VERGENNES, Vt., Sept. 11 (UPI) — A would-be bride transformed her canceled Vergennes, Vt., wedding into a charity event at the Basin Harbor Club resort on Lake Champlain.

Kyle Paxman called off the wedding in July when she discovered her fiance was having an affair with another woman. Paxman’s mother, Patricia Carbee, said the family decided to convert the ceremony into a charity event after they were unable to cancel their pre-paid reservations at the club, the Barre (Vt.) Times Argus reported Monday.

“We wanted to find a way to help her heal and help others at the same time,” Carbee said.

The Saturday event, which features an open bar, a four-course gourmet meal and lodging, will benefit the Vermont Children’s Aid Society and CARE, an organization that works to empower women in developing nations.

Paxman said “125 strong, charity-minded women” have been invited to the event.

“We’re going to have an amazing time,” Paxman predicted.

Keeping my eyes open, I cannot afford to sleep,

Giving away promises I know that I can’t keep.

I’ve been away from home for almost a month, so I didn’t know until this week that the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine includes an investigative piece about, well, investigations. Specifically, using keystroke loggers and other snooping software to gather evidence of infidelity.

Whether such spousal spying is ethical is, like most affairs of the heart, largely situational. It’s not necessarily legal, either — evidence gathered through cyber spying may not be admissible in court in a divorce case, because only the government is allowed to place wiretaps without a court order. Meanwhile, it’s no secret that cyberspace provides a false sense of security for many an illicit liaison.

I’ve long felt that people who ask The Question (”Is cybersex cheating?”) want one of two answers: yes or no. If they’re involved in an online relationship their spouse doesn’t know about, they want to hear, “No, of course not, you’re not being unfaithful.” If they have no interest in cyberspace but their partner spends a suspicious amount of time there, they want to hear, “Yes, it is, you’re perfectly justified in feeling hurt.”

As you saw last week, it’s not that simple. The Question has as many variations as there are people asking it.

But what I didn’t have room to address in that column is even more significant: The Question doesn’t consider how technology challenges traditional ideas about relationships and commitment. Nor does it take into account how sex-tech solves some of the practical problems formerly addressed by monogamy.

It’s possible that technology is merely exposing normal, common human needs and behaviors, actions that once took place in secret so as not to rock the monogamous boat. After all, if you can’t get it at home, you’ll get it somewhere else — whether it’s sushi, a hike in the woods or validation of your worth as a human being. Or sex.

No one person can be by your side 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But you can have all the attention you want when you have online buddies to fill in, not just with sex but with banter, deep conversations about your inner self and light chat about a favorite book or movie.

Women especially are finding online what they lack at home. For every e-mail I’ve received from a man saying his wife is no longer interested in sex, I’ve received one from a woman saying that she goes online for the verbal interaction she doesn’t get from her husband.

In most cases, the husbands are asking for advice on rekindling their wives’ desire, although some seem to be seeking absolution for their decision to supplement with online sex and porn. But the wives are just sharing with me how their online lovers fill the empty places not served by otherwise strong partnerships.

These women generally have no intention of leaving their marriages and often assure me that they love their husbands as much as ever. And some note that online flirting and cybersex have improved their sex lives all around. (As one man said about his online flirt buddy, “her husband gets the heat from my candles.”)

Monogamous couples have to choose, again and again, to direct their sexual energy only toward each other. No one is entirely sure how many succeed, although recent surveys suggest married women are as likely to cheat as married men.

Polyamorous people, on the other hand, extend emotional closeness and commitment to more than one partner at a time. They accept that sexual energy can be shared with two or more lovers without neglecting anyone; cheating, in the poly world, occurs when someone is dishonest and disrespectful, or refuses to communicate with the other partners.

The internet reveals a glimpse of polyamory to everyone who has ever flirted over IM, entered a chat room or joined a role-playing game. Regardless of whether you have sex online, every coquettish remark gives you a taste of what it means to share attention, time and intimacy with other people.

According to Franklin Veaux’s excellent guide to polyamory, “conscious, ethical, deliberate non-monogamy is hardly a modern ideal; it’s been around for as long as we have been civilized animals.” Yet it still an “alternative” lifestyle by American standards — even in California — and one many practitioners keep discreet out of concern for family and employers.

Now online romance offers a hybrid of monogamy and polyamory never before available to us, and if we’re smart about it, we can engage in it without the whole town knowing. But only you can decide whether and how much to tell your partner.

Is the cheating in the sex or in the sneaking? A few of you wrote last week to suggest the simplest test of all for infidelity: telling your mate. If you’re keeping your online activity secret, it’s cheating, you said.

But what if it isn’t? What if our struggles to have our Cakegirl34 and Edith too bring us to a deeper understanding of sex, intimacy and love? What if sex in virtual spaces opens us up to better sex, more often (however many partners we happen to have)?

What if we attempt to relax and give it time and see how online lovers fit into our relationships over a lifetime?

One of the delicious aspects of cyber affairs is how dramatic and overwhelming they are, but very few sustain that high level of intensity for the long term. Either the relationship shifts into a calmer gear, like any other romantic engagement, or it ends altogether.

To use Veaux’s term, “new relationship energy” only lasts so long. If that’s what draws you to cybersex, you’ll be changing partners over time anyway, until you get bored or tired of the pattern. Can you enjoy a series of online playmates without neglecting your offline relationships?

I don’t have the answers. I do see an opportunity to look beyond “yes or no” and acknowledge that sex and love and fidelity and commitment and trust are as complicated as they are individual.

I accept that we are humans, a species with a strong libido and a lust for novelty, whose lifestyles bring us into contact with attractive people and new situations on a daily basis. And I wonder how our struggles with modern romantic and sexual opportunities will shape the future of relationships over the next 10, 20 or 50 years.

And by the way, if you’re a man wondering how to rekindle your wife’s interest in sex, you might try approaching her as if she’s an attractive stranger online. Use your words when you see her, and woo her in writing when you don’t. One of the main reasons cybersex appeals to women is that it’s done verbally — no reason you can’t take advantage of that.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

INTERNET, CELL PHONES MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND AND MAINTAIN ILLICIT AFFAIRS

By Mark de la Viña
Mercury News
Rob Hernandez / Mercury News

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 purchasing 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 Infidelityadvice.com and author of “Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs” (Lifestyle Publications, 192 pp., $29.95). “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.”

Jill, 45, an elementary school teacher from Mountain View who asked that her last name not be used, learned of her partner’s infidelity when she came across his open e-mail account, which he had failed to log off on their home computer. She was shocked to read that he had done “everything from soliciting hookers to making dates with others” via the Internet, she says. “I saw that he does this all day at work. I even posed as someone he had been conversing with, and he e-mailed me 30 times in one day!”

When Jill revealed her identity, he downplayed his online trawling, which “ruined our romance,” she says.

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. While 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 (www. 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 (www.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.”

Once the connection is made, technology also helps the affair to thrive. Cell phones and PDAs give cheaters the chance to communicate privately and coordinate with their side dish.

Caryn, 37, a West Valley College student from Morgan Hill, knows this all too well. Like many wired people in Silicon Valley, she used to contact a former boyfriend almost exclusively on his cell phone.

“After several months, I found out he was married,” says Caryn, who also asked that her last name not be used. “Much later, he even informed me that on several occasions I had even paged him during his marriage counseling sessions.”

Statistics on cheating vary widely because of the way pollsters word questions, says Infidelityadvice.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,” as well as research reported in popular magazines and advice columns, 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 over 22 years, found that 22 percent of married men and 15 percent of married women have cheated at least once.

Technology has helped the cause, prompting the curious to make the jump from fantasy to philandering, says Brian Person, a marriage and family therapist in Los Altos.

“Some people, given the proper social boundaries, would be less likely to cheat than they are now,” he says.

Network Security Group’s Lucich is convinced that the rise in advertising and e-mail spam that hype cheating sites entice people to cross those boundaries, he says.

“I truly believe that there are people out there who have not thought about infidelity and then get spam messages or hear about online cheating and dating sites on the radio,” says Lucich, whose book “Cyber Lies” (StarPath, 212 pp., $35) details how to easily check a partner’s cell phone or computer to discover if he or she is cheating. “In a weak moment, they say, `Let’s just take a peek.’ Then they start going further and further, and the next thing you know, they’re cheating.”

There is some small consolation in the rise of high-tech infidelity, Houston says, because cheaters are often unaware that they have left evidence of their affairs on their PCs or cell phones. E-mails are reportedly how Christie Brinkley found out her spouse was cheating on her with a local teenager.

“There are programs you can put onto a computer so you can see everything your mate is doing online,” Houston says. “You can even put a GPS device in your mate’s car to find out where they are going. It might be easier to cheat, but it’s also a lot easier to get caught.”
Contact Mark de la Viña at mdelavina@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5914.

Married people find other married people for affairs through websites
by Tristan Taormino
August 30th, 2006 5:06 PM

“The site seemed simple and straight-forward . . . I knew that most members would be married. I prefer [to cheat with other married people] because they have as much to lose as me typically, and it’s easier to relate to someone who is married,” says Paul (not his real name), a 35-year-old executive at a large corporation in midtown Manhattan. He has been married for seven years, and throughout the marriage he and his wife have had sex about twice a week, but he says she’s sexually conservative. Four years ago, he went looking for “someone fun and exciting, more adventurous in bed and spontaneous.” Paul cheated for the first time with another married woman he met through the Ashley Madison Agency (ashleymadison.com), a website that boasts such taglines as “When Monogamy Becomes Monotony” and “For Women Seeking Romantic Affairs—and the Men Who Want to Fulfill Them.”

Paul is one of over a million members of Ashley Madison, which—like Married Secrets, Affair Match, Discreet Adventures, International House of Wives, and others—caters to married people who want to cheat with other married people. In the three years he’s been an on-and-off member of Ashley Madison, Paul has met two women, one with whom he had an 18-month affair, and the other, a six-month affair; he considers them “friends with benefits.” The reasons he gave for wanting to find other married people echo the thoughtful PR soundbites of the company’s founder and chief operating officer, Darren Morgenstern. “Both people have just as much to risk and lose and expectations stay reasonable,” says Morgenstern, who founded the site in 2002 after reading a business magazine article that said one-third of people who sign up on singles dating sites are actually attached. He wanted to offer a service where folks could be up-front about their marital status.

The Ashley Madison site works much like other personals sites: Members write a profile which includes their basic stats and various preferences (like cross-dressing and tantric sex), tastes in partners’ behavior (”good with their hands,” “will let me take control,” and the unexpected “likes routine”), and desires (from being creative with food to being videotaped). There is even a section where members can rate other members with such positive feedback as “better in person.” Membership costs $240 for three months of unlimited messages, or you can enroll on a pay-as-you-go system.

Sites like Ashley Madison tap into a very profitable niche within the online personals arena by bringing honesty to the dishonest practice of cheating. They allow people an alternative to a traditional personals site where they may have to lie and say they’re single, thus giving potential mates the wrong impression—yet they facilitate lying to a spouse. While Morgenstern admits the company receives its fair share of hate mail, he says, predictably, “We don’t promote infidelity.”

Married people seem to seek other married people to give themselves a sense of added security in an inherently insecure situation. Their preference to cheat within their own camp is based on assumptions about people with spouses: They won’t demand too much of the other person’s time; they’ll be less invested in the relationship since they already have one; they’re more understanding about a last-minute cancellation because the wife is sick and the kids need to go to soccer practice. Ideally, all those things are true, but in the real world, there are no guarantees and having everything out in the open doesn’t mean there won’t be drama. These assumptions make all married people out to be sane and stable, and all single people end up looking like needy, unreasonable fools with no boundaries desperate to fall in love and break up a marriage. Of course neither is true: A married person can turn into a crazed stalker just as a single person can.

“I want to be up-front with people and don’t want any misunderstandings along the way. We were very clear from the start that no one would be leaving their spouse,” said Paul, who told me that he looked specifically for women he thought seemed happy in their marriages, as he says he is; that contributed to the success of the affairs and their not becoming something he didn’t want. Another benefit of spouses cheating with other people’s spouses may be a leveling of the moral playing field: If you’re both cheaters, you can’t judge one another for cheating.

People in open relationships don’t have to deal with lying and sneaking around because they are open with their partners about their other partners. Subtract the thrill and naughtiness of doing something wrong without permission, and some people might not be into it. I’d rather hook up with a non-monogamous person than a married person, so that at least I know everyone is on the same page. Again, being open does not mean there can’t be jealousy, hurt feelings, and other emotions to deal with, but the basis for the relationship structure is honesty and communication.

It baffles me that there is not a site as popular, active, and profitable as Ashley Madison that is designed for polyamorous people. There are well-used swinger sites, but swinging is just one type of non-monogamy, a specific community and culture that not everyone identifies with. Alt.com is marketed as a site for “alternative lifestyles,” but in practice, not a lot of poly people use it; you can’t search specifically for other poly people, and the site is very BDSM-oriented while not all poly people are kinky. There is really only one credible personals site specifically for polyamorous people, Poly Match Maker (polymatchmaker.com); compared to Ashley Madison’s million, it has fewer than 7,000 members.

The Internet has made it easier for all kinds of people to connect, and has also made infidelity a lot less complicated. The websites that profit from it are not the problem. In the United States, cheating continues to be the dominant model of how people have sex and form relationships outside their primary partnership, and the stats on how many of our fellow Americans do it are pretty depressing. Statistics show that anywhere from 12 to 25 percent of women and 22 to 60 percent of men cheat on their partners. When will we embrace a more honest, ethical way of meeting our needs?