فصل 06

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فصل 06

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CHAPTER 6

OLD ISSUES, NEW FORMS: SEXTING, CHEATING, SNOOPING, AND BREAKING UP

The advent of smartphones and the Internet means that our romantic lives now inhabit two worlds: the real world and our phone world. In the phone world we have an unprecedented, highly private forum for communication that forces us to deal with age-old issues like jealousy, infidelity, and sexual intimacy in new formats that we’re still trying to figure out.

SEXTING

Of all the changes in modern romance brought on by the phone world, the most radical has come in the form of sexting: the sharing of explicit sexual images through digital media.

Conceptually, sexting is a timeless phenomenon. Nude photos, erotic letters, and the like have been documented throughout civilization. While something like the Anthony Weiner scandal seems unique to our time, there are precursors, such as the salacious love letters written by U.S. president Warren G. Harding to his neighbor’s wife, in which he nicknamed his penis Jerry and her vagina Mrs. Pouterson.

I wish I had been there when the historian analyzing the letters had the eureka moment: “Hey, wait a second. Whenever he says ‘Mrs. Pouterson,’ I think he means . . . his neighbor’s wife’s vagina??”

Most strange to me is that, whereas “Mrs. Pouterson” is a horrible nickname for a vagina, “Warren G. Harding” is actually a great nickname for a penis.

When it comes to photographs and video, our ability to capture ourselves has evolved with the technologies. Consumer film cameras were great for capturing high-quality images, but they had their disadvantages. Unless you had your own darkroom, you had to drop off the film to get developed, so your privacy would be compromised.

Between the 1970s and the mid-1990s, Polaroids and low-cost video cameras allowed people to produce sexual content on their own and keep it private, but sometimes a kid would open up a box labeled “DON’T OPEN” and get scarred for life.

Digital media, the Internet, and—most important—the rise of smartphones, changed all that. Today almost everybody has a remarkably high-quality camera and video recorder within arm’s reach at every waking moment. In addition to having a high-tech way to capture the imagery, you also have a seemingly private place to store the images for yourself and your partner, but, like the box that says “DON’T OPEN,” sometimes it falls into the wrong hands.

The key difference, though, is the ease of use and distribution. In the past, we can safely assume, most men weren’t mailing Polaroids of their penises to girls they met at bars. It would have been creepy and also a bit of a hassle. However, when a high-res camera is literally a few inches from your penis at all times—and you can instantly share the glorious photo—it’s a game changer.

We don’t have any numbers on the rates at which sexual images were shared prior to the smartphone era, but the numbers now are staggering. Sexting, especially among young people, isn’t quite yet the norm, but it’s quickly getting there.

Here are some of the best stats on sexting that we could find:

• Half of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds have received sexts.

• One third of older teens have sent a sext.

• Sexting is increasing among all age groups—except fifty-five and older.

• You’re more likely to sext if you own a smartphone.

• People who own iPhones are twice as likely to sext as people who use Androids.

• The most popular time to sext is Tuesday between 10:00 A.M. and noon. Yes, we looked this up twice. Strange!

• People who are married or in committed relationships are just as likely to have sent sexts as their unattached peers.1

Why do people sext? The main reasons we discovered are to share intimacy with a partner, to build sexual attraction, to appease a partner, and, in some cases, to maintain intimacy over long distances.

The technology journalist Jenna Wortham did a piece on sexting where the subjects each forwarded Wortham a sext they’d sent and then let her interview them about it. “What I discovered,” Wortham wrote, “is that sexting—like anything else done on our phones—was mostly just meant to be fun, for fun, grown folks doing what grown folks do.”2

People she interviewed had all kinds of good reasons for sexting, and their comments, seen together, actually make it seem like a healthy and compelling way to sustain a modern erotic relationship.

One twenty-seven-year-old editor sexted her hookup because it gave her a feeling of power. “It’s kind of a control thing,” she explained. “I wanted to make him want me.” D, a thirty-year-old artist, said she sexted with her fiancé to spice things up.

“We have already seen each other’s bodies a lot, and we will be seeing them a whole lot more,” she said. “So sometimes eroticism can come from what is unseen, or presenting something in a different way.”

M, a brand marketer, sent her boyfriend a picture of her breasts to help him cope with a case of nerves before a presentation at work.

This is my favorite. I just love the idea of the guy opening up his phone, seeing the boobs, and thinking, “Ahhhh. Okay, you got this, Phil! Let’s nail this PowerPoint presentation.”

On our subreddit one woman gave a whole slew of reasons for why she’d sent sexts in the past: “Because it feels good to know someone wants you from far away. because it’s something to think about. because it boosts confidence. because i’d never done it before. because i liked them. because i’d just broken up with someone . . .”

• • •

For some the privacy and distance provided by the phone world allowed them to be more honest about their sexuality. “I started because I’m a very sexual person and sexting was an easier way for me to discuss intimate things with my partners,” said one female user on our subreddit. “I found it hard to ask for what I wanted or needed in the bedroom in person so this way was easier for me to discuss my needs and fantasies. Now it’s become something I enjoy, like a form of foreplay. I like to send something sexy to my mate before we’re going to see each other.” Another woman wrote: “A guy I hooked up with a few years ago used to ask me for pics all the time. Finally, because I felt like I might lose him (. . . it was not a healthy hook-up relationship), I got into it. I LOVED it. I just felt super sexy taking them, and I still feel good looking at them now. Plus, one day, my boobs will be down around my waist and it will be nice to remember.”

Many of our subreddit users said sexting provided a forum to maintain intimacy over long distances.

One woman wrote:

I’m a girl who lives in the U.S. and my boyfriend lives in Wales. I would say we sext at least once a week. When it’s a long distance relationship like that, and we have to go 2-3 months without seeing one another, I think it’s almost a necessity. I want to keep him interested and excited. Since we had only been together a short time before he went to Wales, we hadn’t really discussed our likes/dislikes in the bedroom. But through sexting we were able to express that and get it all out in the open. So the next time we see each other we will already know the others’ desires. If you asked me a year ago, I would’ve felt “dirty” if I was sexting, but now I’m totally for it in a relationship.

Another user explained:

I think in general it would be much harder to maintain an exclusive long distance relationship without the technology in general. Just being able to communicate on gchat or via text during the day and actually see each others faces while we talk every night is a pretty necessary part to maintaining our intimacy and our relationship. The sexting is just a nice way to spice things up without actually being present.

The conclusion was clear: Without sexting, these relationships would be much harder to maintain and might not even last. Sexting provided an effective way of coping with a well-established and often heartbreaking dilemma: how to love someone when they are very far away.

• • •

The same technology that affords us the luxury and privacy to share these intimate moments is also, sadly, what allows us to betray our partner’s trust on a massive scale.

The main reason people give for why they don’t sext is that they’re afraid of being exposed. One woman reported, “I’ve never sexted and I don’t think I ever will. The thought of it seems hot and exciting, but the possible consequences are terrifying. If the relationship goes south and he’s still in possession of the pictures, then who knows where they’d end up. It just looks like an avoidable, unnecessary situation.”

We did hear some nightmare stories that would confirm this view of sexting. One woman who was initially reluctant to sext tells us what happened when she gave in:

My boyfriend wanted to, I was uncomfortable with the idea but he begged and dropped the “if you love me you will” line. Said some stuff back and forth. I wasn’t really sure what to say. He asked for a picture of me fingering myself. I obliged, then started getting texts from random numbers calling me things like “nasty slut.” Turns out he was at a party, passing his phone around and showing people what I sent. Utterly humiliating. That was years ago, and I haven’t sent another sext since.

Sending a photo to someone who could turn around and be pure human garbage, like the person above, is a widespread fear. And, although in theory everyone could be exposed this way, in reality the risks affect women in a very different way from men.

• • •

In 2014 private nude photos of various female celebrities leaked onto the Internet after hackers posted them on the 4chan website.* The images were clearly meant for these women’s partners and were never to be shared. While the hackers who stole the photos were condemned, the women who had their photos stolen were scolded too, for being reckless. “Don’t want your nude photos leaked? Don’t take any!” went a typical response. Taking naked photos of yourself with your iPhone, the argument went, was indulgent, vain, and immature. The implication was that regular, sexually healthy people do not sext, despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Of course, not everyone agreed with this narrative, but it was still a popular argument.

The fear of this kind of condemnation was another reason people gave for not sexting, but many of the younger women we heard from believe that the prevalence of sexting is already changing the perceptions of these risks. One twenty-four-year-old told us that she sees something empowering in her sexting and has decided that, if her nudes were leaked, she wouldn’t be judged for it.

The warnings about sexting (mainly directed toward women) center around the worst-case scenario—your nudes being posted publicly, like on a revenge porn site. This is presented as something that will follow you for the rest of your life and haunt your career and future relationships. I don’t think that will happen to me, but if it does, I like to think the viewers will draw the obvious conclusion—that I am a sexually confident woman who made a video for someone she cared about. If someone I knew saw the images and judged me negatively for making them, I feel confident that the problem is with them, not with me . . . So when I sext with my boyfriend, the main goal is to get us off. But it’s also my little way of reassuring myself that I decide what to do with my body, and I get to decide which risky behaviors are worth taking.

This view is becoming quite common among young people, particularly teens. For the generation that grew up in a smartphone culture, sexting has become a common step in the journey toward becoming sexually active. Along with a first kiss, now, at some point, there is often a first sext.

When the journalist Hanna Rosin examined a high school in central Virginia where rampant sexting and promiscuous image sharing sparked a police investigation, a surprising number of the kids she met expressed confidence that the situation was no big deal.3

When an officer questioned some girls about their concerns about the photos being disseminated online, he was shocked when one insisted, “This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it,” while another said, “I don’t see any problem with it. I’m proud of my body.” Some girls, he discovered, had taken naked photos of themselves specifically for sharing on Instagram. The idea that this should be treated with shame or that it would come back to haunt them seemed absurd.

Regardless of how you or any officer sees the risks and rewards of sexting, it’s becoming more and more of a common practice. And, as we’ve seen with other aspects of modern romance, what seems insane to one generation often ends up being the norm of the next.

CHEATING

Of course, sending naked photos is not the only sexually charged behavior that smartphones enable or make easier. Consider infidelity. In the past, men and women who were cheating could flirt only in person or over a landline. People would have codes: “I’ll let the phone ring twice, then hang up. That’ll be your signal to go to the window, and there you’ll see a zip line. Take the zip line down to the tree house and I’ll meet you there at 10:30 P.M.”

Now you can be in bed with your spouse and ask, “Hey, honey, what are you looking at on your phone?” She could reply, “Oh, just reading this op-ed in the Times,” when she’s actually sending your neighbor a photo of her Mrs. Pouterson.

Have all the increased romantic options and the technology to access them led to more people straying? I remember reading the Anthony Weiner Facebook messages. Seeing the way he was just messaging random women all over the country and watching the messages quickly escalate from innocuous to very sexual was unbelievable.

This is a transcript of a chat session he had with one of these women, a lady named Lisa from Las Vegas.4 Weiner and Lisa, sorry to bring this back, guys, but it is fascinating:

For me, the most offensive part was that he used the word “wackadoodle.”

Also, did you catch that sly, almost subliminal, blink-and-you-might-miss-it allusion to sex? It was when she said they could have mad, passionate sex.

That last message basically signaled a shift in their Facebook chat and opened the floodgates for all sorts of sexual messages and infamous penis photos.

• • •

What fascinates me most, though, is that this is something that simply could not have happened thirty years ago. Sure, he might have still wanted to sexually stray from his relationship, but the privacy of Facebook, the ease of access to potential people to cheat with, and the ability to flirt with caution via the medium of chat—that perfect storm for temptation is undeniably a new development.

Given the sensitivity of the subject and the potential judgment that would occur in an in-person focus group, we used the privacy of the Internet to gain insight into people’s real-world experiences with cheating and social media.

I posed these questions in our subreddit: Has anyone started an affair or cheated on someone through social media? If social media didn’t exist, would something like this have happened anyway?

One gentleman said that he started a relationship through a social media site. It initially began as harmless chatting but, like the Weiner chat, over time it escalated. Though not as aggressive as the Weiner chat, it started getting flirty and the two began sharing their innermost feelings and problems.

It certainly wouldn’t have happened without social media, as my wife had successfully cut me off from most of the non-family women in my life. I don’t necessarily see it as a completely bad thing either—without my talking to the other woman (and the sort of honesty that relative internet anonymity provides), I wouldn’t have realized just how fucked up my relationship was with my then-wife, and the numerous things that I always thought were normal, and were really her doing her best to control every aspect of my life, and generally make me unable to leave her.

Another user said that he started an affair that he simply wouldn’t have had the gumption to start without Facebook.

They worked together and were casual acquaintances. One day he looked her up on Facebook and sent her a message asking, “Would you like to get a drink sometime?” Soon after that the affair began.

“If Facebook didn’t exist, I doubt I would have gathered the courage to ask her directly. It made the initial step that much easier,” he said.

The advantages of technology that facilitate regular dating (such as the ease of access and the absence of the pressure found in an in-person interaction) also transfer over to cheating. This includes the ease of escalation, which, when engaging in something as scandalous as cheating, is quite valuable. With messages you can slowly test the waters of potentially starting an affair. Once you find out the other person is on the same page, it can ramp up very fast. Or you can easily backpedal without quite the same level of embarrassment you’d experience if it had happened in person.

Here’s an example:

The other person may think you are a creep, but either of you can just act like it was a misreading of the message. In the Weiner situation, phrases like “got a night plan for us?” and “make me an offer i can’t refuse” allowed him to safely test the waters and see if Lisa was really interested in something sexual.

Also, the privacy of our phones means we have a new place to foster and grow clandestine relationships. In the past, people who wanted to engage or flirt with someone outside their relationship would have to sneak away to a remote bar or restaurant to reduce the risk of being spotted by friends or loved ones. Today, with proper precautions, our phones provide a private refuge that can house intimacy that no one else is privy to.

In one focus group a gentleman told us he once started innocently texting with a married coworker and it eventually turned into a full-on clandestine relationship. Normally they had no reason to chat beyond the office. One day the guy sent a jokey text when he saw something that reminded him of something he and the woman had laughed about at work. She responded and a fun, witty banter took hold.

These instances increased in frequency, and soon the two were also spending time together after work. Eventually both parties caught feelings, and it developed into a secret relationship, with the married woman constantly sending texts to this other guy in secret. The texts were getting so frequent that the guy had to change the woman’s contact info in his phone so as to not arouse the suspicion of others, who might wonder why this married lady was texting him so much. Instead of getting texts from Susan, it looked like he was getting texts from a male friend named David.

If I ever was texting frequently with someone and wanted to make an alias, I think I’d go with “Scottie Pippen.” Then any friends who were peeking at my screen could be left wondering why I was texting with the former Chicago Bulls star on the reg.

I only hope Scottie Pippen’s wife never has an affair where she uses the same strategy and the guy texts while Scottie is in the room and he can see her screen. Scottie Pippen would likely believe it was an impostor Scottie Pippen from another dimension, sent to steal his wife and kill him. The psychological damage inflicted on poor Scottie Pippen would be far worse than discovering a simple affair.

Back to our real situation: Eventually both parties decided it was best to end the affair. But again, would this kind of thing have taken off if these people hadn’t had the privacy of text messages to introduce a romantic element into their relationship?

She was married and I respected that. I wouldn’t have made a voice call to say little jokey things to her. It would have been weird. Since it was just texting, it seemed pretty innocuous. But as it went on, we both couldn’t help but realize, there was a spark between us. When you’re both on your phones, you have this safe zone that no one else can break into. It was this private little world where we could talk about all the stress and confusion and love that the whole dilemma was creating. If it weren’t for text messages, I’m not sure anything would have started between us.

Some people we heard from, however, felt that ultimately technology doesn’t turn us into philanderers. If you’re gonna cheat, you’re gonna cheat, they said. Social media or no social media, in the end it’s two people together in the flesh.

“I don’t think that someone who is otherwise a faithful partner in a relationship is going to suddenly start cheating because someone sends them a winky face in an IM,” said one user on the subreddit, in the thread’s most popular post. “I’d say it makes it easier to cheat, but doesn’t make it harder to be faithful.”

But even if it doesn’t lead to full-on cheating, social media presents new problems and temptations, even for the faithful. Besides offering privacy, social media also presents us with a forum where other potential partners are constantly on display. One gentleman recalled how, when he got into a new relationship, social media such as Instagram provided an outlet to view all the options out there.

I love my girlfriend, but when we were first getting serious, I would go on Instagram and see all these hot girls. And its like, ‘Whoa should I be dating these girls? Or just settle down and be in a relationship?’ It felt like the opposite of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ They were in sight and IN my mind.

The privacy of the Internet and phone world has also led to the rise of settings where people can be adulterous without any judgments. The most well-known example is Ashley Madison, a terrifyingly popular online dating website that is designed specifically to help people have affairs. The company’s motto is “Life is Short. Have an Affair.”

The company enrolls its full-paying members in the “Affair Guarantee Program,” which offers a full refund if they don’t find someone within their first three months on the site. The site’s home page offers users a click-through icon that lets them “Search and Chat with Married People in Your Area,” as well as a blog and Twitter feed featuring advice such as “How to Get and Keep a Fuck Buddy” and news items such as “Men Not Bothered by the Idea of Wives’ Infidelity.”

Apparently it’s growing quickly, from 8.5 million members in 2011 to a self-reported 11 million members in 2014.5

Now, I know that people have been cheating on each other for as long as they’ve made promises to be monogamous and that, to date, there’s no hard evidence that the Internet is making people more likely to commit infidelity. That said, it’s impossible to imagine something like Ashley Madison getting this popular this fast in a world without digital media. Whether or not we’re cheating more often, it’s certainly easier to do.

BREAKING UP IN THE PHONE WORLD

Another thing that’s become easier because of modern technology is breakups. Not long ago breaking up with someone required an emotionally wrenching face-to-face conversation or, at the least, a phone call in which the person who wanted to end things had to own up to their feelings and, usually, explain themselves too. Generally the breakup conversation also required being thoughtful about the other person’s feelings and vulnerability, and doing everything possible to say things that would boost the morale of the person being jilted.

This is why our culture developed lines like “It’s not you, it’s me” and “I’m just not ready to be in a relationship now” and “I’m sorry, I just want to focus on my dragon art.”

Of course, no one liked these conversations. But we all saw them as obligatory, because they were the decent human thing to do for another person.

Today a growing number of people, and a majority of younger adults, are more likely to break up with someone by text, instant message, or social media than in person or by phone. According to a 2014 survey of 2,712 eighteen- to thirty-year-olds who’d had a relationship end during the previous year, 56 percent said they had broken up using digital media, with texting being the most popular method (25 percent), followed closely by social media (20 percent), and then e-mail (11 percent), which people used because it let them “fully explain their reasons.”

By contrast, only 18 percent had broken up through a face-to-face interaction, and a mere 15 percent had split up with a call.6 A startling 0.0014 percent had broken up by hiring a blimp that said, “Tammy I think we need to see other people.” (Note: I think this was just one dude named Phil from Indiana.)

The most common reason people gave for breaking up via text or social media was that it is “less awkward,” which makes sense given that young adults do just about all other communication through their phones too.

Oddly, 73 percent of those young adults—the very same ones who said they had broken up with other people via text or social media—said they would be upset if someone broke up with them that way.

To be clear, the study above didn’t specify how serious these relationships were, so it didn’t account for how the length or intensity of the relationship affected the preferred breakup method. Obviously there’s a huge difference between breaking up with someone after three weeks and after three years. In fact, the anthropologist Ilana Gershon has found many young people in casual relationships would actually prefer to be dumped by these less traditional methods.7

On the subreddit we asked people how they felt about the new ways of breaking up. A lot of people who responded acknowledged that they’d broken up with their partners via text or social media to avoid stress and conflict. One woman explained: “I didn’t have to look at his face or hear his voice, so I could be completely honest with him. He was a sweet guy but I wanted to move on.”

What’s interesting here—but also kind of scary—is that she’s saying texting allowed her to be more honest, because she didn’t feel compelled to sugarcoat the reasons she was ending things. Maybe texting means we’ll stop giving those nonsensical “It’s not you, it’s me” messages and become more direct instead.

At the same time, most stories seemed to paint a picture of someone who was using modern messaging to avoid confrontation rather than further honesty. This included many people who broke up in this fashion in relationships that were far beyond the casual point. Several users shared stories like this:

It was a normal day. I was supposed to meet the guy I had been seeing for two years for brunch. I drove to the place and he wasn’t there. I called him an excessive amount of times to no answer. I went home. I got on Facebook and there he was on Facebook chat. He says, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about us and I keep going back and forth on whether or not I want to be with you :/” And that was it.

I was overall surprised and couldn’t believe that was the way he decided to end it, even know [sic] I had seen him the day before and was supposed to see him that day as well. I did make him call me to clarify the situation after this, which made it worse of course. Haven’t spoken to him since for obvious reasons.

It was brutal to read. After two years the relationship was ended with a “:/,” not even a fully fleshed-out emoji. There were many more stories like this, with passive-aggressive nonbreakups that actually ended things way more obnoxiously, and painfully, than a face-to-face conversation.

Ending things by changing their status on social media without telling their partner is another way people break up these days. One woman told us: “In college my boyfriend broke up with me by changing his Facebook status to single. We got back together six years later, and then he broke up with me over text message. I should probably stop dating him.” If you start dating him again and he says he needs to stop by the “blimp place,” maybe brace yourself to read bad news in the sky.

This one is astounding because of the depth of the relationship that preceded the breakup text:

Back in June of 2012 when I was 43, my boyfriend broke up w/me via a text message after being together for 8 years! I practically raised his daughter, and had been totally committed to him [and] everything that came w/him. I was really offended and hurt as I felt that I at least deserved to be broken up with in person or at least on the phone!

Apparently the wound didn’t run too deep, though, because look what happened next:

After 10 months of no contact, his uncle passed away [and] I called him [and] left a message w/my condolences. We finally talked after that [and] eventually got back together. I still love him completely [and] have forgiven him for how things went down. And you best believe I gave him hell for the text! :-)

No offense, but at this point let’s take a moment to be thankful we are neither of the people in that relationship.

When I discussed this topic with people from my generation, they were shocked to learn that so many people were breaking up in this fashion. The younger generation has taken another idea that seemed bizarre and made it into a norm. Is it that surprising, though? If you subscribe to Sherry Turkle’s argument that the prevalence of text-based communications is leading to a decline in face-to-face conversations and the skills to conduct them, the shift makes total sense.

EXES LIVE ON IN THE PHONE WORLD

For those getting out of relationships, especially for the jilted, social media also presents an easy outlet to reconnect with past loves. We heard many stories of former flames who reconnected over flirty Gchat or Facebook messages and wound up cheating on their new partners.

But even if it didn’t lead to cheating, having to see their former love’s presence on social media was tough for the jilted. “It makes it harder to let go,” one person told us. “Even if you are one of those unicorns that can leave a relationship with friendly feelings and a clean break, your self-control is tested when all you have to do is click a button to see how they are living their lives without you.”

The temptation to continue to creep on your ex over the Internet is nearly universal. One study found that 88 percent of those who continued to have access to their ex’s Facebook page said they sometimes monitored their ex’s activities, while 70 percent of people who had disconnected from an ex admitted to trying to spy on the ex’s page by other means, such as through a friend’s account.

Many people we talked to advocated a complete “unfriending” on all accounts, but others thought those kinds of social media plays created drama in and of themselves. Even if you do unfriend or unfollow, though, it’s hard to avoid your exes. As one person told us: “It gets complicated the longer you had a relationship with them. Can you block them on Facebook? Sure. But you have the same friends, or at least befriended her friends on Facebook. You’re going to see them doing the same stuff via pictures that your friends post.”

Some people have gotten pretty creative about how to solve the problem of the social media ex. One nineteen-year-old girl from Toronto named Cassandra Photoshopped pictures of Beyoncé over her ex-boyfriend’s face and put them up on Tumblr.

“If imagining yourself at your happiest with Beyoncé doesn’t help, I don’t know what will,” she told BuzzFeed.8

I personally have thought about this strategy and decided that other celebrities might be good as well.

Ladies, trouble getting over your man? Why not Photoshop in The Transporter himself, Jason Statham? Fellas, does it make you sad to have those vacation photos of you and your lady in Hawaii? What if instead you were in Hawaii with the funnest dude ever: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?

Ladies, are you sad when you look back on that romantic dinner with your ex who left you for your best friend? What if that wasn’t a romantic dinner but a stimulating conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor?

Even if neither you nor your partner is being tempted to use social media to facilitate cheating—since we all know how easy it is—there is another trend that is seeping into modern relationships: snooping.

SNOOPING

If social media makes it easier to cheat, there’s no question that it makes it a lot easier to get caught. Every interaction with someone online creates part of a digital paper trail.

This digital paper trail and the knowledge that our partners have this secret world in their phones can lead to what we will refer to as “snooping.”

Here’s a tip: As you read this section, when the word “snooping” comes up, read it in your head with a quiet, sneaky, Aziz whisper voice. It’ll make the section more fun. Try it now. Snooping . . . See?

Both in our in-person focus groups and on the subreddit, many people discussed how secretly viewing their partner’s texts, e-mails, and social media led to their finding incriminating evidence that made them angry and sometimes even ended the relationship.

“I broke up with a girl because of a text I had seen on her phone,” someone recounted. “We were in bed and she got up to go to use the bathroom. After a few moments I heard her phone vibrate on the bed. It was a text. On the lock screen was a text from her ex-boyfriend that said something along the lines of ‘Are you coming over again tonight?’”

“My ex and I both got into a bad pattern of checking each others phones and it lead [sic] to a lot of trust break downs,” said one gentleman on Reddit. “Most of the time there was nothing at all to hide, but before the last fight I found out she had been lying to me about going to a Bible Study and instead going to spend time with a guy she met at that Bible Study.”

And no, it wasn’t her new best friend, Jesus Christ.

So there you have it, readers, if your boyfriend or girlfriend says they are out at Bible study—they are more likely out boning someone from Bible study.

Even in instances where someone snooped and didn’t find evidence of cheating, the act of going through your partner’s phone can create its own problems. In seeking to make sure that your partner is being faithful, you may inadvertently breach his or her trust.

In our interviews people on the other end of snooping had varying feelings about being snooped on. Some didn’t care, because they had nothing to hide anyway. Many subscribed to the theory that if you leave your accounts logged on, it’s fair game. But others believed that looking at your partner’s screen is a violation of trust or that it reveals underlying jealousy issues. Some even said it was grounds to end a relationship.

One thing that stuck with me, though, was that whether or not your partner is actually cheating, these suspicions and the snooping that follows can boil into full-blown paranoia that drives you mad.

Snooping . . . (Are you still doing the voice? Just checking!)

One gentleman in a large focus group held in New York described how he caught his girlfriend cheating when her Gmail account was left open. He saw an open exchange between her and an old boyfriend and felt compelled to check it based on his previous suspicions. This led to the crowd of roughly 150 people generally agreeing when I asked, “So if someone forgets to log out, your attitude is If the shit’s open, I’m reading it?”

She was in fact cheating but agreed to end it with the old boyfriend. They worked through the issue, but it led to a dangerous downward spiral where he kept checking her e-mails, Gchats, and texts. The girl would change passwords, but he would crack them. Sometimes he found something suspicious, like deleted chats, and other times he didn’t. Eventually he found an e-mail that made it clear that the relationship with the old ex-boyfriend was not going to end as she had promised. They then broke up.

What was interesting was that even though the snooping ultimately helped him catch his cheating girlfriend, after that experience he felt in future relationships he would never snoop again. He felt that snooping only led to suspicion and paranoia that could break the fundamental trust needed to maintain a relationship.

His sentiment made sense to me after I took in all the stories in our interviews. So many people we interviewed told us that the slightest glimpse into their partner’s private phone or social media could spark an uncontrollable need to snoop and read more. One flash of an incoming text or e-mail from a stranger of the opposite sex or NBA all-star Scottie Pippen is all it takes to raise questions. People generally recognize that most of the time there’s nothing to worry about. Even so, it’s hard not to follow the trail once you find it.

In most relationships, the barriers to our private digital world break down without our realizing it. As a relationship progresses, a couple winds up sharing passwords out of convenience.

“Hey, honey, what’s the password on your laptop? I want to listen to that awesome Pitbull song on Spotify!”

“My password is ‘Pitbull’!” she replies.

“Wow, that’s crazy!”

Next thing you know, you’re listening to Pitbull’s hit album Planet Pit. Then a Gchat message comes up from a guy named Armando.Perez@gmail.com. You think to yourself, Holy shit. Armando Perez . . . That’s Pitbull’s real name! Why is he messaging my girlfriend?

Is your girlfriend having an affair with Pitbull? Do you read the Gchat message to make sure she’s not? Do you possibly violate your partner’s trust just momentarily to put your fears at ease? It’s a conundrum you didn’t plan on facing, but now you have to.

Snooping or accidentally getting a glimpse into your partner’s private messages isn’t the only way to descend into madness. Simply reading the messages posted publicly on a partner’s social media is often enough.

A woman in one of our focus groups described getting suspicious when another woman was being very active on her boyfriend’s Facebook wall.

“This girl was just constantly writing on his wall,” she said. “It was just like, Ugh, you know he has a girlfriend.”

She became agitated and decided to check his text messages, upon which she confirmed he was cheating.

Men and women also described partners getting upset when someone of the opposite sex was “liking” a lot of Instagram pictures or even seeing certain types of photos.

One gentleman we interviewed described how his girlfriend would get very jealous if she saw Instagram photos of him with other girls or other female users liking or commenting on too many of his photos.

“One time I made the mistake of liking a photo of this friend of mine in a bikini. All hell broke loose,” he said.

These are not necessarily new problems. Is a girlfriend getting upset that you liked an Instagram photo of a cute girl wearing a bikini any different from a girlfriend getting upset because you ogled a cute girl at the beach?

All the mundane misunderstandings and fights that we’ve always gotten into in our relationships get reinvented in weird and interesting ways in the digital world.

One gentleman, Sean, told us a tale that involved him getting suspicious of cheating due to a glimpse of his girlfriend’s social media at a very stressful moment:

My girlfriend was in a ski accident. I was in the ambulance with her and she gave me her phone to call her parents.

Afterwards, I looked down and I noticed that she downloaded Snapchat. I didn’t really know what Snapchat was. And all that I had heard about it was that it was an app specifically for sending nude pics.

So I checked, and there were like eight Snapchats from this one guy whose name I didn’t recognize.

And I was furious. But I didn’t say anything. Because she was in a back brace. Which seemed like bad timing.

And months later, we threw a party, and I met this dude. And he was gay, which was extremely reassuring.

I experienced a version of this myself once, when my girlfriend got upset with me due to Instagram activity. I was taking off for a flight to New Zealand for a cousin’s wedding. Before boarding, I called her. I got her voice mail. I texted her a message saying, “Hey! Taking off soon. Just wanted to talk before the flight took off. Gimme a ring.” She wrote back, “I called you four hours ago.”

I could tell she was upset because she also included the emoji of the Indian guy with a gun beside his head.

I called her back and eventually she answered. I explained that I was busy packing and getting ready for my trip and that I knew I would have time to talk when I got to the airport. She said, “Oh, so you were busy packing? Well, I saw on your friend’s Instagram he posted a photo of you hanging out by the pool taking Polaroids, so I feel like if you have time to play with a Polaroid camera, you’d have time to call or text me back.”

I simply said I was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again.

A week later, though, it was Valentine’s Day. I pulled out all the stops. It was our first Valentine’s together. I sent her her favorite flowers at work, along with Fuzzball (a stuffed animal from the Disney Michael Jackson show Captain EO, to remind her of our trip to Disney World) and some chocolates that were the same type she had loved on a trip we took to Mexico together.

When she came to meet me at home after work, I made her close her eyes and walked her into a room where I had on one of her favorite Stevie Wonder records. When she opened her eyes, she saw glasses of her favorite wine for the both of us. Then it was time for the gift exchange.

I went first.

I said, “Hey, so you remember a week ago you were upset that I didn’t call you back before my trip, and you were mad because I was playing with the Polaroid camera. Well, the reason I was doing that is I bought you this nice vintage Polaroid camera and I was just making sure it worked before I gave it to you, so . . . here’s your gift.”

She felt HORRIBLE.

It was the greatest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received.

HOW PREVALENT IS CHEATING?

Fear and suspicion of cheating aren’t always unjustified. According to nationally representative survey data, in the United States 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have at least one extramarital affair during their lifetime, and 2 to 4 percent of all married people are willing to tell survey researchers that they’ve had an affair in the past year.

In nonmarried but “committed” couples there is a 70 percent incidence of cheating. In addition, 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women confess that they’ve engaged in “mate poaching”9 (trying to seduce a person out of a committed relationship). This is not to be confused with rhino poaching, where someone tries to seduce a rhinoceros into a cross-species romantic tryst. Or egg poaching, where someone tries to seduce a delicious egg into their belly without overcooking it.

Let’s take the “best case” cheating scenario. Your partner of ten or more years has had a one-night stand with someone they will never see again, they regret it, it didn’t mean anything, and they would never do it again.

According to Match.com’s nationally representative survey, 80 percent of men and 76 percent of women would prefer that their partner “confess their mistake . . . and suffer the consequences,” rather than just “take their secret to the grave.”

I asked a lot of people in the focus groups how they’d feel about their partner having a one-night stand with someone else. Their discomfort seemed to be less about their partner hooking up with someone else—in practical terms, it wouldn’t change much about the relationship—and more about knowing that their partner had been unfaithful.

“In theory I’d be okay with it,” said Melissa, twenty-six. “But actually knowing it happened? I don’t think I could handle that.”

As we all saw in the hit film Indecent Proposal, just because Woody Harrelson thinks he’ll be cool with something doesn’t mean he will be when it actually happens.

Others were not at all accepting of the hypothetical situation. For many it would be an immediate relationship ender. One woman we met recalled a night when she told friends, a couple with a new baby, about an extramarital relationship that she’d had.

The wife turned to her husband and said, “If you ever cheat on me, I am divorcing you and taking the baby,” then got up and went to bed. And he said, “Sounds good to me. Sayonara, lady!”

Okay, the latter part of that exchange didn’t happen, but there definitely were those who had zero tolerance for infidelity, and also marriages that have ended with someone angrily leaving a room and shouting, “Sayonara, lady!”

FRANCE:

MONOGAMY AND MISTRESSES

In the United States there’s an optimistic expectation that most people will remain faithful to their partner, but actual data show great numbers of people will not. As we’ve seen, when it comes to sex and relationships, what we believe in theory does not line up with what we do in practice.

When the New York Times opinion writer Pamela Druckerman conducted interviews for Lust in Translation, her book on infidelity around the world, cheaters in the United States seemed to try to distance themselves from their act. “A lot of people I interviewed started off by telling me, ‘I’m not the kind of person who would have an affair,’” she explained. “And I’d always think, Of course, you are exactly the kind of person who would have an affair, because there isn’t one kind.”

According to a recent survey of attitudes about extramarital affairs in forty different nations, 84 percent of people in the United States said infidelity was “morally unacceptable.”10 Another poll, from Gallup, found that infidelity is more universally disapproved of than polygamy, animal cloning, and suicide.11

So if there were two guys at a bar, one cheating on his wife and another with a cloned pig named Bootsie, it would be the cheater, not Bootsie the pig, getting more disapproving looks.

When you compare this level of disapproval with the data on the actual prevalence of cheating, it paints a strange picture. Do we really believe that all these masses of people who engage in affairs are immoral monsters? That’s quite a lot of monsters. It seems that we often reluctantly accept the act of cheating in our own lives while still condemning the practice at large.

Not all cultures condemn infidelity so fiercely.

The country that has by far the highest tolerance for extramarital affairs is—no surprise here—France, where only 47 percent of people surveyed found such activity morally unacceptable. That’s good, because France is the country with the highest rates of infidelity: 55 percent for men and 32 percent for women, according to the latest data.12

The second-most-tolerant nation is Germany, with 60 percent considering extramarital affairs morally unacceptable. Several other European nations, including Spain and Italy, are in that range.

In contrast, the countries that rank close to the United States are mainly in Latin America and Africa, places like Ghana, Bolivia, and Brazil. Those where disapproval rates are highest, in the ninetieth percentile, are mainly traditional Islamic nations in the Middle East.

Seizing an opportunity to eat amazing food in Paris, I decided to travel to France and try to learn about their romantic culture.

Now, granted, everyone knows France is famously tolerant of infidelity. But there’s a difference between reading a number from a survey of attitudes and talking to real people about their experiences with something as messy as having affairs. We went to France not to verify that people cheat and feel differently about it from how we do but to find out how their more open attitudes about monogamy affect their relationships, their families, and their lives. We didn’t romanticize the way they do things there, but we wondered what, if anything, people in more conservative places could learn from the more lenient French approach.

During our interviews and focus groups, most of the French people I met said it’s natural, if not inevitable, to seek sexual novelty and excitement. They’d still get angry about cheating, but not in the same way we do in the States. They don’t judge the transgression so harshly.

“In France, you can be a good guy and still have affairs,” a young Parisian named Lukas told us.

“I don’t think you can be faithful all your life,” said Irene, twenty-three. “It’s unreasonable to think you wouldn’t be attracted to someone else. If I was married and we had kids, I wouldn’t give that all up if he slept with someone else.”

“You know pretty much everyone has strayed, so there’s more understanding when it happens,” said George, a twenty-five-year-old who’d lived in France and in Austria. “In the subconscious of French people is an idea that everyone cheats, even though in fact not everyone does.”

In France most people have come to expect that their political leaders will have affairs, at minimum, and often an entire second family too. When François Mitterrand was president, his mistress Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine Pingeot, would often visit him at the Elysée Palace, despite the fact that he had a wife and children. At Mitterrand’s funeral in 1996, his second family sat alongside his first family.

Politicians aren’t the only ones who do this kind of thing. The focus group participants shared tales of other arrangements French couples have that would be hard to fathom in the United States. One woman told us that her uncle used to quietly take the bones from his wife’s meat dishes to feed the dog of his mistress, and eventually her aunt, annoyed by the charade, simply started bagging the bones for her husband’s mistress herself.

When I interviewed the dog about this situation, he told me, “It’s weird, but hey, I’m not complaining. Double the bones, man!”

Another woman told us that in her family an older relative would vacation with both his wife and his mistress, together, taking separate rooms but otherwise doing a surprising amount of stuff together.

The mistress thing was very widespread. The most jarring fact I learned was that on Valentine’s Day the flower shops advertise with the slogan “Don’t forget your mistress!”

As I left the final focus group, I ran into that dog on the sidewalk. He said:

I don’t know, man. I get it in a sense. Their expectations of romantic fidelity are more realistic, but the mistress shit?

Seems like men are taking advantage of the women’s goodwill and they are resigned to this demeaning situation.

It’s a bummer, minus that whole double bones thing, ya know?

I admire the French for embracing honesty and their sexual nature, but there must be a middle ground between unrealistic monogamous expectations and full-on second families.

Hey, you don’t happen to have a plastic bag on you, do ya? Why? No reason . . .

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