{"id":452,"date":"2013-11-15T14:45:17","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T15:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/twilia.org\/?p=452"},"modified":"2023-09-06T14:21:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T14:21:14","slug":"ashley-madison-why-cheating-is-not-the-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/twilia.org\/index.php\/2013\/11\/15\/ashley-madison-why-cheating-is-not-the-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashley Madison: Why Cheating Is Not The Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you guys heard of Ashley Madison before? It\u2019s an online dating service targeted at married people or people in relationships.<\/p>\n

Meaning, it\u2019s like Match.com, but instead of being for singles, Ashley Madison is for people already married or seeing someone.<\/span> It is essentially a service that facilitates cheating and extra-marital affairs. (It even has a slogan, \u201cLife is short. Have an affair.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"Ashley<\/p>\n

Ashley Madison\u2019s website, with a model wearing a ring on her ring finger<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

While I disagree with Ashley Madison (hereby referred to as \u201cAM\u201d) and what it stands for<\/a>, I decided to park aside my feelings to take a deeper look at AM and the bigger issue that is extra-martial affairs.<\/p>\n

Looking Up Ashley Madison<\/h2>\n

I first knew about AM in 2013, as it was planning to launch in Singapore in 2014 but promptly got blocked by the local authorities as it was deemed as a flagrant disregard of family values. This ban was made public in the local news.[1<\/a>][2<\/a>]<\/sup><\/p>\n

I was immediately confused and bewildered by the idea of a business promoting extra-marital affairs \u2014 it just seemed really irresponsible to endorse and facilitate cheating \u2014 and thought that it was probably used by very few people. Upon some research, I quickly realized I was wrong and the Ashley Madison site actually enjoys high traffic around the world!<\/p>\n

Some facts and figures (updated in April 2021<\/span>):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. According to Alexa (a third-party tool to check a website\u2019s popularity), AM is the 10,214th most visited site globally<\/span>. Looking up SimilarWeb (another tool to check traffic stats), AM shows an estimate of 10 million visitors a month<\/span>, which is huge.<\/li>\n
  2. They claim to have reached 70 million users as of 2020<\/span>.[3<\/a>]<\/sup><\/li>\n
  3. It has members in 53 countries<\/span> including the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, and India.[4<\/a>]<\/sup><\/li>\n
  4. What\u2019s even more astonishing is its quick growth in places like Hong Kong and Japan. It was the #104 most visited site in Hong Kong and #1,288 most visited site in Japan in Oct 2013, even though it was launched there four and two months prior respectively.\n<\/p>\n
    \"Ashley<\/p>\n

    Ashley Madison\u2019s ranking in each country in Oct 2013, in terms of its website\u2019s popularity, according to Alexa. (Note in 2021: I don\u2019t have the updated data as Alexa no longer provides this data publicly.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So who\u2019s using it?<\/h2>\n

    After seeing these stats, I thought, If their site is so highly visited, that has to mean that many people are using it. But who?<\/em><\/p>\n

    I found this in-depth coverage of Ashley Madison by a GQ journalist<\/a>, who signed up for AM as part of his assignment to write about AM\u2019s female users.<\/p>\n

    Here are the profiles of some women he met:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. One is almost 40 and a high-power career female. She has been married to her husband for almost two decades with several children. She describes her household as \u201creally happy and functional,\u201d but has been cheating since two years into her marriage with both men and women<\/strong>. She has been corporeally disloyal in relationships since she was 16. She considers her affairs a favor to her husband<\/strong>\u00a0because \u201c<\/strong>[her] marriage would be in shambles if [she] wasn\u2019t playing [doing so].\u201d<\/li>\n
    2. One is in her early 30s and has a forensic-science degree. She married young to appease her religious parents<\/strong>, has been married for 10 years, and finds her life and sexually unadventurous husband \u201csuffocating.\u201d The first man she met via AM \u2014 a Muslim \u2014 had sex with her at her house while her husband was away on a trip. She says, \u201cIt\u2019s so hypocritical\u2014all this holier-than-thou stuff.\u201d<\/li>\n
    3. One is in her early 30s as well. She has been with her unambitious husband for around a decade, and is sexually uninspired and no longer in love. She lives by a conservative and professional demeanor that she seems confined by<\/strong> and speaks about liking being a \u201cdeviant\u201d and being \u201cbad.\u201d A week after her interview with the journalist, she left her husband; a few weeks after that, she quit her corporate day job to be a writer.<\/li>\n
    4. Another is in her late 40s, had two long-term affairs with male colleagues<\/strong>, and has been with \u201cpublishers of magazines, CEOs, politicians, managing partners at law or investment firms\u201d through AM. She wants to fall in love again but doesn\u2019t see the need to leave her husband \u2014 yet, as there\u2019s still love that holds them together. She finds lifelong passion extremely rare and doesn\u2019t believe any one person ever fulfills a person\u2019s needs<\/strong>, though she acknowledges feeling guilt about making outright lies (to her husband) whenever she sees someone.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Except for the first one who claims to be open with her husband, the rest are either, by their own admission, deeply unhappy or deeply dishonest with their spouses. Even with the first lady, I\u2019m doubtful about some of her claims as they are contradictory (she claims to be in a really happy household, yet she actively seeks out affairs; she does not take responsibility for her affairs but instead says she\u2019s doing them as \u201ca favor\u201d to her husband.)<\/p>\n

      General Stats on AM users<\/h3>\n

      Here are some facts from GQ:<\/p>\n