This blog could actually be a 100 part series, in the last 3 years I have heard thousands of divorcees “divorce stories”, and I am pretty certain I have heard it all or close to it all. One of the more shocking things about cheating is like divorce it doesn’t seem to discriminate. No matter what age, race, sex or religion cheating is rampant, especially gaining momentum in the years leading up to divorce, a kind of glaringly huge symptom that is an unhappy or unsatisfied marriage.
As I became a divorce expert and a sounding board for people’s deepest darkest fears and secrets, I began to sympathize more and more with the cheaters. For the most part they were kind, sweet, educated and articulate people who used sex with others or emotional bonding with others as an escape, a band aid on the bullet hole of the under lying feeling that something wasn’t quite right any more, within the union of their marriage.
The lists of things wrong with the marriages vary, but common themes of lack or sex, dull sex, lack of affection, attention, compatibility wants and likes are cited. The old adage that if you are not filling a certain need in your spouse, rest assure there are a plethora of other people willing too, seems to ring true. Sometimes it can be that people try to fill each other’s needs, just they never really have that chemistry, that sexual compatibility or maybe there is a giant age gap, that makes long term marriage harder to relate to each other. The point is through a ridiculous amount of people both men and women cheat, some have literally never been faithful to their spouses, cheating on them from the day they are married. Living a double life having two loves is the norm for these women and men. How do so many of them get away with it for so long, well in a word TECHNOLOGY! Technology is a cheaters best friend from meeting potential mistresses and lovers to facilitating these relationships for week’s, months and in many cases years, we can all thank technology.
Where cheaters meet, well from Linked In which I can personally attest is a married man’s stealth way to try and find women because it is disguised as “work”, related, remember it has a private instant messaging system where you can happily pursue people on there till your heart is content. Then there are the hundreds of free dating apps, Tinder, Pof, Zoosk, Ok Cupid where you can register and don’t even have to post a photo and can scroll thru potentially millions of would be affair partners. I am going to say in my experience in online dating approx. 50% of married men will flat out tell you they are married, while the other 50% will play with some serious fire pretending they are single or separated, while their wife and kids are at home. Then for the hard core serious married people looking for affairs AshleyMadison.com with 37 million members, just shows how prevalent cheating is across the board. There of course are the old school ways to meet potential affair partners, friends of friends, coworkers, secretary’s , spouses friends, conventions and work travel all put you in contact with thousands of potential new partners. Now to how we so easily schedule meetings or rendezvous and fall in love with these people.
The internet and smart phones are a blessing we can connect to so many all over the world instantly, but this same technology allows adulterers to talk, call, video chat, instant messages, email and text, a lot of times with out a trace. The days of being able to look at phone records or email accounts and know a spouse isn’t cheating are over. Apps such as Whatsapp, Viber, Tango, Confide, KIK, Aim, Yahoo Messenger and a hundred more allow you to instant massage each other 24/7 without your phone being alerted, no sound, no text pop up and no trace. So your spouse can be calling their lovers, every waking min they aren’t with you and never getting caught. People can easily and freely set up new email accounts, secondary Facebook accounts, even second phone numbers with apps such as Google Voice and Line 2. The best part is even if your spouse catches you on one app a little too long, you can just delete that one, move to another one over and over again to continue the affairs. Your phone also allows you to store contacts under any name, so if you like to live a little more dangerously you can change Tiffany to Tony, or John to Jane and no one is none the wiser who is calling or texting you. I think FaceTime and Skype should be given special mentions to facilitate cheating, because it lets you see, hear your lover say “I love you” or have a quick cyber-sex session while your spouse pops out to run an errand and no one would ever know. Of course almost every regular social media site now has instant messaging and video chat too and in a few seconds people can set up new accounts and connect to anyone they wish to also. I even have heard of wives forcing their husband to get a new phone number, which the husband then immediately gives his mistress, so there are so many ways around infidelity its impossible to stop.
The next point that makes cheating so easily undetectable, is more and more of us work unstructured hours, not from one place, we work flexi time or travel a lot, or have a territory to cover and basically unless your spouse attaches a GPS to your body and tracks you, it’s very hard to tell where anyone is at any given time, non less who they are with. You can easily now even spend entire weeks with your lover on business trips, whether real or fake ones you have set up, no one really can find evidence of these trips. Technology I believe also as a byproduct makes these affairs happen quicker and more easily, because texting you can do even sitting in front of your spouse 24/7, and in even a few short days you can emotionally feel connected or in lust/ love with someone in a very short amount of time. The other interesting fun fact is most spouses have locked phones, and there is a kind of unwritten agreement that if you don’t look at mine, I won’t look at yours, maybe this too is an indicator of so many people being up to no good through technology. Even if you have unlocked phone though easy to get around, by hiding apps, using decoy apps, you really do kind of need to be the FBI to find proof these days.
The last reason so many people get away with cheating is a psychological reason, we really don’t want to know, this concept of nine tenths of reality is perception means that we go through life just believing a large part what we see, but mostly what we want to believe. I constantly talk to women who turn a blind eye to their husbands philandering ways, because in their minds, it’s the easier path to take. They aren’t often willing to give up the lifestyle or perks of being who ever wife, so will conveniently choose to not see it. Men do this too, someone once told me it wasn’t until his wife’s 7th affair that he left her.
We all I think to some point suffer from low self-esteem or self-worth, but I believe women and men who stay in these marriage really at their core feel that they couldn’t do any better than that. You can even show these people proof or evidence of their spouse’s extra marital affairs, and they will choose not to believe it. Partly due to their own agenda too, maybe they want money, inheritance, a baby, whatever they will just choose to stay and ignore facts. One of my all-time favorite quotes is “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true”. Think about it we often don’t want to admit we are married to men/women who say they love us to our faces, while also pursuing women or men online and telling those people they are the true loves of our lives. It’s not easy to see things clearly it takes a strong person to remove the rose tinted glasses and see things for what and who they are. The last thought I have on this is, if we go through life living a lie, how is anyone really truly happy doesn’t everyone deserve truth, loyalty and honesty, and with the rise of open marriages and agreements, maybe this is the directions marriages are going in, a more open form of adultery, because with technology ever advancing and constant temptation, opportunity and desire the guesstimate that up to 80% of people at one time during their marriage cheats will surely only grow.
Tiffany Beverlin
CEO/Founder DreamsRecycled.com
tiffany@dreamsrecycled.com
.png)
