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.
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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.