Hide your extramarital affair by doing it online. What could possibly go wrong?
Put the rolling pin down and step back
What’s your name, chuck, and where do you come from?
“My name’s William, Cilla, but my friends call me WILLY eheh heh heh and I’m from HORNY Hornsea!”
[Studio audience cheers noisily for no obvious reason]
And you, number two?
“My name’s ROD uhuh huh huh, and I’m from uhuh huh huh SHAFTesbury.”
[Studio audience inexplicably cheers even more wildly]
And you, number six?
“You want information? You won’t get it.”
[Silence]
By hook or by crook, chuck, we will.
“I am not a number! I’m a free man!”
Readers under a certain age – those who are as yet unaware of their own birth – may be under the false assumption that reality TV began in the Noughties. In fact, the great British public has always lusted after every opportunity to humiliate itself via broadcast media. This rampant desire was eventually sheathed in the 1980s as a hugely successful TV game show and thrust into our living rooms as Blind Date.
The format of Blind Date, as if you didn’t know, involved a contestant posing leading questions to three other contestants of the opposite gender – yes, how quaint – who were hidden behind a screen but visible to the audience. The contestant asking the questions would then have to choose one of the three with whom to go out on an all-expenses-paid romantic day out in Barnsley with a photographer in tow.
The highlight of the show was watching the undisguised disappointment of both the man and woman when the screen swept back and they caught sight of each other for the first time. Their faces tended not to show surprise so much as emotions ranging from shock, misery and dread to disbelief, revulsion and terror.
One can only imagine the post-traumatic counselling required, ex-contestants relating their recurrent nightmares of that ‘reveal’ moment on Blind Date to a therapist who nods and hums sympathetically, interjecting with reassuring phrases such as “I’d like to help you with your problem”, “My time is yours” and “Tell me about your mother… Is she fit, eh? eh?”
When I was a student in the 80s, a friend at university contacted the producers of Blind Date and invited them to hold auditions in the student union building, which they duly did. We learned a lot about reality TV that day.
When posed a question such as “I enjoy dancing, so would you like to go dancing with me?” a normal young man of the 80s might reply “Er, OK, I’m willing to learn” or “Yes! I am a gold-medal winner in disco/waltz/tango/lambada/etc” or “Can’t we stay at home and watch Gladiators instead?”
These are wrong answers.
What you were supposed to say is something more like “I’m strictly ballroom, babe. Would you like to be strict with my ball room?” or “I teach dance lessons. Would you like me to give you one?” or “Let’s get straight to the horizontal dancing, darlin’!”
Inevitably, my friend was the only student in the auditions who understood how to perform like a twat, so he was the only one to be chosen to take part in the TV programme. He didn’t win but, uhuh huh huh, he certainly came close!
Blind dating has never appealed to me. I tried it once while still at school, persuaded by a schoolmate. The girl was pleasant enough but all desire drained away when I delivered her home that evening, chaste and sound, and met her mother at the door.
You know the way they say all young men will one day end up looking like their dads and young women their mums? Well, my date’s mother looked like Bugs Bunny in a dress.
I could put up with the buck teeth, I thought, but those three-foot long ears were too much. Besides, just as I turned to leave, she pulled on a rope and I was crushed by a one-ton anvil. Disappointed? I was crushed. All I could think of doing was wave a little sign that read “Ouch”.
Once those high-waisted, big-haired and dangly earringed days of the 1980s faded into the distance, the fad for blind dating was replaced by face-to-face speed dating. The purpose of speed dating is to give strangers the opportunity to evaluate each other in the reassuring knowledge that they will each take away their halitosis and lack of personal hygiene after three minutes.
Then the internet probed its way into our personal spaces and made blind dating fashionable again. Indeed, online matchmaking is a highly profitable business, apparently unfazed by front-page headlines and repeated viewings of Hitchcock’s Frenzy. “I say, that's not my club tie, is it?”
Over the last decade, I have been inundated with press releases from dating websites that specialise in married people looking to have affairs. At least, I think they were press releases. It’s quite possible that they only looked like press releases but were actually subtly formatted spam targeted at middle-aged IT journalists.
One turned up just the other week announcing Kiseki, a Japanese “international dating” app. I guess this means you could conduct a torrid relationship without the risk of ever bumping into them in the street, given that they live several thousand miles away. Kiseki promises to “break down geographical barriers” and “spark love at the global scale”, all from your bedsit in Hebden Bridge. Still, I’d like to know what an ‘eki’ is before I kiss it.
It’s just as well that I never took up those PR offers to use journalist discount codes to “take a look around” otherwise my email would have ended up in some hacker’s exposure list. That would take some explaining at home, I can tell you.
It’s bad enough with those misdirected SMS or WhatsApp messages that one receives from time to time. When I’m out and about, these tend to be from unknown numbers and saying something like “C U down the pub Phil” or “Running late Steve, sorry” and so I ignore them. But if my phone is resting on my desk at home, it has a proclivity to buzz with misdirected notifications that look highly suspicious, if not downright incriminating.
This happened just yesterday. I was sending a message just as Mme D announced she would be going out for a couple of hours. I sent it, put my phone down and went to boil the kettle as she made ready to leave. On her way, she called out to inform me that my mobile had just buzzed with a new text.
I wandered back to my desk, mug in hand, to find my smartphone screen still illuminated and bearing a message from someone in my contacts book called KATE that read:
B WITH U IN 15MN LVVR
What should I do? Should I embarrass this KATE by replying to say she texted the wrong LVVR? Surely the best thing to do is just delete the message and forget about it.
But what if Mme D has already read the message? Surely deleting it and failing to mention its existence will seem incriminating. On the other hand, if she didn’t see it, deliberately mentioning it to her and showing her the evidence might look like I’m double-bluffing and trying to cover up my tracks.
Hang on, I am far too boring for illicit adventure. Revenge porn? Revenge yawn, more like. I don’t have any tracks that require covering. And yet this misdirected text makes me feel like I am somehow acting suspiciously whatever I do. Argh.
Just imagine, then, how desperate you’d have to be to risk everything by initiating a genuine extra-marital affair via the least secure method known to mankind – the internet. Who in their right mind would trust the internet to keep a secret? A secret dating website is about as secure as adolescents exchanging love notes in a classroom via paper aeroplane. Next thing you know, the school bully is threatening to pin your love notes on the school noticeboard unless you buy him off with ten packets of Opal Fruits.
Even better, it has been suggested that the active userbase of these dating sites is almost entirely masculine. Sure, there are hundreds of thousands of women signed up too, but the suggestion is that these women may actually be the men’s own wives trying to catch them in the act. They need not have bothered. In 2015, the dating website ashleymadison.com suffered a data breach that saw 60 gigs of personal information about its users released for all to see.
I love this idea: hundreds and thousands of virtual women awaiting their unfaithful virtual husbands’ return after midnight, curlers in their virtual hair and wielding virtual rolling pins.
But then, what did those men expect from a website named “Ashley Madison”? For a start, it beggars belief that anyone thought that the claim that “Ashley” and “Madison” were women’s names at all. What kind of idiot would name their daughter after a square garden or that annoying tit from Pokémon? No, I do not choose you.
Back in Blighty, we would have done it differently. DorisMabel.co.uk would have attracted literally several users, each paying a mere 0.0000012 Poopcoin (approx £320,000) to seduce chat bots by listing their interests as “reading a newspaper at the breakfast table”, “watching recordings of Match of the Day while Downton Abbey is on the other side” and “shouting ‘Where’s me tea?’”
Married ladies, how could you resist?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He appreciates that the 2015 Ashley Madison hack led to suicides and is officially No Longer Funny. ‘Wimps’ is no place for ambiguous wordplay about extra-marital websites. He therefore apologises to any love-cheat reading this who was caught up in that whole Ashley Madison, er, affair.
I thought that with (at least several of) such sites it had been established that the female profiles were largely fakes / bots, that would string the guys along so they didn't lose hope and depart from the service, while of course never actually agreeing to go out with anyone.
I fortunately don't have to pay much attention to such things, having been happily married for the last 27 years. But it does seem rather odd to open a service for international affairs. Aren't you by definition missing out on the main perk of an affair if you don't actually meet up? Or do both partners buy and, er, install certain remotely operable devices?
In ye early days of internet and personal email, I used to be 'showered' with 'invitations' from seemingly comely East-European ladies desperate to send me their 'photo'. Fortunately, I grew up in the era when those sporting ladies were 'game' but rather unladylike and likely not ladies at all.
And I've been pestered by a number of African Princes/Chiefs/Government Ministers desperate for help in retrieving huge piles of honest-cash.
And the time-share apartments I have missed out on! What was I thinking?
Fortunately, my long-term supervisor has a firm grip of reality despite her enthusiastic, confused husband. She knows I know who butters my bread if you get my drift.