The Infidelity of Impatience: Swipe, Cheat, Repeat!

There has never been a worse time to fall in love. Not because love is dead, but because attention spans are. Because dopamine spikes faster than commitment can root itself. Because we are all dopamine junkies in a world built like a slot machine: pull, swipe, match, repeat.

Infidelity isn’t just a betrayal anymore; it’s a symptom. A symptom of a deeper malfunction in how we engage with desire and delay. We live in a culture that fetishizes immediacy from food delivered in minutes, validation in likes to dates in swipes. Everything we want is just a few taps away. So when real love known to be unpredictable, slow, sometimes boring walks in, we don't recognize it. Worse, we reject it. Because it doesn’t perform. It doesn’t ping.

Cheating isn’t just about sex or even emotional escape anymore. It’s become an extension of our relationship with gratification. The moment love feels mundane, the moment effort becomes required, we look for the next hit. And society, with its curated timelines and algorithmic temptations, makes sure there’s always something or worse someone shinier waiting in the wings.

But here's the irony: the chase is a lie. The novelty is a loop. And most affairs don’t end in passion, they end in disappointment, and often, in emptiness. Because no one, not even the new person, can satisfy a mind trained for instant highs. What we’re really unfaithful to isn’t our partners, it’s the process. The slow burn. The build. The uncomfortable silence that matures into understanding.

There was a time when love was understood as a kind of craftsmanship. Built slowly, carved with intention, and sometimes mended after being broken. Now, we ghost before the glue can dry. We leave when things get hard and blame it on misaligned energies, trauma wounds, or easier still the imperfections of the other person. We’ve pathologized discomfort so thoroughly that we mistake the normal struggles of intimacy for toxicity. 

We forget that love, like art, takes revision.

Cheating thrives in this culture because it promises an escape. Not just from commitment, but from slowness. From the anxiety of staying. From the terrifying act of choosing someone day after day in a world that keeps whispering, “You could have better.”

But here’s the truth no one wants to sit with: better isn’t always deeper. Sometimes better is just newer. Sometimes it’s just faster. And in the pursuit of “better,” we lose the profound beauty of becoming with someone not just arriving.

We are malfunctioning as a society, it's like mutation in cell: cancerous, and to our luck, not a benign one, it doesn't stay localised, it spreads. Not because we are bad people, but because we’re out of sync with what love demands: Time. Boredom. Repetition. Vulnerability. These aren’t bugs in the system; they are the system. And the refusal to sit through them is the real betrayal.

So maybe the real act of rebellion in our age isn’t fidelity to a person but fidelity to the process. To the unsexy parts. The in-between phases. The glitchy, awkward middle before the magic hits. Because love doesn’t always feel good. But neither does growth. Its a sine curve.

And maybe the problem isn’t that we fall in love too easily but that we fall out too quickly, forgetting that love isn’t supposed to feel like a rush. It’s supposed to feel like home. 

And homes aren’t built in a day.

(Alexa play Ghar from the movie When Harry met Sejal ;) )