For Cybercheats, the Affair Is Virtual but Damage Is Real

Tammy felt sick to her stomach when she saw it. Sitting on the scanner by the computer were photographs of her husband, Gene. Pictures he had scanned in himself. One was a picture of Gene and Tammy dancing at their wedding--except Tammy had been cut out.

She called Gene on his cell phone. He was on the road, traveling for his New England company.

“I asked him why he had been scanning in pictures of himself,” Tammy said. “There was a 30-second silence.”

“My mother asked for some wedding photos,” Gene finally replied.

“You’re a liar,” Tammy said and hung up.

Eventually the truth would come out. Gene had struck up a friendship with a woman on the Internet. Although they initially talked about the news of the day, the talk turned personal. Soon they were having cybersex, a common Internet practice in which people send instant messages to each other with details of what they would do to each other if they were face to face at that moment.

Although Gene and the other woman never met, the cyberspace affair was just as devastating to Tammy and Gene’s marriage as an affair conducted in a motel room.

“It came pretty darn close to costing me my marriage,” Gene said.

Tammy and Gene (who, like others in this story, requested anonymity) are not alone in finding their lives damaged by Internet activity related to sex. Last July MSNBC.com released a poll of more than 38,000 adult Internet users. It found that one in 10 admitted to being addicted to Internet sex and that one of every seven hours of Internet usage is devoted to sexual activity.

Through counseling and the support of an Internet message board for relationships hurt by cybercheating, Tammy and Gene are trying to gather the fragments of their marriage.

“One thing that’s helped is we read this book called ‘After the Affair’ and annotated it,” Gene said.

“After the Affair,” written by Yale psychologist Janis Abrahms Spring, has sold 150,000 copies. Although its focus is not the Internet, Spring said she and other mental-health professionals are seeing an alarming increase in relationships damaged by Internet affairs.

“Whenever I give a workshop, I always ask how many of the counselors in the room are dealing more and more with affairs that began on the Internet,” she said. “And almost every hand goes up.”

J. Lindsey Short, a Houston attorney and president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, said he and colleagues across the country are seeing a “dramatic increase” in divorce cases tangled in Internet affairs.

“I think people believe it to be safe to have these Internet discussions,” he said. “Over time, they think they know this person, and from there it’s a pretty easy step to pick up the phone and make a call.”

So what drives Internet infidelity? Stanford psychologist Al Cooper, author of the MSNBC study and a pioneer in the field, calls it “the Triple-A engine”: anonymity, accessibility and affordability. People can share intimacies without revealing their identities or can pretend to be someone they’re not (anonymity). Instead of a small sampling of potential partners at a local bar, a person has the potential to meet thousands of people on the Internet (accessibility). And the Internet is inexpensive, or certainly more affordable than face-to-face courtship.

Cooper says the Internet “turbocharges” relationships, speeding their development as people get a false sense of intimacy with someone who, a week or month before, had been a complete stranger.

Brian, a teacher and farmer in Kansas, never saw the wreck coming. And although his wife’s affair has not led to divorce, it has led him to antidepressant medications and feelings that he will never trust her again.

He and Linda married young; their last anniversary was their 28th. Right after Christmas 1999 they bought their first computer.

“I can still remember the sound that Windows made when it first started up,” he said. “My wife and I sat there just in awe of it.”

Brian, an avid card player, soon discovered that you could talk to people of similar interests from all over the world, and he began playing Spades with them. Linda found friends on the Net too, but her talks had higher stakes.

One night Brian went out to Linda’s truck, looking for a flashlight. Instead he found love letters, printouts of e-mails to Linda from Glenn, a man she had met online.

But the attraction wasn’t confined to the screen. Linda and Glenn had graduated from e-mails to phone conversations to a motel room.

“He drove 300 miles; she drove 30,” Brian said, weeping.

Brian and Linda are still together, but nothing is the same.

“I have known pain, but there is nothing that holds a candle to this,” he said. “It’s devastating and I don’t think my wife understands the pain.”

Of course, the question could be raised: Is Tammy’s case the same as Brian’s? After all, one affair was consummated physically; the other one ended before it reached a face-to-face meeting. But psychologist Marlene Maheu and family therapist Rona Subotnik, authors of the book “Infidelity on the Internet,” said the damage they encounter in therapy with their clients is the same.

Subotnik defines “cyberinfidelity” as occurring “when a person uses a computer or the Internet to betray a vow or agreement of sexual exclusivity.”

Debbie Layton-Tholl, a Florida psychologist who heard from 4,800 people in a study of Internet infidelity, puts it even more simply: “The minute a relationship goes from being public knowledge to becoming a secret--the minute you are feeling as though you can’t tell your spouse or partner about this person--you’ve crossed the line. It’s a betrayal.”

But the pursuit of cyber and real-time adultery is not slowing down. In an ongoing study, Brazilian psychologist Maria Cristina Martins visits an adult-personals Web site and poses as a Chicago woman looking for an affair, specifically with a married man in his 40s. In less than a month, she has received more than 1,000 responses--many from executives willing to fly her around the country and provide accommodations.

While technology is advancing, for better or worse, it can’t make decisions for humans. And when an affair is discovered, the partners have decisions to make about whether the relationship will continue.

Subotnik said that in successful therapy, the couple goes through a number of stages: dealing with anger and anxiety, searching for understanding, and working on communication skills, reconstructing the relationship.

It’s not easy, she says, but there’s hope: “Marriages can get stronger if they survive an affair because the spouses look at the problems and build on them.”

Laura, a teacher in Texas, certainly found that to be true. Her husband, Al, had concealed his affair so well that she never suspected a thing. But when he broke down and confessed it to her, it forced them as a couple to deal with each other more openly and honestly than they ever had.

Although the process was agonizing, Laura said their marriage is better than ever.

“Our feelings are so different for each other now, much stronger,” she said. “I think to myself: If he would have kept this to himself for the rest of his life--which he could have--our marriage would still be just so-so. Strange, isn’t it? So much pain to feel so good.”

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Patrick Kampert writes for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.