I read an interesting article in a newspaper about Noel Biderman who knows a thing or two about adultery. The 43-year-old is happily married, but is the creator of the world's largest marketplace for cheaters. In 2002, his extramarital dating website, Ashley Madison, went live. The $125 million global business attracts 26 million members from 39 countries, garnering 40 million page views a month. Biderman, once the most hated man on the internet, has said that he is fine with being labelled controversial.
Why do people in apparently happy relationships have affairs?
The protest affair: If there has been a lot of unhappiness and rowing in a relationship, your partner might have an affair not only to hurt you but also to say: 'Look how much you've hurt me!' These attention-seeking affairs, though they start off as secret, are often revealed 'accidentally'. We all know about the open email left lying around, or a mysterious phone number calling.
Though you don't want to be endlessly picking over your relationship, it's always worth keeping an eye open for the state of its health. Weeds grow in untended gardens, and if you're both going through a bad patch, this is the time that each is particularly vulnerable to an affair. When things are bad don't get further away from each other; get closer, even if it means saying things you'd rather keep to yourself.
The you-don't-love-me affair: Sometimes a man might have an affair because he feels left out and insecure when his partner's pregnant or preoccupied with small children, for instance. In the same way that it's easy for a wife to feel left out if her husband's too preoccupied with his work or hobbies, so a husband can feel unwanted if his wife is constantly giving all her love and attention to the children.
Men who are insecure in this way need constant reassuring that love isn't a finite commodity, and that just because the children get loads, doesn't mean there's still not loads left for him. Reassurance that the love his wife feels for him is a different love to the love for the children, can also make him feel more special. Some women can be guilty of hogging the parenting role, and men can be shy of intruding on what seems to them like women-only territory. The more involved men are in bringing up their children, the less chances of them straying.
The romantic affair: When the initial buzz has worn off and relationships become humdrum, some people have affairs because they so desperately miss the romance. Believing that romance equals love and finding they can't rekindle it with their partner, they look for it with someone else.
Some might say that couples should try to keep the romance alive in their relationship by going away for special weekends, but you can't keep this up all the time. Better, then, to acknowledge your own disappointment in the fading of romance and share the disappointment with your partner. Out of this disappointment can grow a different kind of love, one that doesn't need endless candlelit dinners and bunches of roses to keep it intact.
The escape-route affair: When it looks as if there's no way out of a relationship except to get a divorce, some partners use an affair as an excuse. It's much easier, and probably more fun, to race off with someone else than discuss separation. It may be that if you marry too young or too quickly, you both develop at very different rates, so it's not surprising that eventually one will start looking around for someone more their type. Rather than let things get to this state, it would be far better to acknowledge your differences and either to agree to continue, for the sake of the children perhaps, or to think about divorce. It is much less painful to divorce when both are in agreement than wait for one to run off with someone else, causing blame and hurt all round.
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