I came across a post that made headlines on TikTok that stopped me mid-scroll. It was a post about a man being loyal to his girl despite another dancing suggestively in front of him in a restaurant. I think it’s part of the restaurant’s charm that these women entertain the customers. The man just wears a frown on his face and doesn’t even look her way. So, I went in the comments to see if someone else would share the same thoughts as me and while it was hard to find, I saw one and she wrote,
“It’s sad that a man goes viral for being loyal. Society really normalized cheating.” And beneath it, another person added, “Being loyal should be automatic.”
Those two lines carried more heavy truth than most think pieces I’ve seen all week.
It’s pathetic that we now live in a world where loyalty, something that should be the foundation of any relationship, has somehow become rare enough to be newsworthy. A man stays faithful to his partner and suddenly he’s trending, praised, applauded and put on a pedestal like he discovered a new planet. But shouldn’t loyalty be the bare minimum? Like shouldn’t it be the default setting, not a personality trait worth a trophy?
I knew we were done for when somewhere along the line, society started treating cheating as an inevitable part of relationships with all the men will always cheat/ women and everybody else cheat too, nonsense. These sentences are thrown around casually, like we’re talking about the weather. And because we repeat them so often, they’ve become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
We’ve lowered the bar so much that faithfulness is now seen as exceptional instead of expected.
The truth which we all know deep down is that loyalty isn’t supposed to be rare and it absolutely isn’t supposed to be shocking nor should it get the stage of being a plot twist. This is something that is supposed to be the natural result of choosing someone and choosing them again every day, especially when no one’s watching.
Why have we collectively let the standard fall this low?
At this point , I think it’s because so many people have witnessed betrayal that they’ve accepted it as normal. I may also blame pop culture because it helped in glamorizing infidelity. Or it could be fear, trauma, or the belief that everyone does it anyway. It could also be because being loyal requires discipline, emotional maturity, empathy, name them, things the world seems increasingly short of.
But imagine a world where loyalty is no longer a trending topic because it’s simply what people do. Just imagine relationships where trust isn’t something to be earned back after damage, but something that never gets broken in the first place, a world where being a good partner isn’t headline-worthy but it is expected. Well, that's not unrealistic. It’s just something we need to work our way back to.