When a series of women started accusing married Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine of cheating last week, the internet didn’t exactly overthink the situation. It didn’t spark a wave of earnest discussions about morality on social media, nor did people express the feeling that he (or his wife) had a reasonable expectation of privacy at this difficult time. Worryingly, few even seemed to acknowledge or care that Levine’s wife, Behati Prinsloo, is pregnant and may be experiencing huge trauma right now – simultaneously going viral while carrying the child of someone who’s potentially been telling models “how f***ing hot” they are. No, we processed the challenging life situation of others by... making memes. Hilarious memes recontextualising his vapid and (in Levine’s own words) “flirtatious” messages. We (myself included) turned the awful domestic situation of total strangers into a big in-joke for our own entertainment.
More often than not, we use humour to deflect (or just ignore) the toxic reality of cheating in stories like this. As we’ll see, I think we’ve got here after decades of terrible public dialogues on the subject. But it’s also true we probably deflect it because, when it comes to our own relationships, research indicates we all operate in a state of denial around cheating. As reported by the BBC, though some surveys estimate that up to 75 per cent of men and 68 per cent of women have cheated, apparently only 5 per cent of people think their partner has or will cheat on them. That’s a lot of heads wedged into a lot of sand.
