When online chats cross the line, help is at hand
CYBER infidelity changed Marlene Wasserman’s life. Cyber infidelity, as you might easily assume, is having an online affair. But wait, there is more. It’s not just about sex — real or “virtual” — writes Wasserman in her fascinating new book, Cyber Infidelity: The New Seduction.
“It doesn’t have to be sex,” she says in an interview with Business Day. “Don’t be distracted by the sex of it.” And therein lies the … um, rub. Wasserman’s research shows that the easy accessibility, the anonymity and the ubiquitous availability of being online means that it is all too easy to fall into betraying your spouse online, even without meaning to.
It’s as easy as a few clicks. You go online and start chatting about books, next thing innuendos pop into the conversation. You feel flattered. Who wouldn’t? Before you know it, you are revealing things about yourself you hardly knew, let alone told your spouse. When they find out, they are hurt and betrayed; you are confused. That, Wasserman says, is all too often how it goes.
Wasserman began her foraging in the folds of fidelity in 2012 when AshleyMadison launched in SA. The website describes itself as “the online personals and dating destination for casual encounters, married dating, discreet encounters and extramarital affairs”.
Her research and the publication of Cyber Infidelity: The New Seduction, thrust an international academic career into a higher gear. The book is being reviewed by several international organisations and she is to extend her global speaking with an address at the first Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies Conference in Lisbon next month.
“I created the term,” says Wasserman of “cyber infidelity”. “I didn’t want cheating, it’s too pejorative…. There is a gap. No one else is looking at cyber infidelity as a relationship form, a way of relating.”
WAsserman, who bravely filled in profiles on sites such as AshleyMadison to glean much of her insight into cyber infidelity, was fascinated by what she found. She has made the study of human sexuality her life’s work. With a doctorate in human sexuality from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality in San Francisco, her new obsession has precipitated what she describes as “a big career shift”. After 21 years as SA’s sexuality clinician “Dr Eve”, she created a new website and international presence, under her given name.
THE secret is the secrecy, says Wasserman. Many of those who commit cyber infidelity do not consider that they are cheating on their life partner because “no body fluids are exchanged”. The thing is, marriage has been set up as a place in which you share all of yourself with your significant other.
So, when you are found out, the sense of betrayal in your life partner is enormous; even when the conversation did not get that sexy. Even a chat about poetry that shares emotions you do not share, never have shared or have stopped sharing with your partner can devastate.
Wasserman is adamant it is only a matter of time until you get caught because people’s phones and other devices are lying around all over, and if you keep yours with you at all times, you arouse suspicion.
One of cyber infidelity’s tragedies, she says, is that the perpetrators are often people who are happy in their marriages and committed to their spouses.
Whereas affairs in real life are often an indication that the betrayer wants to leave, online affairs are trickier ground. Often the perpetrators do not consider what they are doing — at least at the start — to be a betrayal of their partner.
While some online affairs move into real life, many remain online, and what Wasserman has found is that while “almost everyone” considers cyberchatting, cyberflirting and cybersex as infidelity, people she quizzed put emotional connection in that box.
To her surprise, Wasserman found that there was an undying need to feel that we are someone’s chosen one, their all. “Dammit, I say to myself, can we never escape the need for monogamy, commitment and fidelity?”
IT APPEARS not. We have an evolutionary need to secure a significant other who is exclusively ours, although that is changing. More married relationships are interdependent — each partner has their own friends, activities and interests and their lives “overlap into a rich and intimate relationship” — than was the case in earlier times.
The problem with couples who are too much in each other’s pockets is that people also have a need for privacy. But Wasserman points out that privacy is not secrecy.
“Private is, I masturbate, but we know that and I don’t have to tell you every time. Secrecy is not telling at all, and the guilt and shame that goes with it because it has to be a secret.”
When secrecy goes online, it leaves what Wasserman describes as lipstick traces.
“With cyber infidelity, they’ve done it in secret, done stuff — chatting, flirting, sexting — and there it is, the evidence, you can scroll through it. In real-life infidelity you often don’t have much physical evidence.
“Now you, the betrayed, are sitting with all this pain.
“Also, there is this third level, this ‘Who is this person?’ because they may be sharing emotional stuff that they never shared, or have stopped sharing, with you. It feels shocking. Whatever there has been between you feels like a lie. They are behaving in a manner that you’ve never imagined. It’s, ‘How can I ever trust them again’? ”
There is a formula for rebuilding trust that therapists use with reallife infidelity, says Wasserman. It does not work with cyber infidelity. “You can get rid of the secretary, but you can’t take their phone away. Trust is very hard to regain.”
What most often happens is that the betrayed ends up acting as a relationship police officer, which has its own negative impacts.
“The last two-and-a-half years have been a remarkable experience. To see the adaptations that people make or try to make. Remember, these are people who are committed to their marriage….
“I have two men who sit with me still, a year later, and they still struggle to find their way back to each other.”
However, for some, a detente is possible, although the dynamics of the relationship change. “It’s never simple in a therapeutic space, so much goes before and so much after,” she says.
Full of statistics, chatty, honest and nonjudgmental, Cyber Infidelity is a step-by-step guide to help people, whether 21 and dating or 65, married and curious, think through the consequences of their actions. There are lists of questions to ask yourself, and myriad conversation starters.
One of the toughest aspects of our growing online life, Wasserman says is that because of the wide variety of platforms on which anyone can meet such a vast number of potential friends and lovers, “people are going through people like they are commodities”.
That the next person chosen might be a better “match” for you is always back of mind, so on we scroll, over and over and over again.
Wasserman says she has written the book for several reasons, but in the end, for those who are already deep into clandestine online relationships, she has these words: “It hurts. Infidelity hurts, but if you are going to choose that, then I want to be there to work with you through it.”