Cyber Infidelity: The New Seduction

By Dr Eve

Infidelity has always posed one of the worst threats to relationships. But today, our digital prowess has led to a disturbing and as yet little understood new form of infidelity: cyber infidelity. In this book, renowned sexologist Dr Eve takes the first in-depth look at this new form of deception: people who deliberately communicate in secret through texts, chats, e-mails and dating sites, even though they are in a close real-life relationship. Based on her groundbreaking research using the database of the international dating site ashleymadison.com, Dr Eve exposes this new seduction and the sometimes shocking impact of anonymous and affordable connection on modern-day marriages and relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780798168540

Dr Eve

Marlene Wasserman - Dr Eve - is an experienced clinical sexologist and couple and sex therapist in private practice. She specialises in sexual medicine and forensic sexology and has a special interest in onco-sexology. The majority of her time is spent in her therapy room with couples - and individuals - on her couch. She teaches sexual medicine at the medical school of the University of Cape Town and regularly presents papers at international scientific meetings. She is a member of both the executive board and the Sexual Rights Committee of the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), and a temporary adviser to the World Health Association (WHO). An award-winning writer, she has columns in many South African magazines such as Natural Medicine, Longevity, Psychologies, Sarie and Playboy. She also writes on request for many international and national magazines and newspapers, and has published in a number of academic journals. Even her bedtime reading revolves about her job: the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Her previous books include Dr Eve's Sex Book: A Guide for Young People.

Book preview

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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.

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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.

Courtship, casual sex and marriage

From pigeons to profiles: A history of courtship

Since Noah released a pigeon from the Ark to see if the flood was over, pigeons have been glorified as messengers of important epistles: including love letters, both licit and illicit. Long distances, protective fathers and men out hunting in dangerous conditions for long periods created a hunger for love messages. Talking about love, romantic customs, dating rituals and tokens of love all form part of courtship. People have found ways to communicate love and sexual feelings to each other, be it by pigeon, messenger, airmail letter, telegraph or fax. Historically, people have always wooed and courted each other with words and language.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) continues this tradition but, uniquely, changes the dance of courtship and intimacy by providing a large, instantly accessible group of people available in an environment which, as you will see, enhances and speeds up the process of intimacy, making it faster than the fastest pigeon can fly.⁹ Courtship is a necessary part of mating. Ask any primate, who will tell you of their love for grooming, caressing, hitting, licking or biting a potential sexual partner. You will hear them screaming, grinding their teeth or barking to capture attention. You will see them staring, raising their tail and exposing their bright red bottoms, and even expelling a strong smell, to get the attention of a sexual partner. People on online dating sites do this with well-considered descriptive words, reflective profiles, selfies and Snapchat. As Albright so charmingly states, ‘[w]hen the subtle power, instant gratification and almost universal wish to be found interesting, attractive and desirable come together’,¹⁰ relationships accelerate – and there is nothing as accelerated as the Internet. This is the power of courting online.

On the African savanna, men and women roamed equally, courting each other and many others to gather seed and semen. As man civilised himself into larger communities, villages, towns and cities, however, his courtship behaviour towards women became more uncivilised.

In ancient times, mating consisted of men capturing non-consenting women as spoils of war. The Middle Ages saw the ritual and rule of arranged marriages – business relationships in which voiceless women were forced into fusions that strategically improved families’ property, monetary or political alliances. And here begins our first taste of formally recognised system of infidelity: the romance, rules and art of courtly love allowed knights and ladies to show their admiration regardless of their marital status. In medieval times, love became important; since you did not get it inside an arranged marriage, it was acceptable to get it outside marriage. Here’s the kicker: as long as the rules of fidelity and chastity were observed,¹¹ a separation between love and sex was formally given the nod. Love was deified, forcing people into secret sexual activities – infidelity.

Technology has robbed me of any romantic notions I may have had of this courtly love period in history. In the brilliantly produced television series Game of Thrones,¹² blood, sex, scandal and infidelity reflect a violent society that Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of our Nature,¹³ believes will never again rear its ugly head.

Then the courtship rules changed again. The Victorian era romanticised love and made it a primary requirement for marriage. Courting became more public and formal. Courtship involved ‘one man and one woman spending intentional time together to get to know each other with the expressed purpose of evaluating the other as a potential husband or wife’.¹⁴ Those were the days in which your world consisted of a small community with limited choices of suitors and maidens. No one even vaguely considered same-sex courting – oh dear, pass me the smelling salts! You were courted in your own home by a man who lived across the road from you under the watchful eyes of Mom and brothers. No one could imagine a World Wide Web in which you had personal agency within the privacy of your bedroom, office, or local hangout, dressed or undressed, to choose your own partner from a virtual community of billions of people across the globe.

Burzumato describes four cultural forces that assisted in moving mate selection to a courtship system that includes ‘the date’.¹⁵ Firstly, as discussed, courtship moved from public acts in private spaces to private or individual acts conducted in public spaces – from gaining parents’ permission to sit on the porch with you, to taking you out to dinner and a movie, for example. And perhaps a cuddle in the back seat of the car. The car revolutionised dating, being a small space, private and intimate, filled with possibilities. Now, it is the Internet that has revolutionised courtship and dating. All you require is a profile and a mobile device or computer: man and machine meeting and making out in the car, workspace and marital bed.

Dating was normalised as the conduit for courtship. Technically, dating is when two people deliberate and consensually agree to meet socially and publicly to engage in a social activity. The intention is more than friendship. It provides a real-life, face-to-face opportunity to market yourself, and to assess each other’s suitability as a long- or short-term partner. Back in the day, you went on a date as your mother made you or you were flattered by his attention – or, first prize, because you were really aroused and interested in who he or she may be. Social media has short-circuited this: by the time the date happens, you know an awful lot about this person. I know that before you go on an In Real Life date you Google the person – or are you a Google-abstinent dater?¹⁶

Burzumato’s second cultural force – namely, the early-20th-century rise of the ‘agony aunt’ giving advice about dating and courtship – stereotyped dating rules. This ‘higher authority’ determined what was ‘normal’ for you. It was ‘normal’ for the man to invite the woman on a date, to plan it and to pay for it. The inverse was not contemplated, continuing the belief that women needed to be wooed and seduced and men needed to hunt them down.

In 1994, I entered the world as an agony aunt as Dr Eve, and changed this script. Maybe it was my training at the Institute of Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, my feminist agenda or my own liberal upbringing that disallowed me to consider these dating rules to be normative. Mostly, it was the many people who wrote to me, who taught me their dating needs: an open environment in which fun, respect, consent and equality prevailed. And sex. My new dating suggestions were inclusive of the woman wanting to have sex on the first date. Withhold sexist stereotypes and judgements – your responsibility is to ensure there is a condom handy, I advised.

From the original religious script dictating rigid courtship patterns to the familial script, the dating script that has grabbed people’s attention the most, and that continues to hold it until this day, is the media script. Think Kardashians and you get the picture! According to this script, dating happens in public forums. We receive these courtship messages passively via reality shows. We really believe that the way to find a partner is to be accepted on to The Bachelor or The Bachelorette.

The third major influence on courtship was the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Why should a man marry you if he could be sexual with a woman without the commitment? In addition, the oral contraceptive arrived in the late 1960s, concretising the idea of free sex for everyone and, most importantly, separating forever the joined-at-the-hip team of reproduction and marriage. With free love available, there was no need for private spaces as courting once again became proudly public. Women liberally invited men or women on dates and paid for themselves – then took them home for a pregnancy-free condom-covered sexual experience.

Finally, in the late 20th century, the influence of capitalism crept into our courtship language and dating behaviour. Words like ‘competition’, ‘scarcity’ and ‘abundance’ were used in private spaces. Courting became a marketplace: men and women had a price on their heads and were up for sale to the highest bidder. We began to become commodified.

I felt this most strongly standing at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, a well-known, high-class bar that serves expensive drinks and attracts single, corporate women wearing black and heels and men in Wall Street suits, who stop over on their way home to the domesticity of Long Island, the wife and a couple of kids. The most I got was a once-over glance, a ‘Hi, how are you?’ as each man standing in front of me gazed around the room, seeking greener pastures and, with an easy rhythm that seemed acceptable in this community, moved on to the next woman – who greeted him as if she were working on an assembly line. Who’s next? I remember thinking, There have to be easier, more dignified ways of meeting men in New York City.

I went online. It was 2010.

Online dating sites have been around since the early 1990s, reflecting our natural inclination to connect – an inclination that both married and single people display. In 1999, 2% of American singles had used some form of online personal services. By 2002, 25% of singles had used Internet dating services. By 2008, Internet dating was a $1 billion industry.¹⁷ Technology has, indeed, improved – but, as you will see, it is the de-stigmatising of online dating that has contributed to its massive uptake as a primary form of mating and courting.

Remember those early bulletin boards and forums for singles? When I launched my first website in 1995, I realised that people did not want to chat about my posts; rather, they wanted to chat and flirt with each other. I followed the massive success of America Online and offered chat rooms.

Match.com was born in 1994. Perhaps it will surprise you to know that despite the founding of Facebook in 2004, Americans spent over $500 million on online dating in 2007, making it the second-largest industry for paid content on the web, next to pornography.¹⁸

By the time I signed up for my online dating adventure, eHarmony had created algorithms to promise you a perfect match. I created a profile on a dating site for single people. This profile is pivotal to dating and future courtship success. I was the pigeon carrying my own message to a million strangers. I found it laborious, boring, dishonest, and wondered why I or anyone else would spend so many hours having superficial chats when, actually, I wanted to meet as soon as possible and do a real-life check.

It seems many others felt the same. But, as you know, it took many more hours of trite (and sometimes meaningful) online chats before IRL (In Real Life) became even more possible via a new form of technology.

In 2012, the world of mobile online dating applications was born with Grindr and Tinder leading the pack. As you will read, this has changed the face of dating. You may still long to meet a real-life person at a real-life party. Chances are that the party is in your own lounge, and consists of you and a group of friends giggling