Generally speaking, someone else’s affair is none of my business.

Unless I’m involved in the affair or I’m the one being cheated on, philandering isn’t something I need brought to my attention, and if it is I tend to simply ignore it. I don’t know the nature of any of the relationships involved; that is to say, I don’t know if anyone’s actually cheating, or if someone in an open relationship is simply doing what people in open relationships do. There are few things as pathetic as jumping to the wrong self-righteous conclusion.

(This goes beyond apparent cheating. Your addiction is none of my business. Your diet is none of my business. Your cross-dressing is none of my business. Your OnlyFans side hustle is none of my business. That is not to say that I’m not going to be supportive of a loved one who is trying to beat an addiction, or stick to a diet, or perform burlesque. And it should go without saying that if anyone I know has an OnlyFans, I might wish to check it out. But I’m not going to shame anyone for any of these things, none of which is likely to do me any harm. There are situations that beg voluntary involvement from others, but these are not among them.)

I spend a lot of time on Reddit these days, and I frequently see posts in various subreddits – r/advice, for example – about what the poster should do upon finding out that someone they know is cheating on their partner. Whether it’s their boss cheating with their personal assistant, their next-door neighbor carrying on with the Amazon delivery person, or their favorite bank teller’s partner cheating with their kid’s Little League coach, the most-upvoted comment is usually along the lines of “Just do nothing”, and in my opinion it’s sound advice.

Look at it this way: You witness your co-worker having an apparently intimate conversation with another person. You jump to the conclusion that they are cheating on their spouse, and you inform said spouse of the perceived infidelity. The spouse tells you that the other person is your co-worker’s sibling, and what you interpreted as intimacy was one consoling the other over the loss of their parent, other sibling, or pet. What’s more, the spouse likely tells you to mind your own fucking business, and they definitely tell your co-worker that you’re the one who ratted them out. In what universe can anything good come of this?

Even if that’s not the case, even if your co-worker is actually having an extramarital romantic or sexual relationship, you probably don’t know the whole story. What if your co-worker’s spouse is (a) uninterested in sex and has given your co-worker permission to have sex with others as long as they never find out about it, or (b) terminally ill and the occasional meaningless dalliance is what your co-worker needs to be functional throughout this crisis? In either case, your interference will be unwelcome.

On the contrary, what if neither of those possibilities is true? What if your co-worker is just a cheating asshole? You might argue that in this case, your co-worker deserves to be exposed and thrown out of their house. After all, you are a person of high moral character and you’d never cheat on your partner. In this case, you’re just trying to maintain the balance, right? You’d never root for someone who’s loyal to their spouse to be punished, just cheaters. In this scenario, ask yourself what you’re hoping to gain from telling your co-worker’s spouse. Do you think the spouse is then going to have sex with you for revenge? It’s probably not going to happen, even if the spouse appreciates your sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. And either way, if your co-worker finds out about your involvement, they’re definitely going to try and get you fired.

Someone else’s affair is none of your business, unless the people having the affair make it your business. Which brings me to the case of Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know these people as the couple busted for having an affair a couple months ago when the Kiss Cam at a Coldplay concert at Boston’s Gillette Stadium caught them in an embrace. The two were executives at Astronomer, Inc., a software company; both resigned from their positions in the wake of the scandal. It was clear from their reactions to seeing themselves on an enormous screen – essentially behaving like two children caught pilfering cookies before dinner – that neither wanted their spouse to find out.

Indeed, Byron’s wife Megan issued a statement condemning his choices before filing for divorce; the closest things I could find to confirmation that Privateer Rum CEO Andrew Cabot had filed for divorce from Kristin Cabot were shady “news” websites, sensationalist YouTube videos from random accounts claiming to be “in the know”, and AI-generated Google search results, which read like someone re-learning to talk after a catastrophic brain injury. Whether or not Andrew Cabot has filed, the events at the Coldplay concert have left two families in upheaval.

Despite my insistence that somebody else’s affair is none of my business, why do I know all of this? Hell, why does most of the world know all of this to the extent that the incident has inspired more memes than anything in recent memory? Simply put, it’s because Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot unwittingly, carelessly made it our business.

I tried to ignore it, I really did. I saw a post on social media that I didn’t understand, featuring a picture of two people whose significance I didn’t know. Then I saw the picture again, with someone else’s commentary. And then someone else’s. Eventually I figured out what was going on, and by then it was actual news. Commentators, late-night hosts, and stand-up comedians were talking about it. My feeds were full of articles, thinkpieces, and that same picture with various people’s faces superimposed: Bowser and Princess Peach. Principal Skinner and Mrs. Krabappel. Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Michael Scott and Holly Flax. SpongeBob and Patrick. Trump and Epstein.

If I may address the philandering couple directly: What the fuck were you thinking? You’re carrying on an illicit affair in a public place, specifically an event venue with a seating capacity of almost 65,000 people. There are cameras everywhere, including in the hands of virtually everybody in attendance. You may have figured if Joe Blow TikTok records the entirety of “Yellow” and the two of you happen to be in frame, whatever; he’s one guy and he’s probably got fewer than thirty followers, and at any rate, the odds of him recording something more revealing than the backs of your heads are slim.

Actually, you probably didn’t give the possibility of appearing on Joe Blow TikTok’s camera any thought whatsoever, because if the thought of being recorded was on your mind at all, you would have known it was more likely to happen on Gillette Stadium’s “22,000 square-foot curved-radius high-definition videoboard”, the largest display of its kind in an outdoor venue in the United States and currently one of the six largest screens in the world. And that 60-foot-by-370-foot screen is less than half of 48,500 total square feet of screens throughout the stadium.

After the incident, it was reported that Andy Byron has threatened, if not formally made plans, to sue Coldplay for exposing the affair, citing “emotional distress” and “invasion of privacy”, claiming that he did not expect to be recorded at Gillette Stadium. Presumably his attorney brought him back to reality, because I’ve not come across any updates about this inane idea.

I would have assumed someone who’s found themselves the victim of a self-inflicted public humiliation might maintain a low profile in an attempt to weather the scandal without exacerbating the damage. But by immediately doubling down – denying his own culpability while at the same time attempting to shift blame to anybody he possibly can – Byron has only called more attention to himself. I find this confounding; he is – well, he was – the CEO of a corporation valued at $1.5 billion, not some YouTuber desperate to be noticed.

If that were the case, I might be able to understand what happened at the concert. If Byron and Cabot were just two wannabe influencers desperate for followers, I could see the Kiss Cam incident as some sort of stunt. Two nobodies feigning embarrassment, trying to hide their faces and duck out of sight when the camera is on them (while presumably wearing T-shirts and carrying signs with the name of their YouTube channel printed on them) seems like an inevitable conclusion.

Instead, it’s just perplexingly bad judgment by two professionals who might have survived this more or less unscathed had they played it cool on camera.