Cheating isn’t black or white, so think of the shades of grey in the Ashley Madison affair

DOES being a cheating swine undermine whatever rights you have to keep your privates private? Jo Stanley cheated once, and the answer is complicated.

WHEN I was 21 and stupid and still working out who I was and what I believed in, I had a boyfriend that I cheated on.

Before you shake your fists at me with an angry chorus of “once a cheater always a cheater”, I never did it again. Oh and I discovered years later that he also had a thing or 7 on the side, so it wasn’t the most solid of relationships. But having had a very minor taste of two-timing guilt, I approach the Ashley Madison online leak by hacktivist group Impact Team with cautious compassion.

To give you a quick run-down, Ashley Madison is a dating site for people already in a relationship, who wish to stay in that relationship, but would like to meet people outside of that relationship as well. It’s for people, largely men, going by the Ashley Madison marketing, who want to have their cake and eat it too (I believe you can tick that box in the My Turn Ons section).

Impact Team hacked into their database and this week released millions of users’ information, including emails, phone numbers, and names — real names, not just monikers like Randy_and_Ready. It should be noted that the files were initially released on the Dark Web, which if your knowledge of computers is anything like mine, you’ve got as much chance of accessing as a portal to Middle Earth. However, now some very helpful other sites have made it available on the Not Dark Web and so if you wanted to look, you might find someone you know on there — namely your spouse.

Isn’t it ironic ...

It’s an ethical can of worms. Hacking people’s information is technically a criminal act. Making people’s private business public is morally wrong. But does being a cheating swine undermine whatever rights you have to keep your privates private? Impact Team think so but I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m morally bankrupt but I can see some grey in this apparently black and white scenario.

Again, before you send me your hate mail, I promise I am not under any circumstances justifying cheating. Infidelity destroys lives, blows apart families, and is inexcusable. I couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be to have your whole reality, every minute, every smile, every touch shared with the person you thought loved you, destroyed by callous lies.

However, the computer security analysts suggest that there’s very few men on the site actually having an affair, so if that’s the case, imagine this: You’re deeply unhappy in your relationship. You and your partner haven’t connected in years. There’s no intimacy between you, and I don’t mean sex — you can be wild in the sack and still continents apart in connection. One day, because you’re yet to understand what you’re missing in your marriage or how to find it again, you stupidly register on a cheaters website. You never act on it. You never pursue it. Aside from looking at one woman’s profile, which according to reports was most likely fake anyway, you’ve only ever thought of it again when you guiltily see it on your credit card statement.

Is it fair that you be shamed for an intention you never carried through?

And yes, I KNOW what you’re thinking — cry me a river, what goes around comes around, and other relevant Justin Timberlake songs. Obviously a better scenario would be that you turn to the person you’re married to and say, geez honey, I’m miserable can we sort this out honestly, respectfully and without involving Naughty Girl Double D Cup. But sometimes people aren’t as sensible as that. Sometimes people make mistakes.

Carrying a lie around on your back is a self-destructive burden. For those who have cheated, I hope that having their hand forced by a hacking scandal leads not only to the truthfulness that they owe their partner, but also to them one day facing the issues in themselves that drew them to Ashley Madison.

And for those who stuck their toe in the murky pool, but never dived in, take it from my 21-year-old self — don’t do it. Nobody cheats if they’re happy, so go and find a way to be happy. Your future self will thank you for it.