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Call it crazy, paranoid or cynical, but the next time you peruse the personals on Craigslist or scan profiles on MySpace, consider this: There's a good chance you just ran into a cheater.
Just as buying concert tickets or checking baseball scores has become as simple as logging onto a computer, infidelity is a simple keystroke away.
Cheating is on the rise because technology eases the search to find a willing partner, according to therapists, researchers and relationship experts. The unfaithful no longer have to scour bars or cultivate workplace relationships. Cheating has increased along with the growing use of text messaging and cell phones, chat rooms and online dating sites, some exclusively targeting the polygamous.
"The Internet has greatly removed the barriers," says Ruth Houston, founder of Web site Infidelityadvice.com and author of Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs. "If you are a married person who wants to cheat, you can now go online and maintain an affair even while your spouse is in the room. Everything has changed."
No reliable figures exist on the increase in cheaters who use technology, but computer forensics expert John Lucich says the rise is undeniable. The president of Network Security Group, a firm in Union, N.J., hired for computer-related legal issues, says that 95 percent of the cases his company handles involve men and women who set up secret e-mail accounts for the purpose of cheating.
Online dating sites play a key role in connecting people searching for extracurricular activities. Though mainstream services such as Match.com and Yahoo Personals ban married people from posting profiles, the dating sites can't stop users from lying. Other companies are happy to pick up the slack.
Private Affairs (philanderers.com), an online dating site based in Toronto, targets users looking for what it calls EMRs, or extramarital relationships. Another service, Ashley Madison Agency (ashleymadison .com), boasts 1.03 million members in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. With its tag line "when monogamy becomes monotony," the company, also founded in Toronto, has seen its membership double annually, says operations director and founder Darren Morgenstern.
"We're finding that it's just not going away," he says. "People are looking at the plausibility of using the Internet to have an affair, and it just works for them."
Statistics on cheating vary widely because of the way pollsters word questions, says Infidelity advice.com's Houston. The data also is muddied by dishonest responses. And as people debate the definition of sex, they similarly debate the definition of cheating.
Sexologist Shere Hite in 1988 shocked Americans when she reported that up to 70 percent of women married five or more years have sex outside of marriage.
Other surveys have concluded that anywhere from 38 million to 53 million men in the United States have cheated on their wives at least once, Houston says.
But such "studies" often inflate figures, according to Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
His 2004 study, "American Sexual Behavior," which polled more than 10,000 people older than 22 years, found that 22 percent of married men and 15 percent of married women have cheated at least once.
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