Who hasn’t cheated? I have. So why do we mock the Coldplaygate couple?

Hands up, anyone who has never cheated in their life. At cards, on someone, whatever. Not many. Yeah, that checks out. Because we’re human. Born to stuff up.

My hand is down. I’ve been a cheater. The guilt I carried is gone, replaced by regret and gratitude that I learned a lot about the world and myself. And that I could absorb those lessons in private.

Then-chief executive of Astronomer, Andy Byron, and the company’s chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, at the Coldplay concert.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

It takes time to admit you did something shithouse. To work out what got you there, and no, the answer is rarely too many cocktails. That’s probably just the tipping point. You need to go deep, be super honest.

Which is why the global infamy of Jumbotrongate – the Astronomer colleagues Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot caught hugging on the big screen at a Coldplay concert – has made me reflect. Sure, and be briefly obsessed. I’m not nearly that good a person that I can’t relish a gotcha moment.

But what’s still bugging me a week later isn’t the alleged cheating or that a corporate guy is held to a higher standard of values than the US president.

It’s the fake statement attributed to Byron’s wife Megan that went viral. It channelled Xena: Warrior Princess crossed with Delta Goodrem energy. Along with a baffling reference to silk gloves, it declared, “I am not spiralling. I am ascending.”

Said nobody ever after learning their spouse took a side piece to hear Yellow live.

Still, it was shared everywhere by people with big followings and platforms.

“MEGAN for PRESIDENT,” yelled Business Chicks on Insta. MAFS relationship expert Mel Schilling now has 124,000 likes after pairing it with I Am Woman: “This is what reclaiming the narrative looks like. Megan Byron didn’t just respond, she led.”

Except Megan didn’t. She’s said nothing publicly at all. But by the time people worked out Megan didn’t write the statement, it had been turned into a blueprint for what strength looks like.

And that’s the bit I keep circling back to.

I live in real life, not on the Jumbotron. I’ve known men and women who’ve been betrayed. Along with being a love rat myself, I’ve woken, forever ago, to a boyfriend using his bedroom voice on the phone to someone else.

So I know what those early days feel like. You’re numb. Embarrassed. Furious. You think about crashing the car into a wall for dramatic effect, stop eating because you can control that.

So it must suck to go through that horror while the internet is posting made up hard ass speeches celebrating a version of strength which is that anyone who grieves and doesn’t walk away without flinching is weak.

It makes people like us, with mortgages and kids and shared passwords and dreams of a shared future, the ones who ponder at 3am what “for better, for worse” really means, feel like anything less is weakness.

If you want time or maybe even to stay, you’re not “reclaiming” anything or being – I shudder at this pointless word – “empowered”.

But what if the real Megan doesn’t want to be anyone’s president? What if she decides to stay and work through things, like Dave Grohl’s wife Jordyn did when he had a baby outside their marriage? What if she doesn’t want to ascend in soft hand coverings?

She deserves the right to do that. Or not. But most of all, to not have things she didn’t write become her story.

As one Schilling follower said of the fake statement, “Think how hurtful it would be for a woman to have words attributed to her … about a deeply personal situation, where the continual reposting of those words creates even more expectation of and pressure on her to react in a certain way.”

Jinkies, couldn’t have put it better.

People in busted relationships need time to work out if something new can be built from the wreckage. To sit in the shower, crying until they feel desiccated. To call their sister: “I have no idea what to do.”

They don’t need uninformed randoms calling them queen. They need friends who won’t judge if they get back together or key his car. Maybe both.

Kate Halfpenny is founder of Bad Mother Media. Her new book, Boogie Wonderland, is out now. Subscribers can buy a copy from Booktopia for the discounted price of $24.26 plus postage with the code WONDERLAND10. This offer is available until August 31.

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