Is OnlyFans Cheating?

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty, OnlyFans

Cheating, despite being such a seemingly concrete cultural concept, has no universal definition. Maybe you and your partner are free to freak as you please — so long as you never bring it home to your marital bed. Maybe your girlfriend told you from the start that any time spent on Pornhub is time spent in betrayal. Or perhaps you have a far more nebulous situation: You know you’re not supposed to sleep with anyone else, but the time you spend on your iPhone when she’s at work and you’re looking at naked women you don’t know kind of feels like your own business. That is, until she discovers you’ve been spending a dinner date’s worth of money each month watching OnlyFans.

Porn has long been a third party between many monogamous couples, and plenty of fans have had favorite stars and cam girls they know by name. But OnlyFans’ huge success since the pandemic has made it mainstream — to the tune of 94 million users across the U.S. Now even the average viewer has the opportunity to speak to creators directly or buy personalized content catered specifically to their tastes.

And with OnlyFans making the viewer-creator relationship so immediate, there are difficult new questions for partners to consider, from whether your beau is directly messaging the creator to how much money they spend. Perhaps all of that sounds complicated, but it’s precisely these types of nuances that have come to define an ultra-contemporary relationship conundrum and its lack of a conclusive answer: Is using OnlyFans “cheating”? It’s a fight we can’t stop having.

Yes, Looking at OnlyFans Is Cheating

For many couples, any nuances are superfluous. Regardless of how OnlyFans is used, they consider it full-on cheating. On Reddit and TikTok, there are countless tales of women devastated by the discovery of their boyfriend’s or husband’s activity on the platform, both casual and compulsive. Videos encouraging women to find out whether their boyfriend has an account on OnlyFans by attempting to sign up with his email address periodically go viral, and dozens of women respond with sad messages about how they’ve been left with “secondhand embarrassment and a broken heart.”

A couple years ago, Melissa, a 28-year-old in Los Angeles working in academia, had a sneaking feeling that her boyfriend of a year and a half was watching porn — something that he knew made her uncomfortable — and went through his phone. He had used Instagram’s in-app browser to search OnlyFans profiles, liked provocative posts, and clicked links in bios for OnlyFans accounts. She checked his bank statements and couldn’t find evidence of him actually buying anything, but it didn’t matter; she was still hurt. “Just clicking and viewing felt so personal and violating to our relationship,” she says. “I felt not good enough, not beautiful enough, experienced enough, sexual enough, interesting enough.” Since then, he’s deleted his Twitter and now shares his Instagram activity with her, “just because you can easily get so caught up and have frequent lapses of judgment,” Melissa says. “I think we all do.”

On Reddit, one 20-year-old woman said she and her boyfriend would occasionally watch the chaotic drunken Snapchat stories of a local woman whom she described as “skinny, short, blonde, tattooed, pierced and a girl who loooooves sex.” Soon, though, she felt like her intuition was itching. She opened his laptop and went for a dig. “Two months ago, he bought a $40 post of her ‘stretching her holes’ while I was at work at 8 a.m.” The betrayal here was clear: Not only was money tight, but he was spending it on porn of a woman she obviously did not like.

No, OnlyFans Isn’t Cheating, You Prude! It’s Just Like Going to the Strip Club

Many men have been caught in similar scenarios, albeit less frequently involving creators they know in real life. “There’s plenty of things that aren’t necessarily cheating, like frequenting Hooters to see a specific waitress, but aren’t emblematic of healthy relationships either,” a man who once used OnlyFans while in a relationship tells me. “If I went to a strip club once a week, I also wouldn’t be cheating, but I would be exhibiting questionable behavior. It’s part of that gray area.”

The strip club parallel came up in my conversations a lot. What’s the big deal? these people — mostly men — seemed to say. Of course, this comparison is similarly complicated. Some people are perfectly fine with their partners going to a strip club, but even then, it may depend on how frequently one goes, whether they’re buying private dances, and how much they’re spending. Maybe going for a bachelor party with friends to throw some money on the stage is fine but going once a week to spend hundreds on a favorite dancer in curtained-off corners of the club is something different.

OnlyFans Could Also Be a Sign of IRL Cheating

When Lauren, a 22-year-old college student, caught her boyfriend on OnlyFans, he tried to downplay it by claiming he was only watching free content. But after a while, she figured out that he’d actually been spending money on it too. “The real kicker was that I was financially supporting him,” she says. Eventually, he started going to strip clubs, cheating on Lauren with a stripper, and ultimately left her for the other woman.

And it’s not unheard of for individuals to form emotional connections with the creators making the content they’re watching on OnlyFans. According to research from the Kinsey Institute, this is a common experience: In one study published this year of more than 2,000 individuals who use cam sites, most of them men, 60 percent reported feeling a current emotional bond with a model. Other data from the Kinsey Institute suggests that people experiencing feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness were more likely to use emerging forms of interactive sexual technology like OnlyFans.

OnlyFans Is Only Cheating If You Pay for It

Aaron, a 29-year-old massage therapist in San Francisco, was in a committed relationship with a former sex worker when the pandemic hit. “We had a relatively hypersexual relationship, and if there was ever a day where sex didn’t happen, I was encouraged to watch porn to take care of my own needs,” he says. “My ex would tell me stories of finding her ex’s Pornhub tabs open and never being bothered; she laughed it off.”

That summer, he heard about how OnlyFans was helping sex workers survive the pandemic — it was the only way they could safely make money at the time. “And because I had felt so strongly about sex-work labor politics and pretty educated on the topic, I thought the most ethical porn content I could consume would come from there,” he told me. Not much later — at which point Aaron had purchased three videos and spent around $100 on subscriptions on the platform — his girlfriend complained that OnlyFans “wasn’t real sex work.” It devolved into an argument between the two in which he revealed that he used the site.

“She told me she felt like purchases directly from specific creators felt like cheating because I was choosing to buy their content instead of randomly consuming through this large YouTube-like library of porn.” He was surprised that she was so offended and wanted to consume porn in a way that he found problematic. “Basically, after she found out about my purchases, we had enough fights about it that I limited what I consumed and looked at in order to best serve our relationship until it ended.”

And being polyamorous or open doesn’t make this issue any more straightforward. Matthew, a guy in his 30s in a long-term open relationship, tells me that it’s been a source of contention between him and his girlfriend in the past. A few years back, they both dated a woman together, but it eventually fizzled. He still considered himself friends with the woman, however, and when she launched her OnlyFans, he subscribed as a sign of support. For him, it was nothing more than another billable expense in his monthly finances. After seeing the payments on their credit-card statements, though, his partner was uncomfortable that he was allocating household funds towards a former hookup they shared. It was fine if they continued to sleep together occasionally — so long as he wasn’t contributing toward her bills. He ended up cancelling the subscription but still had a threesome with the woman and her new boyfriend six months later (which was fine with his girlfriend).

OnlyFans Is Only Cheating If You Try to Hide It

While Matthew wasn’t trying to hide his OnlyFans payments, he’s not alone in a bill outing his usage. “A few years ago, my wife caught my OnlyFans purchases via our credit-card bill,” says Rob, 40, a married guy in the Midwest. “She wasn’t mad I was looking at porn; she was mad that I hid something from her and was paying for it. It made her wonder if I was hiding more, and there was nothing more. This was truly my big secret.”

They reconciled after he deleted his account. They also implemented more specific policies about what constitutes cheating in their relationship: “Over time, it taught me to be more open with her about things I find hot or sexy but don’t pay for — and especially not to hide it. She and I both consider cheating more physical and emotional than something that’s purely lust. She doesn’t really care if I watch porn, nor do I care if she watches porn or reads smut.” For them, it was the hiding that made it a problem.

What Do Sex Therapists Think?

Rather than suggesting individuals seek guidance from TikTok and strangers elsewhere on the internet, relationship coaches and therapists recommend drilling down on these individual themes with your actual partner.

“What I see happen often in couples therapy is couples functioning off of assumptions that then lead to unintentional boundary violations and hurt that could have been prevented through in-depth conversations,” says Sarah Kelleher, a psychotherapist who focuses on sex and relationships. “Many of us get hurt when we make an assumption that our partner holds the exact same definition of something that we do. Assumptions without mutual understanding and agreement between partners about what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior can lead to misunderstandings and feelings of betrayal.”

Kelleher recommends beginning with a conversation with your partner about the dynamics of your relationship, as well as your thoughts on pornography and what constitutes cheating more broadly. Often, she says, we’re not exactly aligned in what we believe is right or wrong in a relationship and those differences aren’t revealed until one person’s boundary is crossed.

For that reason, drilling down on the specifics can be crucial, particularly when it comes to a platform like OnlyFans. In addition to defining boundaries regarding porn and cheating, Kelleher suggests engaging in thought experiments like, “Do I feel differently about them watching prerecorded content versus live content, such as camming?” or “Do I care if they have long-term interactive relationships versus one-off interactions?”

Because let’s get real: Many people use OnlyFans simply because they’re horny. Maybe that itself is enough for you to call it cheating. Maybe that’s part of what keeps your relationship fun. Either way, that’s a boundary for you to define.