In other words, each one of you is vulnerable to CI, despite the risks. As Ze’ev states, ‘online relationships seem to be the first real alternative to face-to-face relationships’.68 A radical idea, but one that reflects your modern-day need – you want to stay married, but you also want to feed your fantasies, stimulate your imagination and interact with someone in real time. The intimacy is salaciously seductive. Your mantra is, ‘I’m unhappy/we fight a lot/he treats me badly/he cheated so I’m going to have an affair’. Having an affair has become the fall-back position, the solution to conflict or unhappiness in a relationship. Before the Internet, people would turn to each other and work it out – or get divorced. Now, they externalise and seek comfort and short-term healing via CI.
Let me give you evidence for why I think you are inevitably going to go online and break some kind of traditional sacred vow that you took when you married, and committed to, one partner. I invite you to answer these questions, which I asked respondents on AM.
•What is the length of your current primary relationship or marriage?
•I am happy when I spend time with my primary partner or spouse.
•I have no emotional connection to my primary partner or spouse.
•I am considering divorce or separation from my primary partner or spouse.
Length of real-life relationship
Length of marriage plays a significant role in your relationship satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The longer your marriage, the more likely that you will be vulnerable to CI. Makes sense, right? You lose attraction; familiarity makes the marriage feel like living with a family member rather than with a lover; sexual activity drops in frequency; and intimate conversation comes down to, ‘Who’s collecting the kids today?’
The majority of male respondents on this AM survey were married. Most of the 18–24-year-olds across all countries were single and those in relationships had been together for one to five years. These digital natives use technology as social interaction, information, entertainment, social escapism, diversion and the potential to change one’s mood.69 They are not online to have a revenge affair or to escape from an unhappy hook-up. They simply live on social media; signing up to a site for married people is not a guilt-provoking, let-me-don-ashes-and-cloth affair. They really don’t see this as infidelity. So, seeking an online affair is, as you will see, less driven by unhappy current relationships than by the pursuit of NSA, variety, curiosity and the desire to experiment sexually. Whether the women these men seek are married makes not an ounce of difference.
My respondents prove that the longer you have been married, the more vulnerable you are to CI. In South Africa, the majority of male respondents were in the age group of 35–44, followed by 55+; in the USA, the majority were in the 55+ age group, followed by 45–54; and in Australia, the majority were 45–54-year-olds, followed by the 35–45 group, and then the 55+ group. The same trend was reflected in Canada, where the majority of respondents were between the ages of 45 and 54, followed equally by the 35–44 group and the 55+ group. In the UK, 45–54-year-olds led the pack, followed by respondents aged 55 and older.
Are married and committed women on AM there because of long relationships? The majority – 37,4% – had been married for two to five years, followed by 28,9% who had been in relationships for six to 10 years; 16,5% had been in relationships for up to one year, and 17,2% for ten years or longer. Women are not committing CI because of the longevity of their marriages but because they can, because they want sex – not just any kind of sex, but satisfying sex.
Women are turning to the web to find a sexual partner. We have to credit Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines for empowering and liberating women so much that today a woman wants to become the vixen, the how-to-get-the-best-oral-sex-ever kind of girl. I openly dislike the manner in which these magazines choose to do this, however, and the subsequent pressure they place on women to perform at unrealistic levels. Feminism and sexual rights discourse have left women, globally, in a position to hold up their heads and say, ‘I love sex and I’m entitled to enjoy it.’ As women get older, they become less timid about owning their right to sexual pleasure. With their shyness out of the door, women use the Internet to hunt for partners for their play and pleasure. If a woman’s primary relationship disappoints her, she, like her male partner, is going to look for someone else.70 As you will see in Chapter 9, this woman wants sex: pure, raw, real-life sex, not the ‘emotional’ relationships that women have been bracketed into needing and wanting. The Internet is a never-ending surprise package!
Happy spending time with my partner
Are you happy when you spend time with your primary partner? As you can see, almost every man I surveyed is – across all ages and countries, married men on an adult infidelity site are happy to do this. The enjoyment dips slightly in older men; it’s that old familiarity kicking in. We have established that these men are more vulnerable to CI due to this.
I asked South African women on AM the same question: 52,6% said they are happy, even extremely happy, when spending time with their partners. Why, then, are they on AM? If you’ve answered yes to the question of whether you are happy spending time with your partner, why are you committing CI?
Let’s take this a step further to try to answer this question. As you understand, CI is about the emotional intimacy you develop through various behaviours such as sexting, cyberflirting, cyberchattting and cyberdating. I asked men and women on AM if they have an emotional connection with their primary partner. I reckoned that if I found flaws here, it would help me to understand the drive towards CI and people’s vulnerability to it. Look what turned up.
My emotional connection with my partner
All of these men, across all ages and countries, felt emotionally connected to their significant partners! They vehemently