Since the Ashley Madison hack , when thousands of email addresses and usernames were leaked, interest in the service has been at an all-time high. What motivates people to seek infidelity online, and what happens when those people are found out?
Marlene Wasserman, better known as Dr. Eve, is a sex therapist and psychologist who is well known in her native South Africa as a leading commentator on our changing sexual mores. And since she spent three years embedded on Ashley Madison interviewing men and women alike, she probably knows as much about the service's users as even the site's founders do. Wasserman spoke to 63, male and female Ashley Madison users, ages 18 to 55, over the course of three years.
Based on her findings both on Ashley Madison and as a couples therapist helping people cope with infidelity, she shared with Tech Insider some common misunderstandings about Ashley Madison. Conventional wisdom holds that people seek affairs because they're dissatisfied at home. But when it came to AM users, this wasn't the case, Wasserman said. Having created an Ashley Madison account on my own for research purposes, I can attest to the fact that making an account and contacting someone is incredibly easy.
It makes sense that someone who would never initiate an affair in real life might create an account out of curiosity, then find themselves going down a slippery slope. It's technology that has brought something out of us we didn't knew we had. Wasserman was surprised to find that many people on Ashley Madison were content to carry on online-only affairs β and their mental health might have benefited. It's not because they're having sex, but they have this other person [online] who's engaging with them in a deeply personal way.
People become more intimate with their online partners than they realize β without even meeting them in real life β because they have such an intimate relationship with their phones, Wasserman said. You're not sneaking out the door going to a hotel room. It feels, for you, completely comfortable and safe [to cheat online].
