the people involved,” she says. “My kids know there was an overlap. That’s all that matters.
“If people think, ‘what a bitch’, I’d say: my head knew it was wrong to cheat on Brian. I never meant to hurt him. But my gut pulled me so strongly towards Malcolm, I had to trust that.”
She rarely encounters overt condemnation. She suspects that’s for a few different reasons: she wasn’t married to Brian, they weren’t parents, Smith was single, and the affair became her longest relationship.
“Plus,” she adds, “my friends know I’m not malicious.”
“How can you show your face?”
Not everyone has it so smooth. Cosentino’s experience is a strong contrast to the vilification directed at Kristin Cabot, the woman at the centre of the Coldplay kiss-cam footage. When she and her married CEO boss, Andy Byron, were caught on camera at the Massachusetts concert last July, Cabot covered her face and fled.
Last month, she told The New York Times she’d been doxxed, received 60 death threats, and was labelled a “slut”, “homewrecker” and “gold digger”. Strangers approached her car to ask how she could show her face. One woman told her: “Adulterers are the lowest form of human. You don’t even deserve to breathe the air I breathe.”
Cabot lost her job and was publicly humiliated by celebrities and comedians. Her children are reluctant to be seen with her. At times, she barely left the house.
Byron has not spoken publicly. He remains married, and was photographed enjoying a picnic with his wife and their two sons in December.
Yet Cabot was already separated from her husband – who was at the same concert on a date.
One in three Australians has cheated
The story went global because it “pushed our collective buttons around trust, betrayal and morality,” explains psychologist and sexologist, Laura Lee.
“There’s something protective about outrage,” she says. “It feels safer than compassionate curiosity, which might cause others to question our own moral compass or relationship choices.”
People prefer to say, “I’d never do that; neither would my partner,” than confront the reality that this certainty is often an illusion, Lee explains.
That reaction exists even though one in three have cheated or considered cheating, according to a 2024 survey of 2000 Australians. And they’re just the ones admitting to it.
Curiosity before judgment may feel destabilising, Lee says, but it leads to more meaningful conversations. “It means asking, ‘What’s going on here? Maybe there’s more to this?’ Rather than defaulting to shame.”
In 17 years of practice, Lee has worked extensively with polyamorous clients. “Non-monogamous relationships are often met with suspicion and ridicule,” she says.
“That says less about those relationships than about how rigid and conservative our ideas still are around a subject this nuanced and complex.
“We still live in a monogamy-centric society, which is why the reaction is so strong.”
Double standards
There’s also a lot of projection going on. When affairs surface, we tend to “fill in the gaps based on our own fears, experiences and the limited information available,” says clinical psychologist Amberley Meredith.
In the Coldplay case, viewers knew something illicit was happening; if it’d been ethical non-monogamy, the pair likely wouldn’t have squirmed away. That gave the story three key elements: sensationalism, titillation and triggering power.
“If you have a history of betrayal, this story became a channel for those feelings,” Meredith says.
It also tapped into a wider sense of instability. In a fractured world of war, political upheaval and economic stress, such betrayal “ripped off what was just about holding people together – their faith in relationships,” she says.
For others, the story provided relief from a heavy news cycle. “It allowed people to divert their emotional energy somewhere else and weigh in,” Meredith says.
Lee adds that the vitriol directed specifically at Cabot reflects enduring misogyny. “Women are expected to be sexually desirable, but not actually sexual,” she says, pointing to a persistent double standard.
Are workplace affairs a sackable offence?
There’s also the workplace dimension. For Cabot and Byron, they both lost their jobs.
Surveys suggest more than half of employees have had a romantic relationship with a colleague, and among them, around four in 10 admit to cheating on a partner with a co-worker.
Workplace expert Sean Melbourne says blanket bans on office relationships are rare in Australia.
“Most organisations recognise relationships happen,” he says. “They’re not inherently bad, provided they’re consensual, welcome, and free of power imbalances.”
Policies typically place responsibility on employees to manage conflicts of interest and disclose relationships where appropriate, particularly when hierarchy is involved.
So what’s an appropriate reaction?
Ultimately, context matters. But Lee offers a guiding principle. “If it’s not your relationship, your job isn’t to judge or solve,” she says. “It’s to listen, support, ask questions – be curious.”
“You can privately hold your own disapproval without imposing it on someone else,” she adds, “and certainly without the collective dehumanising we’ve seen recently.”
As one of Kristin Cabot’s close friends observed at the height of the online pile-on: “I hope all these people commenting have never made a mistake.”
