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Infidelity

The couple sat in front of me, on my therapy couch. She was in tears. He was astonished. He could not understand why she was so upset. After all, he had not had sex with anyone. He had simply been caught chatting on WhatsApp with a woman he’d never met. He acknowledged that the chat was sexual in nature but said, ‘It’s not that I was having sex or anything.’ He became indignant, tired of reassuring his wife of his fidelity and commitment. She was not to be soothed.

AshleyMadison.com had come to my town, my country – South Africa – in July 2012. I did not know, then, that these kinds of conversations in my therapy room would consume me. That www.AshleyMadison.com would become my new home. At that moment, I was confused, playing King Solomon, trying to understand and be fair to both people. But my mind kept going around in its traditional circles. Is this infidelity? I asked myself. Why is she so upset? He’s right, no bodily fluids were exchanged. What’s the fuss? Yet her distress bothered me. It was a portent of the distress and the joy of cyber infidelity that I would come to witness over the next several months.

I was enraged when www.AshleyMadison.com launched in South Africa. The traditional me called Noel Biderman, founder of the company, on public radio and told him to take his site out of South Africa. I accused him of contributing to the increase of HIV/Aids and STIs in South Africa, a country that already has the highest number of infected people in the world due, primarily, to multiple concurrent partnerships.

But the members of www.AshleyMadison.com kept streaming into my therapy room. They were cyberchatting, cybersexing, then taking it offline. Women were happy and horny and men were devastated to discover their wives on the dating site. I sat up and listened, and realised I needed to set aside my judgements – which I could only do by becoming informed.

In December 2012, I placed my profile on www.AshleyMadison.com.

www.AshleyMadison.com was created in Canada on 13 February 2002. Founder Noel Biderman, known in the international press as the King of Infidelity, developed a new social network concept that is the second-fastest-growing in the world after Facebook. Currently, the site has 27 million users in 40 countries – including over 220 000 in South Africa. Its byline is ‘Life is short. Have an affair’. Globally, it is the largest online adult dating site for married people and single people who choose, open-eyed, to visit a site created specifically for married people to connect and communicate.

I slowly attenuated myself to this social media dating site. I was immediately struck by the honesty. The site is transparent: it is a vehicle for married or attached people to meet. That’s it. They push no other agenda. I felt grown up and responsible for my own choices. I liked the simplicity of the profile creation: age, location, height, weight, age, gender and ethnicity were easy to complete. I was honest – something commonly and deliberately avoided on regular online dating sites, as you will read. The ‘My limits’ status was interesting: I could choose ‘something short-term’; ‘something long-term’; ‘cyber affair/erotic chat’; ‘anything goes’; ‘whatever excites me’; or ‘undecided’.

Immediately, I knew I was not here to play chess but to play online. And unlike other dating sites, which never mention sexuality, this site puts it in your face and gets you to think about your sexuality. A long list of ‘preferences and encounters I am open to’ faced me, from ‘light kinky fun’ to ‘being watched/exhibitionism’. And then I had to expose ‘what really turns me on’, from a ‘sense of humour’ to a ‘muscular/fit body’, with much in between. I then created my ideal date, ranging from ‘travel’ to ‘skinny dipping’ and ‘long drives’. ‘Relationship status’ was an important consideration, as it would show my level of commitment. My choices were simple: ‘attached female seeking males’; ‘single female seeking males’; or ‘female seeking female’.

There was no tick box for ‘discreet’, which is the term used on regular dating sites and usually understood to mean that this person has other relationships – is possibly married or cohabiting, or has a significant other.1 In fact, one Canadian study estimated that 18% of people on dating sites are married; Friendfinder.com estimates that 48% of its service subscribers are married.2

I went in, eyes wide open. I knew upfront that most of the members were married/attached.

Cautiously and passively, I observed the messages coming in from men. They were married, mostly seeking NSA (no strings attached) sex. But, simultaneously, many were asking for more than sex. They wanted long drives, walks on the beach with someone special – traditional relationship stuff – but had no intention of upsetting their home lives. I was intrigued by the paradox.

I did not meet my match online. However, I fell in fascination with the process, and did not know why until Noel Biderman had an invitational conversation with me. We agreed that there was important opportunity for us to work together. We could bring a better understanding of cyber infidelity to the world. He offered me his database to use for my research to write this very book. I accepted gratefully and gleefully.

What a rich environment in which to conduct global research on cyber infidelity. Behind cyber infidelity is a person, a couple: a person who is emotionally and sexually unsatisfied, unhappy, revengeful or frustrated in his or her own marriage, and many couples who are happy in their marriages. So, this book is about you and your marriage or significant relationship. As a couple and sex therapist, I am at the coalface of your modern-day relationship: the confusion, distractions, paradoxes and sexuality. And the infidelities.

Perhaps you are questioning what marriage is all about – maybe more so now that you are feeling the seduction of the cyber world, whether through seeking friends on Facebook, WhatApping your gym instructor, or signing up on a dating site. I want you to know about your relationships, how happy you are with the agreements you made and oaths you took automatically about your commitment to the old-fashioned values of monogamy, sexual fidelity and commitment. And I want you to observe your fall down the rabbit hole of cyber infidelity.

I began to survey respondents from the database of www.AshleyMadison.com. I gathered stories from www.mycybersecret.com, a site I created specifically to gather your stories, my therapy room, the many people who responded to my Facebook and Twitter posts, and listeners from my weekly radio show on www.702.co.za and www.capetalk.co.za.

I bring you the fruits of my labour.

Anonymously, with a male profile and a female profile, I placed myself onto the site. As a 58-year-old female, I was single, curious, cheeky and open to ‘whatever excites me’. As a male, I was married 58-year-old and pushed myself as an ‘adventurer’ open to experimentation, with a definite sexual overtone. As you will see, creating a profile is vital to success on any online dating site. When it comes to a dating site such as www.AshleyMadison.com that is open about its intent, there is no need to lie about your own intention. So, for over 18 months I engaged in cyber flirting, cybersex, fell in cyberlove, sexted and even went offline to meet men so that I could have a full experience of what people were doing. Well, an almost full experience – I stopped before the bedroom door opened! (More about that as you read on.)

I crash-dived into the world of technology. I learnt words like ‘computer-mediated communication’ (CMC) and ‘electronic-based communication’ (EBC).3 This simply means communicating and chatting via your devices, and includes all of those text messages, e-mails, Skype calls, messages and snapshots you send and receive daily via the Internet using your computer, mobile devices such as iPads, and other technological devices. You have many of these devices: in the United States, 88% of adults have a mobile phone, 57% a laptop, 19% an e-reader and 19% a tablet computer.4 In fact, most of your CMC is done via your handset. In 2012, there were about six billion cellphone or smartphone subscriptions worldwide: about one in three people in the population have access to this kind of technology.5 Your mobile has become your primary device for sending text messages, instant messaging, checking e-mails and searching the web for news items and updates. For one in every four minutes you are on a social network site – mostly Google+, with Facebook second and Twitter following close behind.6

This is where you are playing, flirting, falling in and out of love, chatting, sexting and dreaming – with your partner and with other people. Of the nearly seven billion people in the world, just over two billion are online, a 484% increase over the last decade.7 Online dating is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. Online dating sites now earn about $2,1 billion a year in revenue in the USA. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, online matchmaking saw record growth.8

The temptation and drive, the curiosity to communicate with such a huge pool of people, makes us crazy. So crazy that one third of you is using social media to develop new relationships. Whether you are married or in another form of significant committed relationship, you are drawn by your need for intimacy, sexual satisfaction and distraction into this playground of plenty. The question I’ve asked is, what is cyber infidelity? And how, if at all, is it different from face-to-face infidelity?

Think about this: you are both in your early 20s, virgins on your wedding night. Sex is immature, amateur. Three years later, you discover that she has had an ‘emotional’ relationship with a colleague. She vows they did not have sex but you suspect that they did. A few months later, you push the fuck-it button and have a brief sexual fling with a colleague. I am sure everyone agrees that this can be defined as infidelity. There were ‘real’ people involved, and ‘real’ bodily fluids were exchanged.

Now consider this: you are attached, in a significant relationship or marriage, and you are on Facebook with a friend. The conversation turns from cyberchat to cybersex. You respond with much seat-wetting. You’re tweeting someone you admire or follow and the tone changes from friendly, to invitational and eventually to seductive. Bulge in your pants. You’re spending time watching porn and jerking off. You join www.AshleyMadison.com, a dating site for married people, because you feel emotionally neglected. Are you cheating?

Millions of people are using the very technology that you as a married or attached person are using in these situations to connect with people in intimate ways. From Facebook to WhatsApp to Twitter to dating sites and porn, technology is seducing you into new and interesting relationships and attachments. Many – yes, many – of these online connections are secretive. They may even be considered infidelity. Infidelity is breaching the principal oaths and vows of sexual fidelity, monogamy and commitment that you have taken. Practise this online and it’s called cyber infidelity.

The problem with cyber infidelity is that many of you do not consider it cheating – and thus end up badly hurt.

The discovery of any cheating forces a couple to reconsider their relationship. Somehow cyber infidelity takes this a step further. It is amorphous; it is so easy, accessible, affordable, anonymous to have cybersex, to engage in flirtation or sexting, or to send a Snapchat via technology. What is cyber infidelity and what do we do with it? Is it really cheating or merely recreational fun? Does it violate the fundamental values and principles upon which your marriage is based? Should you simply be flexible and incorporate this new form of relating into your modern marriage? In this cyber age, what do we really want out of intimacy and significant relationships?

This book serves to answer these questions. It reflects your online behaviour, and tells a new story of sexuality and relationships. Mostly, it serves to understand modern relationships and marriages. And it provides you with a new model of how to integrate your offline and online sexual, relational and emotional needs. It is a set of tools for managing your intimate online world without the pain and with only the many gains to your relationship.

Cyber infidelity is a natural outcome of the extraordinary numbers of people who are online and the huge numbers of people who feel dissatisfied, sexually unhappy and emotionally neglected in real life. Research in this area is limited and essential. I hope to enrich your understanding of modern relationships and how to manage your cyber infidelity when it seductively pops in.

Welcome to the newest seduction in town. Now, go ahead – read the cyber secrets whispered into my ear.