I had a colleague at an old job who got divorced right as online dating was really taking off. He dug it. He wasn’t looking for love so much as he was looking for it, and if what he told me was even half true, he did just fine.
Do I remember that there’s a service especially for cheaters? Yes, because I remember the stink about their Super Bowl commercials being refused. Didn’t take much Binging to determine I was thinking of AshleyMadison.com. Hmmm. Maybe it’s a good night for a little sociocultural research.
Now Lea knows I’m not going to cheat on her, but it still seemed prudent to avoid the possibility of her accidentally looking over my shoulder without explaining my motivations first. So after I did that, I created an account (mostly telling the demographic truth about myself to get an accurate feel, but I deleted myself, so don’t go looking for me) and looked around for 20 minutes or so.
Welcome to the online wonderland of systematic infidelity!
Perhaps a third of the listings I saw were overtly sexual. Interestingly, probably a third of those were single women looking for married men. That’s an extra-depressing bit in an already depressing world.
I guess most of the rest were what I expected—wives looking for boyfriends. Some of their listings offered some possible insight into what was missing in their marriages.
Now AshleyMadison.com’s take on this whole thing is that they’re not encouraging cheating any more than the omnipresence of glassware encourages alcoholism. Cheaters gonna cheat whether they’re there or not, they say.
I think that’s true, but somewhat trivially so. I don’t think the analogy is very good. There is definitely a powerful sense of community about the whole thing. “We’re in this together”/”We both have something to lose” was evident in several listings, and I think there’s a legitimizing factor there that’s hard to quantify, yet still undeniable.
I sure do wish it was as cool to try to save your marriage as it is to have an affair.
You might also like:
- Hackers threaten release of extensive user data from #adultery site #AshleyMadison.com
I know bunches of people who have cheated on their spouses. You do too. You know how I know that? Be… - “AshleyMadison.com guarantees you will sleep with a married woman.”
Longtime readers may recall I did a little social exploring on AshleyMadison.com a while back. Ashle… - Playing the field, or not
As much as I love women, which is a lot, I was never any good at dating more than one at once. I can… - Tell yourself rejection is her problem
I love women. I mean, I really love women. Always have. I never “hated girls” even in grade school. … - #AshleyMadison business model: Men paying to talk to women (maybe)
I’d call the AshleyMadison.com debacle a train wreck, but that’s not enough. It’s like a train carry…