They had met through a friend.
Jordan Durand, then 17, worked at a music store in the town of Lindsay, Ont., and often saw a girl named Didre who came in to have her guitar fixed.
Through her, Durand was set up on a blind coffee date with Shanice.
She was cute, and unlike his last girlfriend, seemed genuine and focused on her goal of university.
From April to July 2009 they were together, and then Durand left for Algonquin National Park for an eight-week summer job as a ranger.
She sent him letters every week until the fifth week, when they suddenly stopped coming. Durand had been expecting this — they weren’t actually that far apart geographically and it would only be a few more weeks before he came back.
When he arrived back in Lindsay in late August, he asked if she wanted to hang out, and she sent him a text saying she needed to talk to him about something.
She explained to him that during the summer she’d been seeing someone else, and wanted to break off their relationship.
“I was upset,” Durand said. “I felt that I had been used a little bit, because before then it had been a ‘classic’ relationship where the guy pays for everything.
“I felt a little bit inadequate, because obviously she preferred another guy over me,” he said.
The act
Durand, now 19 and a student at Carleton, is far from alone.
There are many victims of infidelity and many reasons why people commit infidelity.
In a 1995 study, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, it was found that 77 per cent of the study’s participants felt extramarital sex was always wrong.
Despite this strong disapproval of infidelity, a 2006 study, Dating, Marital, and Hypothetical Extradyadic Involvements: How Do They Compare?, reports that 70 per cent of American dating couples committed infidelity.
Among the reasons why people do it, one of the most common seems to be opportunity: “That is, that they find themselves in a situation in which they see an opportunity,” said Brian H. Spitzberg, a professor of communication in San Diego State University, Calif., who has written and co-authored several books on infidelity, including The Dark Side of Interpersonal Communication.
“Now that usually isn’t enough in itself and usually there are some problems in the relationship,” Spitzberg said.
Ruth Houston, an infidelity expert based in New York and author of Is He Cheating on You? – 829 Telltale Signs, said men and women have different reasons for cheating.
“Men tend to cheat for primarily sexually reasons, or ego-embellishment reasons,” she said.
“Women tend to cheat for emotional reasons — that is, it’s not just about sex.”
Houston said age is an important factor in the reasons for cheating.
“Many young women tend to cheat for the same reasons as men, that is, that they’re cheating for sexual reasons. Older women are looking for that emotional connection,” Houston said.
Physical vs. emotional
Men and women often view these two types of cheating — physical and emotional cheating — differently, because of perceived levels of threat.
According to Spitzberg, “males tend to experience their females’ sexual infidelity as somewhat worse, whereas females tend to experience their males’ emotional infidelity as somewhat worse.”
The basis of this lies in evolution.
“Basically 5 million years of evolution have led people to be very attentive to losing their possibilities of guaranteeing their mating security,” he said.
“The male is very concerned that his partner doesn’t become impregnated by someone who isn’t him,” he said. “In essence that would waste his time and effort in the relationship, because he would then be cuckolded and investing time and effort in raising a child that isn’t his.”
“Females in contrast don’t want to lose a partner [emotionally] to another partner because they are more likely to depend upon the male for helping them raise their children,” he said.
However, Spitzberg cautions against drawing too many conclusions on how men and women see cheating.
“They both get jealous, they both react to it badly, and so what differences you are seeing are very subtle,” he said.
Either type of infidelity offers unique dangers to a couple, according to Houston.
“The main difference between emotional infidelity and sexual infidelity is that it’s very rare to break up a relationship purely for sexual infidelity,” Houston said. “However if there’s an emotional bond, even if there’s no sex involved, that emotional bond could cause the cheater to cast aside that long-term relationship.”
One of the problems with emotional infidelity is that people don’t always know that they are doing it.
“Sometimes very ordinary things lead to infidelity and people don’t realise it,” Houston said.
It could be as simple as having a work-mate with whom you start sharing personal information with, according to Houston.
“[If] you are keeping some aspect of this emotional relationship from your mate, then you know you are into an emotional affair.”
The cheating business
For Noel Biderman, affairs are big business.
Biderman is the president of AvidLife Media and of Ashley Madison, an online dating service with eight million members — for married people looking to have affairs.
Biderman purchased the company in 2007 and has since expanded to eight other countries, including the US.
And he plans to expand further.
“To have a hundred million members within the next five years is not that out of the question,” Biderman said.
Ashley Madison has been aggressive in advertising its services, but has experienced some backlash.
It had one of its commercials banned from the SuperBowl just last week, and recently a bid for advertising on the Toronto Transit Commission was blocked by councillors.
Biderman said he feels this plays into his hands.
The website’s success shows there is a large market of people looking for affairs, which he attributes to a changing attitude towards relationships.
“I think there is a lower tolerance for being unhappy in your relationships,” Biderman said.
“We have a heightened sensibility that our neighbours are doing this and we’re not. And so your tolerance level just drops. And so that’s just the era we’re living in. With a past connection just a click away on Facebook and a future one on Ashley Madison, that’s just too big a temptation to let slide.”
“There’s a sense of entitlement that a lot of people have,” he said.
“Your neighbours are indulging in oral sex every week, and having threesomes on a regular basis, being with a different ethnic group, and all you’ve had is missionary vanilla sex — you might sit back and say ‘Oh my God, I’m behind the times,’” Biderman said.
Biderman said he doesn’t see himself as an enabler of bad behaviour, rather as an entrepreneur in a market looking for his services.
“It’s an entrepreneur’s responsibility to explore new marketplaces yet unexplored,” Biderman said.
Biderman, who is married with two children, said that if he were to be the victim in an affair, he wouldn’t blame an inanimate object, such as an online dating service.
“I would take a long look in the mirror,” he said.
Whether or not people agree with the premise of the company, Ashley Madison doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
According to the company website, Ashley Madison has almost 750,000 Canadian members, and out of those over 70,000 are aged 18-25.
Overcoming
With businesses like Ashley Madison making it easier than ever to have an affair, it must be asked how infidelity can be avoided.
“Generally speaking, open communication,” Spitzberg said.
“What I mean is communicating with each other about your expectations about relations with people outside [the relationship].”
“Be a good partner — that is, keep your partner satisfied,” he said. “We know that infidelity is one of the primary causes of divorce and relationship break-up.”
According to Houston we have to understand what the problems of infidelity are.
“You’ve got to set boundaries, you’ve got to be aware of the dangers,” Houston said. “The best way you can protect yourself is if you educate yourself about the dangers out there — what you need to watch for.”
Recovery
If the success of Ashley Madison is any indicator, many people are becoming victims in affairs.
Martin Rovers is a marriage counsellor at Capital Counselling Services in Ottawa and has been seeing couples hurt by affairs for over 25 years. He said he makes couples go through several important steps in their recovery. According to Rovers, the first step is to deal with the emotion.
This is followed by telling the story of the affair.
The couple must then try to re-establish trust.
The fourth step is to identify what drove the offender to commit the act.
Even if the victim in the affair chooses to break up the relationship, Rovers said it is still important to forgive.
“You don’t want to carry the anger, the hurt and the mistrust of an affair,” Rover said.
“You want to let it go — that’s forgiveness — let it go.”
Moving on
Durand had to let his experience go.
“Since I had such a short time to react, I didn’t really get any closure out of it, and all the reacting happened when she wasn’t around,” Durand said.
Durand was left with the problem of how to deal with these emotions.
“Basically, I got rid of all the stuff that she’d sent me during the summer,” he said. “That hurt the most I think, getting that stuff during the summer and then realizing that during that time she had been cheating on me.”
He said he and his friend Charlie used a common but effective method for coping.
“I had a bunch of letters and mementos she had sent me over the summer. I had a woodstove in my basement and we basically just went down and set it all on fire.”
“So it took a lot of time, and a lot of getting rid of stuff.”
“That was my last major relationship before the relationship I’m in currently, and it’s made me a little more wary, a little more closed to the person I’m with right now. It’s made me a little more observational of day-to-day things. Any sort of little signs,” he said.
“I believe looking back on my relationship with Shanice that there were enough signs there for me to pick up on what happened, and I didn’t. So I am definitely just keeping a closer eye on reactions to questions about day-to-day stuff, basically just being a lot more careful,” he said.
“I think a person has to go through some sort of hardship in a relationship, not necessarily infidelity, but definitely a hardship before they start to understand what it means to be in a relationship.”