Does it count as cheating if you never actually touch the other person?

This week on The Women Are Plotting, Etienne, Heidi, and Jane dive into the increasingly complicated world of digital infidelity—and quickly discover that cheating in 2026 looks a whole lot different than it did when they were young.

From flirty emails and AOL chat rooms to sexting, secret DMs, dating apps, porn, Fitbit affairs, and even AI boyfriends and girlfriends, the women debate where harmless fantasy ends and betrayal begins.

And this one gets personal.

Etienne confesses that she was an early adopter of digital infidelity back in the 1990s, when an office email flirtation turned into a very real—and spectacularly regrettable—encounter. Jane reveals her own experience sexting strangers in AOL chat rooms during a rough patch in a long-term relationship. And then there's the woman who used Fitbit to flirt with strangers…until her suspicious husband created a fake account and unknowingly got his own wife to flirt with him.

But things get even stranger when the conversation turns to AI. If you're married but getting emotional support, romantic validation, or sexual gratification from an AI companion, are you cheating—even though the “other person” isn't a person at all?

Funny, candid, occasionally filthy, and surprisingly thought-provoking, this episode asks a very modern relationship question: If you'd have to hide it from your partner, does that make it cheating?

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