Is it cheating?

People ask this hoping for a ruling, and there is not one available. What there is instead is a set of questions that will give you an honest answer in about ten minutes, most of which you already know.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

It depends entirely on what you and your partner have agreed, and that includes the parts you never said out loud. There is no category into which spanking falls that settles the question in advance, which is unhelpful but true.

I am not going to wave this away. It is a serious question, people arrive at it in real distress, and the honest answer takes a bit more work than a yes or a no.

The question is about the agreement, not the activity

Couples run on understandings, and most of those understandings were never negotiated. Nobody sits down in year one and specifies whether being bent over a stranger's sofa in Zone 3 counts. It sits inside a broader shared sense of what is yours together and what is not.

So the useful question is not "does spanking count as sex". It is "does this fall inside or outside what we both believe we promised each other". You almost certainly know the answer to that, and the reason the question feels hard is usually that you know it and do not like it.

Four tests that produce an honest answer

Would you tell them, tonight, without being asked?

Not whether you should. Whether you would. If the answer is no, you already believe it is outside the agreement.

Are you managing information?

Deleted messages, a second app, a story about where you were, cash instead of card, changing when you shower. Every one of those is effort spent on concealment, and concealment is a judgement you have already made.

How would you feel if they had done it?

Run the same evening with the roles swapped. People are remarkably good at this test and remarkably quick at it.

What would they say the deal was?

Not what you could argue in front of a jury. What they would say, in their own words, if a friend asked them.

The "it was not sexual" defence

For a great many people this is genuinely true. Spanking can be about structure, release, ritual or headspace with no sexual content at all, and the does it have to be sexual page covers why. I have had sessions that were closer to a difficult massage than to anything else.

The trouble is that it usually answers a question the other person is not asking. What most partners are upset about is that you were undressed and vulnerable with somebody, that you shared something you did not share with them, and that they did not know. None of that is affected by whether anything sexual occurred.

Which is not to say the distinction is worthless. It matters for many couples and it is the difference between a boundary they can live with and one they cannot. It is just not a defence that works on its own, and leading with it tends to land as a technicality.

The things people forget also count

Online and long distance arrangements sit in exactly the same territory. A daily reporting dynamic with somebody across the country, a weekly video call, a set of rules you follow for another person, all of that can be more intimate than a one-off session and is often held to be worse when it comes out, because of the sustained deception rather than the acts. See long distance dynamics.

Professional sessions occupy their own space and couples differ wildly on them. Some treat a professional as categorically different, in the same way they might a massage. Others do not. Neither position is wrong and you cannot assume yours is shared.

If you have already done it

Decide whether you are telling them, and decide it for the right reason. Confessing to make yourself feel better, while handing them a problem they then have to manage, is a common and fairly selfish move. Telling them because they have a right to know what relationship they are actually in is a different thing.

If you do tell them, tell them the shape of it rather than the details. People ask for details in the first hour and it rarely helps them. And do not do it in the middle of an argument, or on a night either of you has to be somewhere afterwards.

If you are not going to tell them, be honest with yourself that you have made a choice with a cost, rather than pretending the question is unresolved. Sitting in permanent ambiguity is its own slow damage.

The version worth avoiding altogether

Most of the people I have known in this position are not serial deceivers. They are people who worked out something about themselves at forty, had no idea how to raise it, and ended up somewhere they did not plan to be. The route out is the conversation they have been avoiding, which is genuinely frightening and generally goes better than expected. See asking your partner and should I tell my partner.