Verified by 
Infidelity
Infidelity Goes Public
Does Ashley Madison's success mean we're becoming OK with affairs?
Posted May 7, 2015 Reviewed by Davia Sills
In 2001, entrepreneur Noel Biderman launched Ashley Madison, a dating/hookup website designed not to help single people meet, date, and potentially fall in love, but to help people in established relationships engage in sexual infidelity.
He didn’t do this because he wanted to cheat on his wife. In fact, he didn't develop and launch his idea until she signed off on it. (They are still happily married.)
So Ashley Madison was conceived not as the mission statement of a serial philanderer, but as a money-spinner. Biderman saw a market niche and created a product to fill it. Even the company name was a marketing ploy, with its ingenious CEO simply smashing together two sexy-sounding female names.
Since Ashley Madison’s launch, Biderman has been described as “potentially evil” by Businessweek and as “the most hated man on the Internet” by his own marketing team. When you consider the fact that he has successfully monetized what many see as a threat to traditional family values, this is hardly a surprise. Yet, at the same time, Biderman has been lauded as an innovator who saw a window of opportunity and fearlessly pursued it, creating and marketing an entirely digital product more successfully than most web plays not founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Today, Ashley Madison has just shy of 35 million members in 46 countries.
To cash in on his success, Biderman recently announced that Ashley Madison plans to go public later this year, seeking to raise $200 million through a London IPO. This despite the fact that Biderman unsuccessfully pursued an IPO in Toronto in 2011. Apparently, at that time, investors weren’t yet willing to back what Ashley Madison was perceived to be.
So why does Biderman think he’ll be successful this time around? Two significant reasons. First and foremost, Ashley Madison has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.
Sales topped $115 million in 2014 alone, with an estimated 20 to 25 percent profit margin. That’s an almost fourfold increase over 2009. Money talks, and Ashley Madison’s reported income/profit stream now speaks loudly and clearly.
The second reason Biderman may be willing to take another shot at an IPO is that social mores, especially those centered on sex and romance, have evolved significantly, even since 2011. In a recent interview discussing the IPO, Biderman talked as much about social change as about his company’s rising revenue:
“We launched in South Korea [in 2014], where adultery was illegal. We got blocked, got banned. The government basically interceded on that basis: It’s an illegal behavior. Well, then there was a Supreme Court challenge to the whole thing, and it turned out the Supreme Court changed its mind and reversed a 63-year-old law. Those are watershed moments in society. We really just felt that this was our moment in time.”
Nevertheless, in the same interview, Biderman acknowledges that even though social change is occurring rapidly, and 2015 may, in fact, be the right time for Ashley Madison to go public, there are still serious challenges to his market success:
“I’ve been in meetings where everything is going well and someone storms out, and I’ll say, ‘What’s up with them?’ Well, their wife just went off with the neighbor. We are going to be economics plus emotions… That’s how our valuation will go. We will have more massive swings because of emotions… It’s a thousand-year-old narrative we’re trying to overcome.”
Still, it seems clear that Biderman believes the societal anti-infidelity hurdle has been sufficiently cleared in the last four years, and that the formerly sacrosanct paradigm of monogamy in marriage (and in other serious intimate relationships) is no longer as inviolable as it once was.
He’s probably right.
Thanks to digital interconnectivity, romantic attachment looks much different today than in the past. Now a person can meet someone through a dating site or app, flirt with that individual via text message and IM, date and be sexual with that person via webcam, and brag about this wonderful new relationship on Facebook and other social media—finding this intimate connection entirely fulfilling both emotionally and physically, even though he or she has never been in the same room (or even the same country) as the other person. This is true whether the people involved are single or already part of an established romantic relationship.
Of course, this easy access to willing romantic and sexual partners is only half the equation for Ashley Madison. The second, more important half of the formula is that digital technology has caused many people, especially younger people, to view intimate relationships differently than their predecessors.
For these “digital natives,” who’ve never known life without high-speed Internet connectivity, the world is a much larger, more open space. They can meet someone half a world away, and that is no barrier to friendship or romance. Plus, there are literally millions of people to choose from—not just the few they meet through friends, family, and work. Further, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, it is now relatively easy to juggle multiple intimate connections. In time, for some, this romantic “multi-tasking” becomes the norm.
Put another way, in the digital world, many people, especially but not exclusively younger ones, are finding that the monogamy box of yesteryear—when a cohesive family unit was needed for survival—is neither necessary nor even desired. Instead, these individuals, both male and female, are perfectly capable of bonding with and/or exploring their sexuality with more than one partner.
As such, things like polyamory and open relationships may be becoming more common. Often, these individuals have a primary relationship (perhaps a marriage) but are nonetheless free to find sexual and romantic fulfillment elsewhere. In their world, infidelity is no longer universally frowned upon; it may even be seen as part of the intimate bonding experience.
Whether you view this as good or bad probably depends on your age and life experience. From my perspective, as a therapist who has specialized for more than two decades in the treatment of intimacy-related issues, my take on sexual and romantic activity outside a primary relationship is this: If both parties in the relationship can agree, without coercion of any kind, that certain behaviors are OK, and both parties then operate within these mutually agreed-upon boundaries, then who am I to stop them?
It doesn’t matter if the boundaries they choose would work for me because it’s not my relationship; it’s theirs. (Where I tend to see problems with this approach is when the boundaries are unilaterally set rather than mutually agreed upon, or when the boundaries are simply not respected—especially when the cheating partner keeps his or her romantic and/or sexual infidelity a secret.)
Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear to me—and Ashley Madison’s pending IPO is simply one more indicator—that the once incontrovertible “marriage = monogamy” paradigm has shifted, and that extramarital sex is no longer the taboo it once was. For many couples, certain behaviors that would have automatically been considered "cheating" in the past can now be discussed and agreed to as "OK" prior to or even during a relationship. As long as these mutually agreed-upon boundaries are respected, and sexual and/or romantic secrets are not kept, these relationships can not only survive but thrive.
