Chexting: A Fresh (Or Foul) Take On Cheating

Back in the good ol’ days, all a girl had to do to see if her man was cheating was to check for lipstick on his shirt collar. These days, you can forget about checking the collar. Your best bet is to check his cell phone.

With the rise of communication methods heavily impacted by technology, such as cell phones, instant messaging and popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, it was only time before cell phones and more specifically, texting, became a major player in the world of relationships and dating.

Many couples these days even prefer to communicate by texting. Megan, a grade 11 student at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary says, “One of my friends had her phone taken away and she ended up using my phone to text her boyfriend and tell him. I guess it just goes to show how much couples rely on technology nowadays to communicate.”

A subsequent result of this is the practice of sexting – texts that are explicit and in some cases, involve compromising photos. Another grade 11 student at Queen Elizabeth says, “When people use texts, they are generally more bold then they would be in person, which leads to things getting much hotter much faster.”

Now many (negative) comments can be made about sexting, but one thing is for sure: if sexting finds its way into relationships, it can also find its way between relationships. With texting being a relatively private and controllable form of communication, cheating becomes easily accessible to many people. Texts can be exchanged between two people in secret with the messages deleted after the fact.

Welcome to the secret world of chexting, or cheating through text messaging. Chexting has recently made headlines all around the world. In high profile cases of celebrity chexting, the marriages of both Tiger Woods and Jesse James were jeopardized after they were both accused of infidelity. Evidence used against them both included texts – or more like sexts – from conversations with their mistresses.

And just as these men learned the hard way, chexting may seem foolproof at the time, but it is incredibly easy to get caught. One expert, Peter Dedman of Predicto Mobile, the largest paid mobile community in the US, describes it as “lipstick on the cellular – digital proof that becomes evidence you’ve been unfaithful.”

“People who cheat on their boyfriends or girlfriends are really just cowards… [and] cheating with texting is just an easier way out for these people,” says one student at Queen Elizabeth High School.

Even those who think they are safe after they have carefully erased all incriminating evidence off their phone, aren’t in the clear just yet. There are multitudes of sites such as Squidoo.com that outline how you can recover files off phones. Anybody can do it; all you need to do is download a free program that recovers recently deleted files off of SIM cards. A high-tech solution to the newfangled method of cheating!

Kristen, a student at Queen Elizabeth High School, points out the dangers of files saved to a cell phone: “This friend I have was sexting with her secret boyfriend and she saved some stuff that he sent to her. Then her mother found the texts, and she wasn’t allowed to see him anymore.”

While chexting is a new take on the age-old idea of cheating, no matter how it is disguised, being unfaithful is still as unacceptable and hurtful as ever.