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Internet infidelity

Today's divorce rate is higher than 50 percent -- and it's increasing. Divorce lawyers and marriage counselors say Internet-abetted infidelity, romance originating in chat rooms and fueled by e-mails, is now one of the leading factors in marital breakdowns.

Log on to any search engine and query married and flirting or married personals and check out the results. There's certainly no lack of outlets for people hoping to find extramarital love on the Internet.

Internet infidelity is very common, says John Ciaccio, owner of New Jersey-based A-plus Investigations, which does Internet investigations and e-mail retrieval for customers in the Lehigh Valley and northwest New Jersey.

We've built an entire department to deal with it, he says. Each year people get new computers; they get more computers. And each year we get more phone calls about spouses cheating online.

His company has been investigating Internet infidelity cases for the past five years.

I've been in this business 25 years, he says. Cheaters used to communicate through beepers, then cell phones. The Internet is the new way to communicate.

David Greenfield, of West Hartford, Conn., a psychologist and author of the book, Virtual Addiction, says the convenience and seeming anonymity of the Internet have attracted a new breed of adulterers, people who might have been too timid to make their first forays into infidelity face-to-face.

Many spouses who engage in cyberaffairs consider their online romances to be harmless, he explains.

But the spouses of those who are cheating don't see it that way, he says. It's often done on the same computer they both use at home. It's like having someone else in your own bedroom.

Perhaps that's why a whole host of Web sites and businesses dedicated to stopping cyberaffairs have also been created. Web sites like Chatcheaters.com and InfidelityCheck.org describe an array of surveillance products capable of tracking a cheating spouse's e-mails and online chats, including some that can monitor each key stroke in real time.

That's similar to what a real-life investigator does, however, an investigator also knows what's in the fine print of Internet monitoring software programs.

Monitoring online activity is deemed illegal by the court system, Ciaccio says. But any information stored on the hard drive is accessible and admissible in court.

Sandra Morris, a San Diego-based attorney who is president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, says the spread of Internet infidelity has raised some complicated issues about computer privacy.

A spouse may have a misplaced sense of entitlement to spy, she says. There are prohibitions against electronic eavesdropping, though a lot of people feel that when someone's cheating, all bets are off.

John Mayoue, a divorce lawyer from Atlanta, says federal statutes outlawing interception of electronic communications can apply within a marriage.

However, there is a perceived difference between information obtained in password-restricted areas of a spouse's personal computer and information obtained from a shared family computer.

If the client owns the computer we can send a technician in to image the hard drive, Ciaccio says. We can check out e-mail and Web sites visited if that's the case.

So how many of these online conversations lead to real-life affairs?

It's been our experience that the more they communicate, the more likely it is they will meet in person, Ciaccio says.

Such was John LaSage's experience. He founded Chatcheaters.com after his wife of 23 years left him for a man she was having an online affair with in New Zealand. Chatcheaters averages 400 visitors a day.

LaSage says he was devastated to discover, after his wife had left, that she had engaged in erotic e-mail and chat room correspondence with several men.

Betsy Walton-Phillips, a licensed clinical social worker for St. LUKe's Hospital's Behavioral Health Services in Fountain Hill, says the devastation of discovering a virtual affair is no different than finding out about a real-life affair.

Infidelity is a symptom of a greater problem in the marriage -- whether the infidelity is committed online or in real life, she says.

The big difference, she says, is that individuals committing the infidelity on the Internet are more likely to deny or minimize the importance of the online affair.

Each case is different and each individual's perspective is different, she says, But the key common denominator in all affairs is the accountability to fidelity. The Internet is not an exception to that accountability.

Furthermore, she says by concentrating on an online friendship, the focus is taken away from the marriage and the issues at hand. She has seen the success of marital counseling sessions that were sought after online affairs can go both ways -- some end in divorce, other couples choose to work through the underlying problems.

A University of Florida researcher, Beatriz Mileham, studied Internet infidelity as part of her doctoral dissertation, interviewing 76 men and 10 women who used popular chat rooms for the married, but flirtin' crowd.

Most of the participants insisted they loved their spouses but sought a romantic encounter online because of boredom or their partner's disinterest in sex, Mileham found.

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AMY SATKOFSKY
The Express-Times