Noel Biderman
As the extra marital affair continues to rise, we talk to Noel Biderman, Founder and CEO of AshleyMadison.com who has been called ‘The King of Infidelity’ since the launch of the dating website in 2002. He tells us why people have affairs and why judgement is often misplaced.
Why are 25-34 year old women most likely to seek an affair outside of marriage?
‘That is a demographic that we see because we are spawning digital infidelity if you will, so that is the starting point. An affair is something that happens in stages. It certainly doesn’t happen as you are walking down the street or while you are waiting in a queue and you decide to have an affair with that person. It takes years to build upon, and we are the gateway drug, where you can dip your toe into the infidelity waters. It makes a lot of sense that we see this demographic.’
‘At the same time there is a lot of biology in play here. We see on Ashley Madison tens of thousands of men over the age of sixty using our service and we really have no corresponding women of that age demographic. So there are two things in effect here, a new generation, a new mentality and the internet, technology, but also biology. There is just a different biological drive between men and women. That is not to say sixty year old women don’t pursue sex but it seems to be that they are not interested in extra marital sex.’
Why is 1-3 months the typical life cycle of an affair?
‘Affairs and cheating get crossed over. Eternally we think of cheating as something much more short term or a one time encounter. An affair brings a bit more depth to things, but filmmakers have given us the perception that people have affairs, fall in love and that goes on for a decade. That is a very tiny percentage, for the most part, women like men have children to raise and jobs to go to and love their home existence and their partner. What they are really missing is the passion; that is what we hear time and time again, there is no passion. What they are seeking is a way to fill that passion void. It seems to be a temporary need, it seems to come and go. So they pursue something like this, they get that passion fulfilment. It re-invokes them and they get that sexual drive back with their own partner, they go to the gym more often, they are better at work. It’s not something that they pursue long term. That is not to say that it is not serial in behaviour, they may come back to it again three years later. In its need period it seems to be short lived, which is about 1-3 months.’
How can women gaining power at work affect a couple’s sex life?
‘There are a couple of factors in play here. First you have to look at society, where do they come from? One hundred plus years ago we would paint the women with a big red ‘A’ on her if she behaved in this manner. Even more recently, if a women had an affair, we threatened to take her children away, she was an unfit mother, we took away her financial capabilities so she had to struggle to survive. We stopped with this notion, if a women had an affair and her marriage breaks down so be it, she still has to take care of the kids, she may be the most qualified to do so, she still has to pay alamoney. We removed social constraints and that led to more female infidelity. At the same time when women entered the workplace, the financial freedom, their ability to say that if their marriage broke down, that they would still have their career or to live in a great flat. That was what removed of some shackles. The more powerful a women gets in her career, the more people she meets, the more economic freedom she has, then the equality is growing between her husband and herself. The more her husband feels small and less sexually attracted to her will all come into play here. Risk taking is fundamental part of being successful, so it doesn’t matter what career path you take if you are a risk taker in your career then it’s very likely that you are a risk taker in your personal life as well.’
Why are attitudes towards infidelity changing fast?
‘That has been driven by women. Once we decided from a legal framework that it wasn’t good use of society’s time to debate in a family court who did what to whom, we started to have this more simplified notion of divorce. If couples want to separate, let them separate, divide the property, put the children in the best possible position to succeed. That was a huge paradigm shift. It wasn’t that different from saying that women should go to school and become doctors in the workplace. We have been playing catch up the whole time, but today there is more women in MBA programmes than men, there are more women in medical schools then men, they are burning their male counterparts in their thirties, it’s a women’s world if you will.’
How is technology helping to better arrange an affair now?
Let’s think back 15-20 years, if you wanted to have an affair you had to pretend to go and walk the dog and go out to a payphone and call your potential lover. Now you have a personal device and your Ashley Madison app is right there on your I phone so whether it’s a future lover on the app or past lover on Facebook, you are so close to finding someone who thinks you are wonderful, attractive and capable. All the things that are currently missing in your relationship. I think that is huge part of what is going on, technology has changed it for everyone, it’s the way to dip your toe in to the infidelity waters. For so many they sign up and build a profile, they send a message, they exchange a photo and all of a sudden it feels comfortable for them or it doesn’t. It’s much less daunting to do it that way than to walk up to colleague at work, who you have no idea if they would be open to an affair or not and you put it out there. That could come with whole host of reactions! The way affairs were perceived before the internet was way more challenging than it is now. Technology has at least made the dipping the toe in the waters far easier. Consummating probably just remains as emotionally challenging.
Why are women not generally wired for one nights stands?
We have seen some distinctions over the last couple of years and we have now been doing this for 11 years and founded the notion of an infidelity based website. We have worked with institutions all over the world and professors, in the UK, we work with Dr Eric Anderson who has been studying the female monogamy gap. It’s interesting; women come to an affair with some different mentalities than men. Men come to an affair believing that this is their biology that they are not abnormal for wanting to do this. Women come to the affair because their husbands have perhaps not lived up to what they wanted them to be. Believing that they are almost abnormal in this desire and so it tends not to be something that gets satisfied in a one night stand because it doesn’t come in their mind from a biological place. Cohabitation between partners leads to a decrease in sexual desire and this really brings much more into the mix for them. It is something that they work through in a different way. We have worked for the best part of decade to get men to have a better understanding of what women are looking for and for women to understand what men are looking for. I think that is why Ashley Madison has been as successful as it has been.
Please can you tell us a bit about your book Cheaters Prosper: How infidelity will save the modern marriage?
‘Time and time again I have heard people say that I have a ‘home wrecking service’ and that if someone cheats that they are a terrible person. I felt compelled to be a voice of reason to say if a woman is having an affair or a celebrity or an athlete or a politician, these aren’t sociopathic people, they are just like you and I, they are regular people. They just struggle with the concept of monogamy because it is not in our genetics. Why they have an affair is really important. If they wanted to leave and really wanted to be selfish and put sex above all else they would leave and some people do that. They find someone younger and better and they move on and walk out the door. There are huge consequences to that. Children raised in single parent households, do have more problems with drug and alcohol use, do have less of an opportunity for education, do have more encounters with the law. There really are consequences for separating families. When people are having an affair they are trying to have their cake and eat it too, they want to stay married and raise their children. They want to keep their home life and want to stay close to their extend family. They just don’t want monogamy anymore; it just doesn’t work for them. What the book is trying to highlight is those mistaken notions and to say to people that there is not a single study that has been done to any effect on the topic of infidelity. Cheaters don’t put their hands up, you can’t watch them real time. What you a get are very biased and very small study samples. Undergraduate students are not a great sample to base an infidelity study on. Here we are on Ashley Madison seeing 25,000 people sign up a day, sending hundreds of thousands of communications. We are a fly on the wall watching these self-publications and that is for the first time ever telling us the truth about infidelity. When and why we pursue it. I just wanted to share some of what I was seeing in that book. There is a lot of mistaken notions and a lot of judgement thrust at these people and I’m not so sure it was fair.’
Ashley Madison arose from an article your read stating the 30 per cent of online daters pose as singles, so can you tell us about that light bulb moment and how it all took off from there?
‘That really was the light-bulb moment; hundreds of other people read the article to but they continued flipping the page. I think if you are going to have a light-bulb moment you have to have a history and a confluence of notions. For me, I was a sports attorney at the time, representing professional athletes and I spent a lot of time negotiating their contracts and just as much time dealing with their domestic issues. These often involved unfaithfulness so I think it was part of my business DNA. It was something that I understood and saw, it wasn’t from personal perspective but from a business perspective. I thought there may be a business engendered around that behaviour pattern and that is where the idea for Ashley Madison came from.’
What is next for you and Ashley Madison?
‘If you and I were talking about traditional online dating, people date differently in the UK than they do in India; we would have to involve their parents in the process. In China there would have to a discussion around family name and economics. To build a universal product to satisfy all of those would be really challenging to bring a dating product around the world. Unfaithfulness is pretty universal, people cheat the exact same way the world over, we really have a chance to become the first ever global dating company. We have a chance to be on every continent and in every country and provide the exact same product in all of those places. So that is our ambition, to be the most global dating service in the world because the behaviour pattern we address is the most global. Even in counties in the world where unfortunately women are put to death for having affairs. They still have them; it is still that much of a biological draw for them that they are willing to risk their lives to have these affairs.’
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