Is your wife or husband on Tinder?
snatched from their husband or wife’s iPad. Some find out through old-fashioned snooping — linking Apple IDs and MyTaxi accounts to shared devices has much to answer for — others through genuinely single friends who have made an awkward discovery. But one person’s cheating is another’s innocent chatting, so how far is too far? If your husband set up an account and chatted to a couple of people to prop up his ego, but never met up with them — is that grounds for divorce?
Kavanagh says an apparent rise in open relationships has made attached people on dating apps even more of a grey area. “We’re living in a very sexualised society,” he says, “and a society that doesn’t necessarily believe that marriage is for life. What happens then is that somebody tries to solve the problem of a dissatisfied sex life with an open relationship when really they should go to a sex therapist and look at ways to improve their sex life.”
Gurpreet Singh, a counsellor for Relate, says the common thread is loneliness.
“If there’s a gap in the relationship, that’s generally what leads to these sorts of things,” he says. “Somebody’s not feeling completely like they belong in a relationship, and instead of addressing what the problem is in the relationship, they will go outside it and explore their options, because it’s that much easier to do. Creating a profile takes minutes. To get a few responses takes minutes. Between motivation and action, there used to be such a long gap, but now, between motivation and action, there is 60 seconds.”
One app, Hinge, has recently introduced a function which allows users to give feedback on people they’ve met up with, meaning you could notify them if your date turned out to be married. But the “We Met” feature is the first of its kind — most apps have no means of sifting out people already in relationships, let alone a way to alert users that someone is posing as single.
It’s hard to imagine that beyond that initial ego boost, being chatted up online provides any real gratification, even for the loneliest of spouses. But as Mccinnes says: “Life is quite mundane at times and this is just not real life at all” — and that, surely, is all part of the appeal.