Black Book: Ashley Madison on The Profitability of Infidelity
Sometimes I’m asked why I don’t pursue certain girls, and it’s because of the scenario Ashley Madison founder Noel Biderman lays out in the second paragraph. A girl who’s making herself available is a lot different from a girl who’s really available. I want to believe a girl who’s interested will still be interested once she sorts out whatever she has going on.
I didn’t create infidelity, and it happens. Unfortunately it happens in environments where there is collateral damage. I’ll give you an example: An affair that happens in the workplace — and listen, more affairs happen in the workplace than on Ashley Madison. Someone gets an unfair promotion as a result. There is a victim there that wants nothing to do with the affair and gets roped into this nonsense. Someone loses their job, and then investors suffer from that whole kind of thing.
Or an affair happens on a singles dating site – imagine you’re a single who meets someone on a singles site, gets involved with someone, sleeps with them, only to find out they’re taken. They didn’t realize that’s what they were getting into. They were lied to, to the nth degree. That’s a little different than saying I have a nice job or whatever. That’s saying, I’m available, and let’s see where this can go, only to find out you were never really available.
I can’t convince people to be unfaithful. Even one to one, let alone with a TV commercial – what I can convince them is, if they decide to have an affair, not to do it in the workplace, not to do it on a singles site, not to do it on Facebook. To do it on Ashley Madison.
This kind of behavior; I think it invites a lot of bad karma. I just can’t see something positive that comes out of a Web site like this, especially if installs boldface on the kind of trust issues people develop once they pile on dating experience, or have been married and/or cheated on. But, at least people like the girls I know who target married men now have somewhere else to go besides my favorite bars. Maybe Ashley Madison deserves a little more credit than I’ve given it.
