Imagine you open your Instagram DMs to find a nude from a complete stranger. Do you ignore it and never respond, or do you take the chance to sext with a random person — despite being in a relationship? What if, as you later discovered, it was all a test, conducted by your partner to see if you’d be unfaithful?
This seems to be the case for a growing number of women whose partners aren’t concerned with whether they’re actually cheating, but whether they hypothetically would. And while most people might leave this anxiety to themselves — or maybe talk it out with a therapist or their partner — there are some for whom the only solution is to “test” their partner’s loyalty directly, often through the services offered on subreddits like r/LoyaltyTesters and r/TestMyWifeGF.
On these forums, suspicious boyfriends and husbands present their girlfriend or wife’s contact information and photos for eager “testers,” who will nonchalantly approach said partner somewhere on the internet and attempt to lure them into sexting. Conversely, testers will offer up their services on the subreddit hoping to find someone looking to have their partner be tested. “Testing now — moms, wives, girlfriends, friends, aunts and sisters all love my 9.5-inch BBC, and I’ll prove it! DM me now,” one recent post on r/TestMyWifeGF states. The author then goes on to ask for the Instagram accounts or phone numbers of women, claiming that he’s had success getting women to chat by “accidentally” sending them pictures of his cock. He adds that he’s only interested in talking with real women, not men role-playing as their own sister or mother.
As this poster’s mention of “real women” and “role-playing” suggests, much of the subreddit is quite horny. Rather than an actual test of a partner’s loyalty, they’re often meeting grounds for men to roleplay with each other, with one pretending to be a well-hung “bull” and the other a cheating woman.
That said, another-NSFWburner, a moderator for r/TestMyWifeGF, says some tests are quite real. “From what I’ve seen and been told, there indeed are some legitimate interactions going on,” he tells me. “I’ve also seen cases where catfishing tactics have been used to unfortunately lure people into sending sexually explicit photos.” He does estimate, though, that about 60 percent of the subreddit’s members are simply role-playing.
As for how often people use the subreddit to authentically check their partners for infidelity, he’s unsure. Even among that 40 percent he estimates are real people, many might be participating in the subreddit as a means of exploring cuckold relationships or some other interest with their partner’s consent. “I haven’t been made aware of any breakups occurring,” he says. “Honestly, that’s one of the last things I want to happen. As someone who’s been personally cheated on in the past, I can sympathize with those looking to see if their spouse/partner is unfaithful, and that’s one of the main reasons I accepted the offer to be a moderator. I never envisioned this subreddit as anything malicious, but unfortunately some people have taken advantage of the system.”
By that, he’s referring to how some may not simply just pretend to be someone’s boyfriend or a bull, but do so in order to blackmail the target. “I’ve been told about users offering to ‘test’ someone who use that opportunity to sexually exploit the ‘target’ for their own personal gain,” he continues. “It’s extremely sad, and something I don’t condone, but it seems like there’s people all around us who are willing to take advantage of others.”
As the “bull” from the above post mentioned, there are people offering up the information of actual women they know but may not be dating — potentially their own family members, too. In these cases, the goal isn’t necessarily to gauge their loyalty, but to catch them in a sexual context. “Another mom added to the list of fails!” one post reads. “Want to find out how any women in your life react?” Included is a screenshot of a Snapchat conversation with a user’s mom, who appears to have saved the random dick pic she received.
another-NSFWburner bans any users he catches blackmailing people or otherwise manipulating the subreddit, but as the only active moderator (a role that’s essentially just a hobby), it can be challenging to stay on top of it all. But still, his hope is that some positivity comes out of the group in cases where someone “passes” these loyalty tests. Every now and then, some people post screenshots of passed tests, mostly in the form of texts or DMs from women who reject men’s advances and say they have boyfriends or partners.
FWIW: It seems unlikely that having a stranger send your partner a dick pic is all that accurate of a gauge of infidelity. It’s not even a promising way of getting someone to sext — women receive and ignore unsolicited dick pics all the time. Thus, loyalty testers present a particularly uninformed view of cheating, a complicated, nuanced event that rarely occurs simply because someone received a random photo of a “9.5-inch BBC.” A much more effective “test” would be for these men to communicate directly with their partners, but it’s clear that for some, sneakiness is part of the appeal.
All of this points to the mixed pool of feelings around cheating and the eroticism that comes with it. In many cases, it appears as though men want their girlfriends to digitally cheat on them, even if it’s all just role-playing. But like the subreddit r/Cuckik, where cucks serve up their partners to bulls without their knowledge, there seems to be some less-than-honest intentions about the community. Sure, maybe it’s just a group of men looking to test the loyalty of the women in their lives — but what does it say about these men in the first place?
At least in terms of their relationships, that’s a test they’d probably fail.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
