The Women of Ashley Madison Get Real

This is Part Two of The Women of Ashley Madison trilogy. Part One is here.

At least two suicides are being blamed on the hack on Ashley Madison and the release of email addresses and credit card information along with more personal details of its registered users.

I find this tragic on so many levels: a group of people proclaiming righteousness and judgement took it upon themselves to invade the privacy and lives of 37 million people. Once exposed, those people felt that their lives were ruined and that they didn’t deserve to live. Families have been destroyed, marriages ended, jobs lost.

I have no doubt that we will hear about more suicides, divorces and ruined livelihoods in coming weeks. And to what end? 

I once believed that Ashley Madison ruined my life too. I almost ground myself into dust after my affair, but I’m still here and better for the experience it offered me.

When I first started playing around on Ashley Madison, I was bored in my marriage to a great guy with a low sex drive. Our libidos had been mismatched from the beginning but his dried up to non-existent after the birth of our kids and a demanding career.

I tried date night, lost weight and wore something other than sweat pants (sometimes). I feel that I tried to make things work between us sexually but it was becoming laborious. I liked the idea of a  little no-strings-attached fun. Maybe a friends with benefits who was in a similar situation: happy in marriage, unhappy in bed. I certainly felt guilty about the road I was about to embark on but not enough to stop. 

I had a couple of online flirtations and a clumsy dockside grope with one man but no one really inspired me to have a full-fledged affair.

One night while cooking dinner in my suburban home, I received a message via Ashley Madison that caught my attention. It was flirty, charming, respectful and funny. And he was so handsome.. My cheeks flushed, heart beating madly, I emailed a cautious, complimentary response. He responded immediately. He offered a cell number and asked me to text him.

I swigged a huge drink of wine and sent him a text. Once again, he responded straight away and so began an evening of flirtatious conversation and risque photo exchange. We discovered that we had a lot in common – books, music, films – but it was our differences that most intrigued me.

He was a physician who had worked and lived around the world, had older children and had had affairs in the past. His attention and interest in me was delicious and over several days we texted incessantly. He confessed to having an unusually high sex drive and our conversations quickly turned sexual. Thus began a number of one-handed conversations via GChat where we confessed our fantasies and told one another stories. 

I was not dissatisfied with our online affair but I was also curious about what our chemistry would be like in real life. He was persistent in setting up a date yet I kept putting it off. Travel, work, kids, I demurred, but the truth was that I was becoming emotionally attached and worried that he wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Or maybe he would and then I’d really be in trouble. 

After weeks of furious texting and sexting, we finally met one cold, sunny Sunday afternoon. I told my husband that I was going to visit a friend who had just had a baby and would be back in a few hours. No questions asked or suspicions raised. Nerves jangling, I arrived at an apartment in a trendy part of town. Waiting for me in the foyer was the man who would change my life. 

The following months were a whirlwind of divine sex, international travel, proclamations of love and devotion and promises. Promises to love me forever, to never love anyone the way that he loved me, to leave his wife. Although I was deliriously happy and madly in love with him, I still had reservations.

In sharing our histories, he revealed several affairs over the course of his 30 year marriage: from one nighters to affairs spanning a decade, he explained that his wife didn’t really like sex nor did she really like him. They were separated with separate lives and residences but until meeting me, he hadn’t been motivated to move forward with a divorce. I was so madly in love and wracked with guilt over what I was doing to my husband that we decided that it was time for me to leave my marriage as well. 

As I would soon find out, his promises were empty words that turned to smoke and blew away, leaving nothing but ashes….