Is a virtual affair real-world infidelity?

Is a virtual affair real-world infidelity? - On the Level - MSNBC.com

...

now, can those with a longer memory than me tell me if these sort of questions were posed in the pre-internet days?

the article says something like 53 percent of men think sending a flirtatious email to a coworker is cheating, while 73 percent of women do.

what about the days before email? what if it was sexual flirtation based at the water cooler? does that change the opinion any?

and if not, why?

i didn't actually read the MSN article in its entirity. no surprises there, eh?

you raise a damn fine point, though, mowglimonster.

now, me, i don't normally tend to see flirting as inherently cheating or sexual or whatever. in sad fact, i've often got a terrible blind spot for it to the extent that i don't even realize if someone's flirting with me or my behavior could be construed as flirtatious towards them. i think it's called Generalized Cluelessness Disorder.

but, when a person's in a relationship, most especially an avowed committed relationship, suddenly their actions take on a meaning more significant than their own. your actions now affect your partner as well as you.

so, perhaps a functional definition of 'cheating' is 'if either you or your partner(s) feel that it is.'?

I am surprised someone would make a distinction at all between a flirtatious email, a flirtatious letter, or a flirtatious talk, and declare the first one as less meaningful because it is bits and bites.
Of course, a flirtatious email isn't written out of the blue, anyway. Actually, a flirtatious email would be more meanigful in my eyes, because a slightly flirtatous talk in the coffee kitchen can happen spontaneously and not mean anything really, but be just a certain sort of chitchat - as long as neither party was putting anything into it. Whereas someone has to have put a certain degree of thought, and a certain kind of thought, into writing and sending a flirtatious email or letter.

That's an interesting question. i don't really have an answer, I think it's one of those "depends on so many things" - questions. I'd actually say Mowgli is heading into the right direction. But here is another example :

Your husband has dinner with a female friend of him - and doesn't tell you anything about it. (My husband and I had this very discussion after he saw a sitcom episode centering around such an incident.) Nothing else happened. He sayd he thought it strange that the woman in question felt cheated upon, as nothing else had happened, not even a kiss. I sayd I would be bothered, even if I believed nothing else had happened, as I would assume there had to be an underlying reason for not telling me. It is "actual deeds matter" contra "underlying motifs matter". Honestly said, a jokingly flirtatious chat -no matter what the medium- with a colleague of his would bother me less than anything he wouldn't tell me.

As to the rest of the article, I think some of these people are fooling themselves. Interaction with another person is always real, no matter what the medium is. A virtual character of mine having an explicit affair with another person't virtual character? Difficult. I mean, I have at least heard of P&P roleplayers whose characters had "affairs" -though not very explicit ones- and that was seen as part of roleplaying and not taken into real life. But at least from the examples in the article it is pretty clear that they put a lot more into it, even if they wouldn't admit.

I think there has to be a question of appropriacy too. If you are behaving in a certain way that you know doesn't mean anything to you, but is still inappropriate, then that should stop. For example, if a wife is flirting with a colleague, and she knows it's just innocent, but she knows her husband would be uncomfortable with it, then she should stop. Because, presumably, she loves and respects her husband.

I agree with Hsing that a lot of these people seem to be fooling themselves. They know how they feel, but they're justifying it by pretending it's something else. Interaction within a MMORPG is different from many other types of roleplaying in that it's less like storytelling and more like actual roleplay in the classic sense. You are being someone else. I think if you are involved in a creative group work, the distinction lies in this - are you being the character or simply writing about them? In Second Life, that avatar is an avatar of you - so yes, any in-game infidelity is infidelity, in my opinion. And if the sexy young female avatar is played by 60-year-old Bob from Milwaukee, that just means that you're having an affair with 60-year-old Bob from Milwaukee.

Edit to add:
And, to go along with what Hsing and Mowgli said - if you don't want your partner to see what you're doing... That sounds to me like something you shouldn't be doing

what i found most shocking on that page was the news that Oprah's backing Obama. I mean, the political implications for the nation are quite frankly nothing short of staggering.

Savage titled it well, "It's all over"

back to the topic at hand...

I have to say his take on fidelity is a bit "liberal", and by "liberal", i mean, well, 'counter culture mcgovernick'.

Now, I don't tell grace every time I squander four or five quid on lottery cards. Nor do I tell her every time I glance at young women in revealing clothes down on the sea front. But while Grace isn't happy with me buying lotto tickets, she hasn't forbidden it. (for the record, my rule is one card a month, or more if winnings permit. I've only broken it... uh... a few dozen times).

The guy with the Second Life affair going on is clearly doing something his wife doesn't want him to do. he freely admits it. she has said she feels that sex online is adultery.

right or wrong, that's how she feels. to HER, her husband is now an adulterer.

i think mr. savage would do better to convince the wife that it's okay to get your rocks off while pretending to be a cheerleader than tell the husband that it's okay to lie.

i'm all for free sex and hedonism and stuff (the sooner we get most of the human population killed off by AIDS the sooner property prices will drop and I can get a decent house), but I stopped having tawdry online cyber-sex affairs with pakistani men pretending to be american housewives as soon as grace found out.

uh, i mean... as soon as i entered into a mutually monogamous relationship...

yeah.

I would say that this is true only if your partner always tells you when he meets up for a drink with a male friend or not. If he always fills you in on so he''s been seening then the omission would be suspect. If we occasionally meets up for a friend and doesn't mentition it, and you don't mind that. Why, should it be any different if his friend happens to be a female? It sounds a bit jealous/sexist to me?

As for the on-line sex thing. It depends on how open you are with your partner. It the on-line sex is innocent then you wan't have a problem talking about it "Hey Honey, I had sex with a bard today, to me!" if it's something you do in secret, it's probably in the wrong...and pretty sad.

oooh, now here's an interesting one... what if John Q. Husband bangs Susy L. Co-Worker in the broom cupboard one day. To Susy, it's romantic, passionate, and thrilling (she's a bit dim, Susy). To John, it's just a piece of ass and a chance to get his willy wet.

John comes home, gives his wife a kiss, and goes to help the kids with their homework. He never had any emotional attachment what so ever to Susy L. Co-Worker, and he doesn't have any intentions of banging her in the broom cupboard again. John never tells his wife.

alternate situation:

Betsy R. Wifenhimer is in a recipie swapping chat room. She's been trying to find a new way to liven up peach and apple crumble. Some pervy dude in the chat room starts flirting with her, and she finds it amusing enough to reciprocate. Flash forward a few hours/days/weeks, and Betsy is giving this guy cyber-head while blushing to her self. She's not actually getting off on it, but she finds it a bit naughty and is going along with it, while the other guy is starting to make a lot more typos and isn't typing as fast. She never tells her husband about it, superficially because she thinks its not really important. She doesn't view it as cheating because she's got no emotional involvement other than a few giggles.

is there a difference between those two situations, other than one's 'meat space' infidelity and the other is 'cyber space'? or, does the second one not count as infidelity for some reason.

if not, why?

It's different because Hsing's husband is a straight man (I assume). For a simplistic summary, if a straight man meets a straight man, there's no potential sexual encounter. If a straight man meets a straight woman, there is a potential sexual encounter. The potential is reduced if the husband tells the wife because it indicates his willingness to be open with her and to keep her aware of how his relationships stand with other women (hopefully non-sexual, but hey, they could be swingers).

This is not a male vs female issue, it's a case of possible sexual encounters. I tend to tell Garner who I'm meeting when I go out, anyway, but I do think there would be a difference between me going out to meet one of my female friends alone and going alone to meet a male friend. If I tell him I'm going, it's a case of, "Fine, whatever, fetch me snacks on the way home." If I don't tell him, there's an implicit suggestion that I wish to keep it secret. And why would I wish to keep it secret.

Of course, some people might prefer to keep all meetings secret from their partner, but I would find that weird too. Why can't you be open with your partner?

I am still ambivalent. I think she is fooling herself when she tells herself "it's nothing" as long as she was dealing with another person at the other end - I mean, in that given example, she makes a real guy far, far away jerk off, right? I would feel terribly wrong doing that. Even if I weren't married, actually, but in terms of infidelity, I would feel wrong. But actual collegue-shagging - I mean, in terms of intimacy, that is still pretty ultimate, isn't it? In my marriage, I would expect both to be treated as infidelity, but having had real world sex would have more consequences than "Darling, I had a cyber affair, but it didn't mean anything to me."

Ah, Rinso - The dinner example: in the case which we discussed I meant "deliberately not telling the partner" and not "innocently not mentioning it". Sorry if I didn't get that across, but it was what I tried to express with my last sentence: My husband doesn't tell me everything, but deliberately keeping something secret must mean something - either there was more to the dinner (emotionally), or he suddenly thinks I am an overjealous control freak. He actually slept on other women's couches on the one or other occasion, and such things don't bother me. But if he had told me he slept at a hotel, and I find out he slept at a lady friend's couch, it would matter to me even if I believed him that nothing at all happened, because I have to question his motif.

I've taken the discussion from this thread into our living room, and we had a very interesting discussion. (Don't fear, no drama.) He pointed out that in all these stories - the avatar's affair, dinner friend, and so on, another factor coming into play when things sum up to infidelity (or infidelity in the making) might be a kind of manifestation (for lack of better word).
You might frown at your partner having one candle light dinner with a friend, or spend an evening as an SL avatar flirting with another SL avatar, or have her/his RPG character flirt with another one, and see it as rolplaying of a sort, a kind of experiment, maybe for a short thrill, but not yet regard it as a full grown break of trust.
Yet when it happens again, and again, and your significant partner is returning to these interactions and the thrill they bring - be it actual erotic interest or the voyeuristic gigglish thrill described above, there is something manifestating that presents a problem in all but the most liberate partnerships.
By the way, I don't believe those thrills ("Oh, there is someone really high now hundreds of miles away, but me, i am only getting an innocent giggle from it, its all just experimenting") can be so far apart from each other as people in that situation make themselves believe. See above. That "Second Life" isn't real life at all seems like an illusion to me; only the most professional actors can really split repeated, explicit sexual roleplay apart from their "real" private life so it is "not real", and has no effect on your emotional household at all.
Note the words repeated and explicit, though. When RPGming, the one or other PC fell for another PC or NPC, but it neither dominated the storyline, nor was it ever very explicit. "Oh my, the elf's in love... Watch out, you could catch yourself a quest..."