The internet and cellphones have changed the face of infidelity, writes Rebecca Barry Hill, with opportunities available, and the spark kept alive, at just a press of a button.
It started with a few drinks and some skinny-dipping. Carly, 26, had a live-in partner at the time; her colleague was married. They both worked for a large company which congregated twice a year to bond over a fun weekend of activities. Carly, no stranger to casual sex during her early 20s, was up for a bit of fun. After an evening of sexual tension, the pair went swimming, leading to what she thought would be another no-strings encounter.
"Living about four hours apart and both being accustomed to cheating in this manner," says Carly, now a 31-year-old mother of two, "it should have been a simple, forgotten-about one-night-stand."
But working together meant they had full access to each other's contact details. Before long, they were texting. As the relationship developed, they manipulated things so they had work in the same locations. Carly was soon in the throes of a full-blown affair.
Eventually, she decided she couldn't handle her long-term relationship any longer and forced an argument to end it. She moved out of the couple's apartment and in with a friend, giving her freedom to pursue the affair.
"We continued via text, phone and our work meetings for a few more months before I left overseas," she says. "I should have ended it then but instead we continued via email, IM [instant messaging], video messaging and text ... When I returned six months later, the relationship was more intense than ever and we continued seeing each other, talking on the phone and texting."
It might sound commonplace but the long-distance affair probably would've fizzled if it wasn't for the good old mobile phone. Where hand-written love letters might once have stoked the fires of a dangerous liaison, modern infidelity is more likely to rely on the impulsive whim of texting or, in the nauseating case of singletons Liz Hurley and Shane Warner, Twitter. All it takes is a rush of blood to the head and a few seconds on a computer or cellphone to commit emotional adultery - actual sex may not even come into it.
Carly's affair was typical of our times. A corporate high-flyer, her overtime in the office was part of the reason she was invited to the company conference, an event reserved for the top tier of employees. Physical distance and faithfulness were no match for raging hormones when cellphones, email and video messaging were right at her fingertips.
Has technology made it easier to have an affair? That depends on how well you cover your tracks. In Carly's case, she says her partner instinctively knew she was up to something well before she broke things off; it was her odd behaviour, rather than her digital footprint of deceipt, that gave her away.
"The old way people used to meet - I'm talking in the 90s - was in sports clubs," says divorce lawyer Jeremy Sutton. "Squash, tennis, netball. Joining clubs was a New Zealand thing to do, and often that's how affairs would start. Now we're either working or glued to the internet or TV. We're not so much outdoors. I know that a lot of sports clubs are finding it hard to survive."
Catching cheaters out back then had little to do with decrypting computer files or combing through mobile phone bills, common ways to catch out love rats today. If friends didn't spill the beans, suspicious wives would go through the washing, sniffing for unfamiliar perfumes or looking for stray hairs.
"I've seen it a lot with clients who have broken up as a result of cheating - they're spending a lot of time together in the workplace. That makes it much harder for the other person to know what's going on."
New Zealand's best-known private investigator, Julia Hartley Moore, who recently released her new book, Infidelity, Exploding the Myths, doesn't believe cheating is necessarily on the increase; it's just that there are more ways in which people can go about their affairs.
"The technology makes it easier but it also makes it easier to get caught," she says of the likes of serial sexter Tiger Woods. Some men have cottoned on to their wives checking their cellphones and cellphone bills, she says, so they carry two phones, one with which to carry out the illicit relationship. Others might use an iPhone APP such as TigerText, which isn't sent to the recipient's phone but hosted on the company's servers and erased whenever the sender wishes.
Computer forensics can even uncover deleted emails. But strange behaviour is always the biggest giveaway, she says. While affairs often start as a by-product of an unhealthy relationship or low self-esteem coupled with flattering attention from someone new, a modern phenomenon is emerging. Thanks to the internet, it's now much simpler to seek out an extramarital relationship, without the need to call a hooker or hang out at a bar, sans wedding ring.
Rather than Carly's case, in which she just happened to fancy someone and an attraction developed, it's not uncommon for wannabe adulterers to scope out potential partners at organised dating events such as Table for Six and speed dating evenings, says Hartley Moore. Dating websites, such as nzdating.com are common hunting grounds for attached wannabe cheaters, looking for a no-strings thrill, often at the expense of a willing single.
"Usually if I rang his cellphone, he'd let it go to answerphone before he rang me back," says Hayley, 30, a single woman who met her partner on a match-making site. "We'd been seeing each other for about two months when I put two and two together. He'd usually say he was busy at the office or at the gym or out with mates. One night I followed him home to his house and saw him with his wife and baby."
Then there's controversial website AshleyMadison.com, set up specifically to help attached people cheat. The Canadian match-making website was launched in 2001 before expanding to the US and UK. The site now boasts more than 9 million members worldwide. Since the New Zealand version launched last year, more than 4000 Kiwis have signed up. How many are legitimate? It's difficult to say. The site has been accused of harbouring fake profiles, which its members pay to interact with.
Judging by the backlash against the concept, with critics referring to it as a "cruel sex site that profits from marital pain", its popularity is not necessarily evidence that infidelity has become acceptable. There have always been and always will be cheaters - it's just that now they have the means to cheat in an environment that could, potentially, simplify the process.
One of Ashley Madison's slogans is "affairs guaranteed". It gets away with this promise by offering cyber affairs, aka "erotic chat", giving weight to the idea that you don't have to have sex to be cheating.
It soon becomes apparent, however, that mere chatting was not the aim of the game for the 30 or so men who contacted me - or should I say my sexy pseudonym - within 72 hours of signing up. My fictitious cheater had a vague profile: slim, blonde and in her late 20s, and had trawled through a list of physical and personality-based preferences, such as whether her suitors should have body piercings or such universally attractive traits as a "sense of humour" and being "well-groomed". Who'd want someone desperately unfunny who hadn't been to a hairdresser in 10 years?
Most men were upfront about their intentions, suggesting we go on a date almost straight away. And most were polite, saying there'd be no obligation to take things further. (Still, even within the anonymous confines of my made-up, cheating persona, I felt as guilty as if I'd wanted to pursue an actual affair.) The most incredible discovery, browsing through the list of guys, were the handful of men who chose to publish what looked like photographs of themselves. Either that or some of them had selected pretty ordinary upgrades from random strangers' photographs ripped off the internet. Hartley Moore says she, too, got a shock when she went onto a dating site during an investigation, and there was a photograph of her friend's husband, pimping himself out as a single man.
"Men will go into an affair not even thinking about getting caught. Women will go into an affair to make sure they don't get caught. Guys just blunder in thinking, 'Well I'll deal with that if it happens and it probably won't'. Look at Bill Clinton, bless him. We'd never know whether Hillary had an affair because if she did, she would have planned it. That's the difference."
Apparently, not everyone who signs up is in a stale relationship of their own. One single guy proposed on his profile that it was "time for excitement, not commitment", suggesting that if a woman was married and seeking an affair, he'd be happy to oblige. Nevermind the moral implications.
"Need some excitement to break the monotony," he typed once we'd become acquainted on the site's instant messaging service.
"I seem to have trouble finding things that excite me. So far, flying and wakeboarding/snowboarding seem to fit the bill. Now all I need is some more exciting of the social/sexual variety ..."
Another guy messaged that his family was overseas.
How do you get past the guilt? I asked, aware that I sounded like a complete party pooper.
"I'm bored and needing some company," he explained. "I want to go out and just have some fun."
After a few days, I upload a picture - an old one I found on the net of a model, partially obscured, so all you can really see is a big pair of dark sunglasses. I continue to spread my adulterous killjoy self to other corners of the site.
Do you worry what your wife thinks? I asked a long-term player.
"Not really. It's exciting. The secrets. The anticipation. The forbidden."
What if you meet someone in person and they don't live up to your expectations?
"That's the risk you take but that's what makes it interesting. It's like dating but with more excitement."
Dating is not exciting?
"Sometimes it is. The chase and the sex is great. The rejection sucks, though." He goes on to explain that on the site, everyone is more upfront about what they are looking for.
Then he sends me his email address.
Later, I try the experiment by creating an "attached" male. Once again, a striking number of attached women put what looks to be their genuine photograph on the site. The main difference here, however, appears to be females' reluctance to initiate a conversation. Whereas by now I had an inbox full of male admirers, after 24 hours as a guy, I have only two females. Cheating websites might be a newfangled way to meet people but as far as courting etiquette goes, it's pretty old-fashioned.
The means to cheat may have changed but the fallout, sadly, is no less painful. Particularly if it ruptures a relationship between a couple with kids. Yet in New Zealand, infidelity is no grounds for divorce. Regardless of the reasons, a couple must have lived apart for two years or more before they can apply for one.
"There's far more that goes into an affair than simply the opportunities," says Jon Hay, an Auckland psychotherapist and marriage counsellor. "Usually it takes a long time for an affair to begin and there's a lot of unhappiness on both sides. It's rare that an opportunistic affair happens.
"Most people say they weren't looking; that's a frequent utterance. But when they're in an unhealthy relationship and someone starts paying them attention, that's when people tend to find themselves in an affair. They didn't plan it and 'we were just friends and I didn't see it coming'. That's often the way."
So how to guard one's relationship against an affair? Hartley Moore says those who are prepared to cheat have a tendency toward it.
"There are tonnes of nice guys out there who are serial shaggers and they shouldn't get married, they shouldn't have committed. Then we wouldn't have half this problem. You know, Hugh Hefner's got it sorted."
Ego is why men cheat these days, she adds. "I think the fact that we're so busy with the kids and the job, you get tied up in so many things that he kind of goes by the wayside a little bit.
"Men need to be told they're fabulous, they need to feel wanted. And when you're that busy, especially with children, you tend to focus on all these other things you've got to do.
"Women don't need it as much, we don't have that same ego. A guy can have a loving family and wife but if she's not paying him attention and some girl in the office does and tells him he's fantastic, that can be a dangerous thing."
Hay says he's seen countless couples come in as a result of cheating but who need guidance to move past the damage. Men are more likely to cheat, he agrees, although it could be that women are simply better at concealing their cheating.
"If you go back a generation, the normality was that the wife was at home, and the husband might have been stopping for beers on the way back, meeting up with who-knows. Things are more equal these days or aiming in that direction, although it's not so acceptable for one partner to be stopping at home every night. So those opportunities aren't there anymore."
For Carly, removing the opportunity to cheat wasn't as easy as she'd thought. The temptation was always just a mouse-click away. She decided to head back overseas for a clean break. A few months later, her ex-lover emailed to say he'd left his wife and wanted to come after her. Carly declined, and after a couple of years he got back together with his wife - they now have two children.
"We still talk through email, Facebook and Skype but things have finally cooled enough for us to be friends, at least privately," she says.
"I learned a lot through this relationship and I do regret violating the sanctity of marriage even if it wasn't my own. I also hurt my ex - whom I still care a lot for - in the process. He never caught me but he had a feeling.
"I'm now in a very stable, happy relationship in which I have never cheated. The opportunity to cheat and not get caught still presents itself but is no longer an attractive option to me. I believe that this one night stand would never have grown into the serious affair that it did if it weren't for our cellphones and the privacy they afford."
* Names have been changed
