Cheating — it doesn’t have to torpedo your marriage

Lynn Comella, Las Vegas Weekly

Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 | 2 a.m.

You may have seen the commercial. An attractive couple makes a beeline for the bed, stripping off their clothes as they go. They embrace, kiss and become entangled in each other’s bodies. As the steamy scene unfolds, text scrolls across the screen: “This couple is married … but not to each other.”

It’s an ad for Ashley Madison, an online dating service for married people seeking affairs. The company’s tag line is nothing if not memorable: “Life is short, have an affair.”

Founded in 2001, Ashley Madison has more than 8 million members worldwide, with a new member joining every seven seconds. The website serves nine countries in three languages.

In the Las Vegas area it boasts 50,000 members. Think about that: Approximately one in 40 area residents — some of whom may be your friends, colleagues or even your romantic partner — are looking for no-strings-attached relationships with people who are not their spouses.

Infidelity has made Ashley Madison’s founder, Noel Biderman, 39, a wealthy and controversial man. He’s been called a pimp and a pornographer, and has been compared to a drug dealer who knowingly destroys people’s lives and marriages.

Biderman doesn’t shy away from the controversy. He embraces it, not only for its marketing potential, but for the opportunities it presents to add his voice to public discussions about marriage and infidelity — as he puts it, to “recalibrate notions about why people stray and what it means.”

Biderman, who describes himself as a happily married father of two, got the idea to create a dating service for married people after learning that 30 percent of people who visit dating sites intended for singles are attached. And, although technically not a dating site, Facebook is being cited in more and more divorce proceedings, according to a law firm in Britain, which contends that 1 in 5 divorce petitions filed in the past year named the social networking site as a factor.

Biderman recognized that an untapped and potentially lucrative market existed for married people seeking affairs, and set out to create a platform explicitly for them. “What’s wrong with giving people access to a community of like-minded people?” he says.

Biderman approaches the topic of infidelity as both a savvy businessman and an amateur sociologist. He spent nearly a year and $200,000 on research before launching the site, and delved into literature on monogamy and infidelity to learn about the biological, evolutionary and cultural roots of infidelity.

“My biggest challenge when I did research,” he says, “was that I couldn’t find any evidence that women had affairs.” But Biderman knew that women did, in fact, stray — it takes two to tango, after all — and, as he puts it, “it is not in our DNA to be monogamous.”

While he was confident men would use the site, Biderman focused on building a brand that would appeal to women. There is nothing accidental about the name Ashley Madison, or the fact that the website’s colors are pink and purple.

So who, exactly, uses Ashley Madison? The ratio of men to women is 2 to 1, with variations across age groups. The primary users are married men in sexless relationships and men who find their stride later in life and are looking to meet younger women.

According to Biderman, there are also a number of young married women on the site, some of whom have been married less than a year.

The meanings of marriage and infidelity have changed, Biderman explains. Younger people in particular are less willing to settle for relationships that leave them feeling unsatisfied.

Biderman himself says he “would” use his own service, although he didn’t say whether he has.

Ashley Madison typically sees an uptick in new members the day after Valentine’s Day. For a number of people who don’t get what they want from their partners on this high-pressure holiday ­— flowers, gifts or affection — it’s the last straw, Biderman says. They wake up the next day, take stock of their relationship and decide to meet someone who might make them happier.

“Nobody can be talked into having an affair,” Biderman says. “No one is going to watch my commercials and suddenly get the idea to cheat. Life takes them there, not my commercials.”

This was the case with Morgan, an attractive 40-something married woman from Las Vegas who preferred not to use her real name for this story. Morgan set up a profile on Ashley Madison to meet other women shortly after she and her husband decided to be non-monogamous several years ago. In fact, it was Morgan’s husband of 12 years who told her about the site.

“I wasn’t looking for anything serious,” Morgan tells me, “which is why it was such a good fit, because there’s an understanding that people are already in relationships. I liked that there was this upfront understanding.

“It didn’t feel like a meat market, although it was,” she explains, adding that it felt inviting rather than sleazy.

Morgan and her husband are still married, and she says their relationship is stronger than ever. “We’ve realized that our friendship is very, very deep. We very much support whatever will make the other person happiest. And we truly mean that.”

She scoffs at the idea that Biderman is breaking up relationships. “Ashley Madison doesn’t create a cheating environment,” she says. Biderman “is not ruining people’s marriages; it’s the people in the marriages who are ruining them.”

Biderman, of course, agrees. Ashley Madison didn’t invent cheating, he says, adding that cheating doesn’t make someone a bad person; nor does it have to be the end of a marriage.

“Infidelity can be a catalyst for change. It can start a conversation. It can save your marriage,” he says.

As for Ashley Madison, business is booming and more growth is in sight. As Biderman puts it, “There is no stopping this train.”

A version of this story appears in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly, a sister publication of the Sun. Lynn Comella is a women’s studies professor at UNLV.