Is Messaging On OnlyFans Cheating? 'Too Hot To Handle' Star Carly Lawrence Weighs In

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"Dear Brooke, Is OnlyFans cheating? I (21 female) and my boyfriend (23 male) have been together for almost three years. I caught him on OnlyFans — and he'd been paying for over 10 different girls' p*rn and talking to them over OnlyFans. He said he didn't realize it was cheating at first, he thought it was the same as paying for premium p*rn. When he realized what he was doing was wrong, he stopped months before I even knew. His last opened messages confirm this. He acknowledges what he did was wrong, I just don't know how to feel. Would you consider this cheating?"

Brooke Houghton | Narcity

OUCH! This whole situation is a doozy and a half. Right off the bat, I wouldn't call this cheating, but I would call it as close as you can get to cheating under the guise of miscommunication.

When it comes to relationships, it's easy to assume that monogamy (or exclusivity for all you romantics in weird situationships) just means don't sleep with anyone else, but it's not always so black and white.

I have friends who consider just watching porn cheating, while others wouldn't blink if they caught their partner indulging in some me-time.

But the age-old question, "Is porn cheating?" is one couples have been asking themselves since the dawn of PornHub and Playboy.

With OnlyFans, your partner may not only have a favourite porn star – they may actually have an online relationship with them, too. Where, at the least, they're pen-pals, and at the most, they are asking them for oddly specific feet pics.

(For anyone living under a rock, OnlyFans is a platform where users can post explicit content and fans can subscribe to their pages, direct message them, and send personalized requests.)

Whether or not you consider messaging creators on OnlyFans as cheating comes down to the rules of your relationship, but if you're feeling jilted and they're feeling guilty, it sounds like an unspoken rule or assumed line may have been crossed.

To help shine some light on this sticky situation, I asked Carly Lawrence, who you may know from Too Hot To Handle or her own OnlyFans account, for her opinion.

Would you be okay with your partner messaging or subscribing to other creators on OnlyFans?

"If I had a boyfriend that was going and messaging girls? Yeah, I probably would hate it," she said. "If I really came down to it. I would not like it, because I find OnlyFans more of a person — which is crazy because porn is still people, too. But when you're really messaging someone and talking to them day in and day out, that's a little bit more than when you're just going on and clicking the first top-rated porn on PornHub.

"You know, you're really going to find that girl. Subscribe to that message. Plus another thing is each message that is sent with a photo has a caption, so the guy knows what he's unlocking.Whereas with porn, sometimes you just click on it, and you don’t know. OnlyFans is a little bit more, you know what’s going on, you know what you’re paying for."

When you're chatting with fans do they disclose their relationship status?

"I don't know how many men have girlfriends," Lawrence said. "Like, I don't necessarily always ask, and maybe I just don't really care to know because, at the end of the day, it is like a business for me. So it's not really my business or personal life. But if he does feel guilty about it, like that's kind of a bit weird, but also maybe he just actually cares about his girlfriend's feelings, which is rare as well, because most men would say, 'F*ck you, I'm going to do what I want to do.' So maybe it's nice that he's taking into account her feelings."

How much money do you think he spent chatting with 10 girls?

"Well, and that's another thing too because if a girl doesn't have an open profile, and it's a paid subscription, he's paying for 10 girls' subscriptions," Lawrence said.

What would you do in her shoes?

"I wouldn't necessarily leave a relationship right away because I think mistakes can happen," Lawrence said. "Especially she said that she was 21. And he's 23. They're young. They're also new to the OnlyFans world. I think most people are. It hasn't been around that long. So it's definitely going to be a tricky thing to do.

"But I would say the best thing to do is if it really bugs, you talk about it, which you should talk about it anyways. And ask what made him kind of want to. Is she maybe not fulfilling something sexually for him because he maybe has a really high sex drive, and he doesn't want to necessarily bug her with that because maybe he feels like – and I'm not taking any side. I mean, [maybe] he feels like I wanna have sex all the time, and I don't want to put this on my girlfriend. So I'm gonna go and beat off somewhere else and beat off to someone, and it doesn't matter, and then go home to the person I really love.

"So maybe just talk about it, and see why he's doing it? Am I not fulfilling a need? Is our sex something that we need to work on? And kind of go from there and then see how the conversation goes. But her asking if she can feel bad about it. It's normal to feel bad about it."

What advice do you have for her if she can't get over her hurt feelings?

"If I couldn't get over something, I would probably just leave. Because also she is young," Lawrence said. "She hasn't been dating him extremely long. And if there are red flags too early on, it's a good indicator that red flags will happen later on. That's how I look at it. I've been in relationships where they started off really bad, and they never got better."

Cheap Advice

After chatting with Lawrence about the world of OnlyFans, I think you need to have a candid conversation with your boyfriend about what was going down in the DMs and what cheating means to both of you in your relationship.

If you really love this person and believe it was an oversight in judgment, and that he stopped and came clean once he realized he crossed a line, I would draw that line deeply in the sand and try to move forward.

And if after you have an open heart to heart where you spill all your kinks, concerns, and feelings, and it happens again, you'll know what to call it.

In your heart, if you already feel like this was cheating and can get over it without harbouring any ugly feelings, it's also okay to move on.

In the words of the wise Carly Lawrence, "If there are red flags too early on, it's a good indicator that red flags will happen later on."

But then again, I'm no therapist.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Narcity Media.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Cheaper Than Therapy is a spicy new column and video series hosted by Brooke Houghton where readers can share their own anonymous questions and get expert advice for free. Brooke speaks from her own experiences as a single 20-something woman in Toronto and brings on expert guests from therapists to celebrities to help solve your relationship, sex and love issues. So if you can’t afford therapy from an actual professional, ask her a question here and tune in next month for another episode of Cheaper Than Therapy.