What The ‘Ashley Madison’ Hack Reveals About Our Relationships

If you’ve ever used the website Ashley Madison, it’s likely you’ve spent the past week shitting yourself.

The online “dating service”, which boasts the tagline “life is short, have an affair”, was infiltrated last week by hackers, who demanded Ashley Madison shut down the website permanently, or suffer the release of “all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”

There has been a lot of debate about the ethics of Ashley Madison since this hack was announced. A lot of the response in comment sections and forums has been one of vindication: “Good on the hackers! Cheaters deserve to be exposed.” But, does exposing people really help? Wouldn’t we be better off asking why this website exists in the first place?

Reading about Ashley Madison, I was stunned to learn how popular it is. The site has a total of 37 million members, making it the 18th most popular adult website globally. That’s a lot of people putting their relationships on the line for an illicit affair. Why?

Some answers can be found amongst its users. In an opinion piece in The Guardian, an anonymous writer told of why they joined the site after many years married to their high school sweetheart:

“As time passed, I reflected on my limited experiences in light of the realisation that I may spend the rest of my life fundamentally unsatisfied. I realised that the love I have for my wife is and has always been far more platonic than romantic. I had married out of convenience and safety with little regard for anything deeper, other than the avoidance of any kind of insecurity, pain, or challenge. We really have had a comfortable life, but I reached a point where I was ready to act on my long-repressed desires and impulses, to broaden my horizons, even if it meant risking that life in search of what it meant to actually live.”

You’ve likely heard this story before: A man goes through a ‘mid-life crisis’, so desperate for a thrill he’ll put everything on the line; the horrible cheater who surely deserves as much pain and humiliation as possible. But look at the numbers, and these stories are more common than we may like to admit. The data varies between studies — the phenomenon is a particularly hard one to measure — but research suggests that between one in five and one in four people have cheated at some point in their life.

To me, honesty is a key part of a relationship; I have a problem with people having dishonest affairs. But is it really the case that cheaters are just inherently bad? Or is there another reason behind our cheating epidemic?

What Even Is Cheating?

It may seem obvious, but when we look back at history the question of what constitutes infidelity gets a little blurry.

When I first went to write this article, my immediate thought was that Ashley Madison was a symbol of increasing infidelity rates; the numbers above are pretty high, you have to admit. But then I realised there was no way to substantiate that claim. What has certainly changed, however, is our approach to infidelity — or more importantly, our approach to love and sex.

As I’ve written about in the past, prior to the Victorian era marriage was solely an economic institution. We did not pair together for love; we paired together to survive. In doing so, infidelity — or sleeping around — was viewed very differently than it is today. Particularly for men, but even for women, infidelity was in many instances totally acceptable. As Hunter Oatman-Stanford writes in Collector Weekly, the French aristocracy used to believe “that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”

This all changed in the Victorian era and with the rise of industrial capitalism, as the working class in particular began to marry for love instead of economics. This brought with it a whole range of new social norms — from the romanticised notion of love being about a monogamous life-long commitment, to women facing the “cult of the domestic”, or the idea they had to submit entirely to their men, both domestically and sexually.

In the past 200 years our perceptions of sex and infidelity have changed significantly. Does this excuse cheaters? Not necessarily. But it may go some way to explaining why rates of cheating remain so high.

The Pros Of Polygamy 

Earlier this year, I wrote about my multiple dating and sex lives. I wrote about my relationships with my two boyfriends, James and Martyn. Some of the comments I received were similar to those I see targeted at “cheaters”. Some treated me with an air of disgust, as if I was inherently hurting James, my first boyfriend, by seeing someone else.

Yet to me, my relationships — and the relationships of those who are in similar situations — reflect inherent problems with our modern norms. They present a potential solution to the cheating epidemic we seem to have found ourselves in.

James and I started an open relationship through a basic understanding that we could have sex with someone else and still love each other. But it also went much deeper than that. We realised that we cannot, and should not, be expected to provide 100% of each other’s sexual or emotional needs. James, nor Martyn, can give me everything I want in a partner, and it is completely okay to say that out loud.

I think we all understand this in some way or another. Even when we pair up monogamously, we stay close with friends, family and colleagues. We keep our hobbies and work friends and sometimes even travel separately. This proves we need more than just the companionship of our chosen mate.

Yet when it comes to romantic love, and sex in particular, we throw that understanding out the window. Pair up with someone, and that is the one and only person you will have sex with, or date, for the rest of your life. That is where you are stuck — and if by any chance there are areas where you are not satisfied, or even if there’s just something you want to explore more, tough luck. That is the price of love.

To me, these standards are the reason a site like Ashley Madison has become so popular. It is easy to say relationships that involve cheating are just inherently bad; that people are marrying the wrong people, that technology is making romance more difficult, or that our romantic standards have become too high. But I think infidelity often comes down to something else: while some can spend their lives being happily faithful to their one partner, for many, our relationship norms just don’t make sense. By their very nature, norms force individuals into them even if they don’t quite fit. When we measure success in such a limited way, it’s no wonder so many relationships fail.

It’s A Matter Of Honesty

One of the key tenets of my relationships with James and Martyn is honesty; it’s the dishonest forms of cheating that cause a lot of pain. And this is where I find Ashley Madison so problematic.

The issue I have with Ashley Madison is not that it encourages people to have sex outside their marriage, but that it reinforces the most problematic aspects of relationship norms while it profits from them. Part of Ashley Madison’s appeal is the sexiness of doing something wrong. The site itself is littered with references to “cheating partners” and “discreet encounters”; the front page has a picture of a woman with a finger over her mouth, indicating secrecy. The whole affair is designed to be sexy in a naughty way.

We should be able to achieve this feeling without dishonesty, but Ashley Madison doesn’t present that as an option. A better site, to me, would be one which challenged our social norms, encouraging those who don’t want a monogamous union to be open and honest about it, at least with their partner. That in itself could be extremely sexy (you can trust me on that), and has the benefit of not hurting people in the process.

The Ashley Madison hack is a huge and disgraceful breach of privacy, no matter how we feel about those who were using the service. But shutting down the site, as the hackers propose, is not the answer either. Instead we need to ask why so many people are using it. By looking at the real reasons behind infidelity, we might be able to find new solutions to dishonesty — ones that don’t lock people out from getting what they want.

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Simon Copland is a freelance writer and climate campaigner. He blogs here and tweets at @SimonCopland. test changes.