Dylan Selterman

Thanks for having me.

It means that a lot of people are cheating on their significant others.

It means that infidelity and adultery are common.

Certainly not everyone cheats, but, you know, a lot of people do.

Yeah, I mean, people looked into what people were doing on Ashley Madison.

That was part of my research as well, was trying to figure out what are people hoping to gain by signing up and looking for an affair partner on Ashley Madison.

And we find that a lot of people are just...

They're looking for a sex partner.

They're, you know, dissatisfied with their primary relationships in a sense because they're not having sex.

That was one of the key findings from our research was that I think about 50%, so like half of our participants said that they were not sexually active at all with their partners.

But their relationships were otherwise at least decent, if not good.

They expressed high levels of satisfaction, high levels of romantic love and intimacy with their partners.

So their relationships were otherwise, I think, at least moderately well-functioning, if not highly functioning.

It was the sexual dissatisfaction that was a key factor for those folks.

Well, let me say something first about the people in polyamorous or open relationships.

We did find some of those in our sample that signed up on Ashley Madison.

So it was not very common, but I think between 15% and 20% of the participants in our sample told us that they knew or their partners knew that they were on the site.

And so they had some kind of understanding with their partners that they were doing this.

Love is complicated and people are complicated.

And in a sense, I think if you think about love as intimacy and connection and attachment, those things can be there, you know, especially for people who have spent the majority of their adult lives married to their spouse.