Online Flings Internet Becomes Second Largest Venue For Beginning Affairs
The husband, pretending to be single, had gotten involved in online romances with a number of women. When one female Internet partner took him up on his invitation to come to his hometown, the man panicked and confessed to his wife. Since he didn’t have the courage to admit his deception to the unsuspecting woman, he quickly made himself invisible.
“The wife, who was shaken to the core, felt compassion for this other woman and got her a place to stay overnight,” says relationships expert and author Peggy Vaughan of La Jolla, Calif. She says the couple then took on the work of dealing with their damaged marriage.
“I could go on and on,” says the marital consultant, who learned of the incident from the distraught wife who contacted Vaughan on her Web site (www.vaughan-vaughan.com), which focuses on extramarital relations. “Online affairs have become so commonplace and typical, I can almost write the script,” says Vaughan, noting that her Web sites are flooded with letters from spouses lamenting their partners’ Internet infidelities.
“In fact, people have been known to risk it all by leaving their partner before they meet the person in the flesh,” she says.
Often, Internet affairs precipitate divorce, according to Washington, D.C., divorce attorney Sanford Ain, who believes there’s a direct correlation between the rise of online flings and the increasing success of Internet providers like America Online.
Married couples harmed by a partner’s meandering seldom stay together, says Ain.
“When people have experienced a breach of trust, whether it is Internet-related (or not), very few -can reconcile their differences,” he notes. “Both have to be highly motivated. Once in a while you feel good that someone has reconciled, but it’s very rare,” he says, citing a 1-out-of-50 statistic.
The Internet is the second largest way of meeting people and having affairs, says psychologist Debbie Layton-Tholl of Boca Raton, Fla., observing that the workplace is still the most popular meeting ground. Layton-Tholl’s information comes from the more than 800 questionnaires she’s analyzed out of the nearly 4,000 she’s collected to date on her Web site (affairladyaol.com, search under topic “Extramarital Affairs”).
Of the married respondents to Layton-Tholl’s questionnaire, 27 percent say they began their affair online and 41 percent say their extracurricular activities began at work. And the majority of married men and women who cheat have affairs with other marrieds rather than unmarried partners, she adds.
Cos Cob/Westport psychotherapist Kurt Sperling says roughly 6 percent to 8 percent of his caseload consult him about relationship issues that stem from the Internet. While the scenarios play out differently, there are often similarities, he notes. Sperling says usually one partner is not home during the Internet interplay, but sometimes the deceived partner is preoccupied doing something in another room or has gone to sleep while the spouse is online.
“Typically what I’ve seen is that people are drawn to chat rooms for any number of reasons - because they may think they share common interests with other people or because they are bored and are looking for something to do,” he says. “Sometimes people are drawn to chat rooms because they are unhappy in their lives and it makes them feel like they’re worthy of attention.”
Still, when the deceived partner finds out, Sperling says the reactions are much the same: “You did that in our home? You did that from the den? You’ve been talking to that person every night when I go to sleep, and I thought you were working on our bills!”
But home is not the only place where deception takes place. People flirt all day long at work through e-mail, says Layton-Tholl.
“Some companies have a no-tolerance rule when it comes to adulterous relationships,” she says. “Most companies frown upon affairs within the workplace, even between singles.”
And it’s usually the woman who loses her job, she says.
“Adultery is still a double standard,” she notes, citing the example of a single 50ish female manager who was axed after her employer learned of her affair with the company janitor, a married man. “They told her she was management, set the standards and should have known better,” says the psychologist.
Incidentally, notes Layton-Tholl, the way the company dealt with the janitor was to send him off on a one-week paid vacation. Still, it’s often the thrill of a secret rendezvous with a “sexy” stranger that drives hordes of people onto the Internet, says Layton-Tholl, citing the power of cybergames and virtual rooms where people can take on different personalities.
“When people talk to me about their experience on the Internet and tell me `I’m in love, he’s my soul mate,’ it’s incredible,” Layton-Tholl says. “They are talking about passion that I can only imagine having in an intimate contact with somebody, and they are having this in electronic communications, never having seen or touched this individual. These are mature adults, married people with kids, with responsible jobs, and they are changing their lives because of what starts out as a fantasy.
“You become obsessive and preoccupied, and the arousal continues to increase because that is the nature of fantasy. People are falling head over heels passionately. It’s out there,” Layton-Tholl says.
And fantasy is what makes these Internet affairs unique, says Baltimore, Md., psychologist Shirley Glass, who also has a relationship column on the Web.
People only reveal a part of themselves on the Internet, which leads to a romantic image based on illusion, she says. Using fantasy as a catalyst, Glass says, the fling can be very intense from the beginning.
“You don’t have to have physical contact to have an affair,” she says. “The thing it has in common is the secrecy, the emotional intimacy and the sexual chemistry.”
By sharing sexual fantasies with someone on the Internet, you really move away from the marital relationship, and most husbands and wives would consider that an infidelity, Glass says. People often defend their behavior by saying, “We’re just friends,” she observes. Still, “the relationship can intrude into the civility of the marriage and become more important than the marriage.”
Layton-Tholl estimates there are millions of online affairs daily and that eventually many of the participants are forced to admit the truth.
Glass says frequently the spouse becomes suspicious when his or her partner comes to bed later and later each night and becomes uninterested in sex. When a mate isn’t around, Glass says, the spouse will go through his or her e-mail or get hold of cell phone bills.
“Most people deny there’s a problem until they get caught,” she says.