Are you guilty of “micro-cheating”? I’d forgive you for having no clue, because I’ve now read about two dozen articles on this latest pop-psychology buzzphrase, which went viral last month, and I’m more confused than when I started. It refers, as far as I can tell, to seemingly innocuous behaviours that actually count as infidelity. But the examples given by dating experts range from wishing someone happy birthday on Facebook, which plainly isn’t a problem, to taking off your wedding ring before chatting someone up in a bar, which plainly is. (Does your partner talk about their ex too much? That’s micro-cheating. But what’s “too much”? No one will say.) Confusing matters further, micro-cheating apparently also includes things that are obviously signs that your partner is having an affair of the conventional variety. If he spends ages staring goggle-eyed at pictures of another woman on his phone, while you look grumpy on the other side of the bed, there are only two possibilities: either you’re posing for stock photos for magazine articles on relationship problems, or you’ve got a relationship problem.

Micro-cheating is an unhelpful idea, as the psychologist Justin Lehmiller noted on The Cut website, because it implies that feeling the tiniest attraction to anyone else is a red flag – a notion so at odds with normal human functioning that it sets a standard no relationship could ever meet. Beyond that, like the idea of the “emotional affair” before it, it seems destined to worry or reassure precisely the wrong people. If you’re needy and insecure, you’ll suspect your partner is micro-cheating when they aren’t – possibly even driving them away, creating the very breach you feared. Conversely, if you’re trying to avoid confronting the truth that your relationship is in trouble, you’ll take false comfort if your partner’s actions happen not to tick any boxes on the micro-cheating list. To read more from Oliver Burkeman, click here.