Ah, the scandalous 2010s: Anthony Weiner’s sexting, Fifty Shades of Grey, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son in love. It’s in this fertile soil that Ashley Madison, the prominent online site dedicated to extramarital affairs, has a household name. The website and its intentionally catchy slogan — “Life is short, have an adventure” — seemed to shape a decade full of sordid vileness and sensationalist excitement.
But when I recently received an email from the Ashley Madison press team, my first reaction was, “Does this still exist?” (I’m not alone here: the first search recommended when you type the company into Google: “Does Ashley Madison still exist?” “?”»)
It’s not just that the site has suffered one of the most notorious data breaches of the 21st century, revealing millions of member accounts and exposing the affairs of government officials, celebrities, and probably your school’s softball coach. It’s also that in the golden age of “Ethical Non-Monogamy,” when New York magazine publishes “A Practical Guide to Polyamory” on the cover and top celebrities talk kindly about their open marriages, one has to wonder if everyone still has “flings,” especially on a site older than Facebook.
But Paul Keable, the site’s chief strategy officer, says online-initiated infidelity is alive and well. Keable said the company has more than 365,000 new listings each month, a figure that has remained “relatively stable” for several years. a tendency to minimize vacations. ) The site had about 38 million members at its peak in 2015, before the brief knowledge, which is more than apps like Hinge and Raya today.
Without a hint of irony, Keable cautioned that the explanation why Ashley Madison remains popular, even in the age of oversaturation dating apps, is its commitment to privacy. While other apps require users to blatantly claim their preference for non-monogamy, through expressing his name and face, he said, “Not a lot of people want that. They don’t need to fight for it. They want to find what they’re looking for [and] they don’t tell everybody. “
Ashley Madison’s motto is “Life is short. To have a business. “
At this point, the site seemed very strict. When I created a checking account to explore the site and receive more information, my account was suspended almost without delay; the result, the PR team told me, of having indicated in my biography that I’m a journalist on mission (“We just ask for that”). It does not attempt to interview members through the platform or compromise the anonymity of our members,” the company said through the PR team. )The company showed up to put me in touch with members for anonymous interviews, but when I said I’d like to know their full names for my own records, to make sure they were genuine people, they subsidized me.
When, regardless, I was sent back to the online page, which turns out wasn’t updated since 2010, I was surprised by what I saw. There were a large number of men in their thirties and forties who reported being “attached,” yet a notable proportion (about a third, by my rough estimate) were in their twenties and twenties. A giant number of them were “lonely” or single, an odd trend for an online site that claims to be the leader in “married dating. “
As it turns out, those calculations weren’t too far off base. According to data shared through the company with The Daily Beast, the site is now 40% Gen Z, up from 37% in 2022. And according to a statement from the site, 28% of active users are single men, or 70%. A percentage of them said they were not for other single women, but married women.
A poster of Ashley Madison in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the 2010s.
Curious as to why a young single man would need to date a married woman, I agreed to an absolutely anonymous interview with a guy I’ll call Chris, whose true calling I don’t know and who, as far as I know, could be an Ashley Madison worker posing as a divorced father in South Central Philadelphia.
Anyway, Chris, who claimed to be in his forties, told me that he joined the organization a little over a year ago, so that it would be less difficult to reunite after his divorce. She has a “pretty demanding” full-time assignment and between that and taking care of her son, she said, she doesn’t have a lot of time for an appointment. She further added, “Divorce sucks. It’s kind of a ruined quote for me.
When she tried other dating sites, she only met other people who were looking for committed and long-lasting relationships. He checked in with Ashley Madison, with some trepidation, for someone he wouldn’t disappoint. And he found out: For the next year, he says, he’s been dating a married woman from his region whose husband should be “on the same page. “
“There’s not a lot of responsibility, not a lot of time and effort,” he said of the deal. “We try to pass the time in combination with the schedules that allow us, but it’s not full participation. “
“I said, ‘I’m going to fall in love with you. I’m going to ask you to leave your husband. ‘
Chris’s story turns out to be compatible with the knowledge provided through Ashley Madison: 16% of single male members surveyed through the site said they appreciated not having to worry about “unspoken classic rules” like waiting to talk about sex; 11% said they like to be “on the same page when it comes to engagement”; Another 11% said they liked being able to convey their expressed sexual preferences; And nearly one-third said they signed up for the organization for a combination of those reasons. Bottom line: Single men sign up for Ashley Madison for easy, no-strings-attached sex.
I have cautiously reviewed the knowledge provided through the team; In the afterlife, the site has lied to its members by creating fake “bots” to flirt with married men to get them to use it for longer. He also criticized for buying fake domain names that criticize the site and showering them with positive reviews. . Honesty is not exactly their policy. (In an emailed reaction to this, Keable said that “Ashley Madison’s biggest mistakes are public, and in fact, we’ve learned the most from them. “)
But if accurate, the knowledge provides an interesting insight into how it’s being used. Female members, she says, are more likely to sign up for an unabashedly non-monogamous date — the kind of trendy new deal, I suppose, there was (Ashley Madison doesn’t use the more popular term “ethically non-monogamous” or “ENM” because it doesn’t need to recommend that the rest of its members are doing something unethical). 16% of users who have open dates, 26% are women and only 14% are men.
In reaction to an interview request from one of the women, the company presented written “testimony” from an anonymous woman in her fifties who, in suspicious and professional-sounding language, said Ashley Madison had “helped my dates with my husband. ” and that “he had brought them together by letting them know that our commitment to each other is not interrupted by the presence of external partners. “
Keable said he saw an increasing number of members who had joint accounts, meaning the two were the same account for requesting ancillary items. When asked why someone might opt for Ashley Madison to look for outdoor partners on an open date instead of a dating app. Designed especially for open dating, such as the increasingly popular and positive app Feeld, Keable returned to the concept of privacy.
“I think the biggest difference lies, first and foremost, in the network of people,” Keable said. “If you’re on Feeld, you’ve got to be loud and clear, you’ve got to push this timeline, you’ve got to be ahead of the curve. of a revolution. “
“When you come to Ashley Madison’s house, you know you’re meeting with other people who don’t need their children, their circle of family members or their co-workers to know,” she said. “And there’s a lot of respect for that. “
Ashley Madison, I suggested, was like an educational wheel for non-monogamy, allowing members to incorporate more partners into their relationships without necessarily letting anyone else know they were doing it. If Feeld is rarely a monogamous gathering for loud, proud people, Brooklyn band Ashley Madison is the choice of shy middle-aged suburbawellers looking to soak in silence. (Another statistic: 59% of non-monogamous users said they haven’t told anyone about their open relationship. )
It turns out that the company is looking for this new potential market, recruiting a spokesperson on Dr. Simpson’s page. Tammy Nelson, sexologist and author of the book Open Monogamy: A Guide to Co-creating Your Ideal Relationship Agreement, which provides an air of legitimacy to Ashley Madison’s press releases and interviews. (Nelson wrote a blog post in 2015 about what to do if his Ashley Madison affair is revealed, in which he trusted couples: “Don’t sign divorce papers just yet. “)
Still, if my limited experience on the site is any indication, Ashley Madison hasn’t strayed too far from her roots. Of the 4 posts I gained during the five hours I was active on the site, all were men “tied” for 35 years. For fear of once again provoking my anonymity-obsessed lords, I didn’t send any messages.
Senior Journalist
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