You're Probably Being Cheated On: Wives Now Cheating Just as Much as Husbands

If Mother’s Day is all about Mom, then the day after Mother’s Day is all about Mom getting some—and not from Dad. 

Since 2010, every Monday following Mother’s Day has seen an increase in female sign-ups for the affair website AshleyMadison.com—and each year’s increase has been greater than the previous: 214 percent increase in female sign-ups in 2010; 262 percent in 2011; 303 percent in 2012; 313 percent in 2013; and 442 percent in 2014. In 2015? They hit 507 percent.

That’s dark.

On the day of this so-called spike, we called Noel Biderman, the site’s CEO and founder (and married father of two)—the guy who isn’t so much leading us out of that darkness as saying, hey, while we’re all here, we might as well start having clandestine sex with each other. Highlights from our conversation:

How’s it going?
It was a good day. The post-Mother’s Day effect is always a positive one around here. It happens after Father’s Day as well. And then it happens after Valentine’s Day. And it actually happens after New Year’s also.

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And after Thanksgiving as well.
Yeah, I think that’s just thrust the family together in high-stress situations… Even a typical weekend, the busiest time in our service week in and week out, is Monday morning. And that’s not because we do all this Sunday night advertising on NFL football games. That’s because the weekend, for the most part, is full of expectations, right? Of connecting with your partner, maybe going out on some dinner dates, having sex, whatever. If none of that happens 19 weekends in a row, what are you going to do on the 20th one? You’re gonna say screw that, I’m doing something different.

But so is this just an act out of frustration that’s kind of fleeting or is this something that these members who come on a Monday morning are likely to come back and actually engage?
It’s definitely not fleeting. I think the point I try to make is most people don’t come to an affair lightly… There are places in the world where a woman will be put to death—think about it—she’ll risk her life in the end to have an affair, and it turns out millions of them do. They know the consequences and they still have affairs, because asking someone not to be intimate for the rest of their life is like asking them not to breathe oxygen. It’s a life force. That’s why our business is so successful. It’s not really because I’m the best CEO that the world’s ever seen. It’s because I’m selling a life force, and it’s pretty hard to live without it.

In the past couple years the female memberships are growing at a much faster clip than the male memberships are—is that correct?
Absolutely… In the early days it was married women signing up, looking for married men. That was 99 percent of the communication. Today, 17 percent of that communication is to single men. So there’s not even a word in the English language. We both know what a mistress is. What’s a male mistress? What do we call him? He’s a newfound creature.

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In the last 10 years—the rise of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton might be the next president who herself as survived infidelity—we feel very differently as a society about marriage in general, we get married later and later in life, about monogamy, about having kids, and certainly about unfaithfulness. And women are leading that charge for the most part.

So you’re selling infidelity as a manifestation of female empowerment?
Yeah. You know, I’ve been characterized as many things. Some evil. But almost as like a post-modern feminist. I’m leveling the playing field between two. If you’re married to a women today who out earns you, you’re at the biggest risk of any man of your wife being unfaithful. It’s not about her being blonde. It’s not about her having fake boobs. It’s not about any of these other factors. If she out-earns her male counterpart, if she’s flipped the traditional dynamic. She’s more likely to have an affair than anyone else. And that’s fascinating.

So by those lights, sex is about power, not love?
I think an affair accomplishes a whole bunch of different things. At its core, it’s sex. But it’s also about excitement. People always want excitement… having the same vanilla is boring.

What women want, especially women of power, you know, they might be feared or respected or whatever, but they want that feeling of wanting to pursue them. Of being wanted. So that’s what they’re also looking for in those relationships. So they love it. If they’re 38 and their husband maybe makes love to them once every three months or says one nice thing a year about their hair or whatever, they want some 29-year-old saying you’re the most gorgeous thing ever, you’re like sexual napalm. They want to hear those things.

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If Mother’s Day is all about Mom, then the day after Mother’s Day is all about Mom getting some—and not from Dad. 
What’s clear to me though is it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m married, I don’t know if you’re in a relationship, but I’ve never met a single married person in my life in my travels, who says, yeah, yeah, since I got married, my sex life just gets better and better and better, and now 20 years into it, we are doing it like bunnies every day. It doesn’t work that way… So co-habitation kills intimacy. It just does. That’s a fact of biology, genetics, life. Whatever you want to blame it on. I think that’s irrelevant in time. I’m one of those people who’s just looking at the big data. I’m like the Google of Infidelity. I get to see 1.2 million communication strings sent on my servers everyday. And this is what they’re saying.

What’s the most shocking revelation of all that data?
Let’s start with one like the seven-year itch. It’s not. Men cheat three to four years into their marriage and it coincides with a pregnancy or a first-child being born. That is so offensive to so many women. That’s like the most outlandish thing but again, like the way we started this conversation was, hey, affairs are very pragmatic. It’s kind of like, 19 weekends in a row, a Mother’s Day where you’re totally neglected again, well, why do men do that? Because, prior to that, their sex lives were going a 100 miles an hour. It was whenever they wanted, whatever room they wanted. Now all of a sudden, their partner doesn’t feel up to it. He doesn’t physically like her appearance. Maybe she’s had the baby, is recovering. And men don’t adjust well to being in that desert. And they’re really thirsty. They’re not prepared for that. Nobody took them aside and said, hey, this is the most exciting time of your life, and it’s the worst of your sex life, get ready for it.

It’s a complicated thing. Especially because I’ve seen a quote from you where you’ve said, “Having a sexual relationship is no different than shaking hands.” Would you want to convey something like that to your children?
No, but society might be moving in that direction. Let’s be honest. If you and I could roll back time and go interview somebody for GQ from 1910, and say to them, this is what the future is going to hold, where every woman you date is shaving her bush and the most popular women in the world are there because they made sex tapes, I think that’s a big social convention jump from having somebody exposing their ankles and getting in trouble…

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It seems like it’s [sex] unbridled now. We have moved that. And maybe it’s because you’re one-click away from watching user-generated porn content. And all that content seems like everybody’s swinging or having threesomes or doing all kinds of kinky sex, and so you feel like you’re missing the boat, but there seems to be a boat out there. And we see it a lot. That’s what I meant by the vanilla sex. We see a lot of people communicating on here that this is not that they’re not sexually active with their partner, but that they’re sure not getting the oral sex that they want or the anal sex they want, or, we have a whole section on our site that are females seeking females, so their partner can’t even be that. A lot of times when I read in those communications, those are women that are doing this with some permission of their husband who then wants to watch that, maybe join in, all of those kinds of things.

Given apps like Tinder and Hinge, I guess the social appetite or climate or landscape is changing.
I think that’s important. I have always been accused of developing the darker side of dating. Match and eHarmony were all about meetings so you could hold hands in the park. I was the Darth Vader of dating. I would suggest this: Tinder is so much closer to my business. So much closer.

What does your father-in-law think about this?
Laughs If he didn’t think I was jerk before that, he certainly does now. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to be in this space and maybe infidelity was more of a personal thing to him, it was more of a professional thing to me. I saw it as business.

His son is in university and he came and interned for me last summer. So maybe things have changed. Maybe he has come to recognize what I have been trying to tell him for a decade plus, which is I can’t force anyone to have an affair…people will do this no matter what. So why not let them do it between two like-minded people versus an unsuspecting person or in the workplace or whatever? What is wrong with that?!

You have to kind of sit back and say, maybe actually society is better off [with] that steam valve.

By Clay Skipper

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