The new infidelity

Thirty-six characters. A minor but very au courant lapse of spelling and grammar. A spark of innuendo. A hint of the illicit. This is the world of textual intercourse. A world we all inhabit.

It started innocently. It always does. First,the messages spelt out a proposal for a client,a pitch to sharpen or a copy to edit. After five months,it stopped being just about work. It extended to daily activities,fleeting thoughts and the occasional joke. The messages landed every morning and every night on Sanjanas phone or in her inbox. Back from boring official dinner, her phone beeped at 1 am. At 7 am,it flashed,Are you awake yet little bird? A copy editor in a Mumbai-based ad agency,Sanjana first messaged back with alacrity how do you not reply to your boss? and then slowly grew accustomed to his texts.

Kuldeep Singh,a senior manager,had been married for 20-odd years,with two children who are in college. When Singh would meet Sanjana in office,he feigned indifference. If he was standoffish and aloof at workplace,he was chatty and considerate online. It indicated an awkwardness,an embarrassment about a relationship that could have been innocent. Or8230; maybe not, she says. After nearly a year of a message-only relationship,unable to reconcile Singhs textual intimacy with his singular reticence,she decided to find another job.

The rudimentary form of the internet began in the United States in the 1960s as a way to combat threats from communist countries. Fifty years later,communication devices,from cellphones to the internet,significantly influence urban Indias personal relationships. With their immediacy,they have made distance a non-issue. Lonely hostel cubicles in different continents have snuck into Indian living rooms via Skype and webcams. Overseas families have ooh-ed and aah-ed at jewels,tut-tutted at saris,blessed newlywed couples and have,short of eating the food,immersed themselves at friends weddings through broadband streaming. But if technologies are making distances irrelevant,they are also creating fractures in relationships. Dr Marlene Maheu,US-based psychologist and co-author of Infidelity on the Internet,writes in an email interview,Technologies are tools,like hammers. They are neutral. The hands that use hammers can build things or break them. Can dishonest people use technological tools for new and creative ways to sneak around and betray those they claim to love? Yes.

Infidelity is conventionally defined as sexual intercourse without the spouses permission. But new technologies are creating new forms of infidelity. Online cheating or cheating lite can be described as intimacy with someone on the Net and secrecy towards ones partner about it. Maheu defines online infidelity as betraying your partner or spouses relationship or sexual trust online. If you are comfortable describing your online activities to your adult friends and family,there probably is no betrayal. Otherwise,you have to ask yourself what you are hiding and why.

Sunita Patil,a bank manager in Pune,had a weekend marriage. She and her husband,an HR professional,worked through the week and fended off sleep and tiredness on weekends to retain some semblance of married life. And then she came across her husband engrossed in explicit chats with a female friend. The chat had been on for several months,says Patil. She is a common friend from college. I had heard rumours about them having dated once,but I never really bothered about them. My husband and I were really pressed for time,but the least he could have done was discuss with me how things had deteriorated. So much heartbreak could have been avoided. What Patil has not been able to come to terms with is the sexual tone of the chat. I was taken aback by it. I was not sure what kind of infidelity it was and if I would have the stomach to forgive it. There was emotional cheating,of course,but I dont know if they had met and if there was anything real going on. And I am in no mood to find out. The couple is now in the midst of intensive marriage counselling.

What qualifies as cheating has changed in this virtual world of intimacy,which obviates the need for proximity and where physical presence gets substituted with tech paraphernalia. This gadgetry-strewn environment must be the toughest for a monogamous relationship to survive. Here touchscreen phones replace touch,chat lines turn into chat-up lines and texting becomes sexting. Nearly every workspace and social situation has its own anecdotes of people using technology to create subterranean relationships. From blogs and SMS to GTalk and Skype,the platforms are multiple and omnipresent. And they allow a great degree of anonymity and persona-switching. The much-loved and much-reviled Facebook,with its free pokes,bumps and status upgrades,can be quite a breeding ground for virtual beings looking for a risqué jab fest. Abhishek,married for five years,confesses to having exploited this space. A 32-year-old media professional in Pune,his work revolves around managing music events and recordings. It involves using Facebook to track events and artists. He says,My Facebook profile doesnt reveal much about my personal life and my wife doesnt object to that because I also use my account for work. This way I am able to have casual relationships without being doubted by my wife who thinks I am talking to potential clients.

Dr Himani Chaphekar,a Pune-based psychologist,says cellphones and the internet have facilitated marital fence-jumping,Social networking is just one of the factors contributing to the rise of infidelity. The idea of sanctity of marriage has undergone a change. After a decade of marriage,emotional connect and physical attraction towards ones partner slumps. Boredom sets in. Faceless chatting can easily fuel this fire into something unacceptable.

The unacceptable could be staring at you on your spouses social networking page. Over the last year,Azim,a freelance Web designer,spent almost every evening playing snooker and bowling with his friends. At least,thats what his wife Zoya,a marketing executive,thought. It was only when a careless friend tagged Azim in a video on a social networking site did Zoya figure that something might be wrong. She found herself staring at her husband of three years dancing intimately with a scantily clad bar girl. When she checked his phone,one message went,Whr r u? White shirt,jeans. Pls lets meet again, said another. When Zoya broke into his laptop with professional help,she found more proof e-shopping bills listing frequent purchase of flowers and chocolates that she never received.

Azim refused to own up to his duplicity,but after much hemming and hawing,his friends admitted that they never went bowling with him,but sometimes accompanied him to bars and clubs where he picked up young women he had befriended in internet chatrooms. Zoya,who has filed for divorce,says,We had been dating since college. I would never have suspected him of cheating on me were it not for the video. He was quite secretive about his email passwords and had a PIN blocking access to his phone,but I always assumed he just needed space.

Dr Ali Khwaja,counsellor and chairman of Banjara Academy in Bangalore,which handles family and interpersonal issues,says,New doors have been opened for those inclined to frivolity in relationships SMS,chat,email,social networking sites. In a month,Banjara Academy handles 30 to 50 serious instances of technology playing a part in infidelity. In most cases,he says,men are the errant ones and women victims.

The disjunct between our real and virtual lives was shown recently on Lovenet,Channel Vs reality show on internet dating. Participants first meet and impress each other in chatrooms. They are then taken to their dates real house,workplace,etc. The online world is often revealed as imaginative hyperbole,fanciful contortions of the truth. People claim posh addresses,clean houses and chastity,but the truth reveals crumbling localities,mosquitoes in the fridge,whips and wigs in the cupboard and nude posters with splayed legs. After seeing the truth,participants can choose whether to hang on to or move on from their online dates.

It was the kind of choice Ambika had to make. A writer,she knew how to frame images with words and her blog had followers,beyond friends and family. Arup,an avid traveller and photographer,soon found himself hooked to her writing. He would await her next entry with anticipation and would despair if it was delayed. He started leaving routine comments on her site. Pleased at having such a diligent follower,she explored his online persona and soon reached his blog. If hers were entries about travels in the peninsula,his were short stories and anecdotes,brimming with dry humour.

From blog fans,they moved to Gmail,GTalk and finally SMS. Each of these platforms brought an increased intimacy. Technology gave them an alternate reality. Ambika,who had been in a committed relationship for over two years,found herself looking forward to Arups texts. After a year of being in touch,they decided to meet in Delhi. She silenced the voices of doubt in her head. Should she meet someone she knew only virtually? What if he was a psycho killer? An email hacker?

She was seeing someone seriously should she trust this typer of words?

They met at Khan Market,her venue of choice. It was crowded. It was safe. But the meeting wasnt a success. She recounts,The person speaking to me was real enough. But the written words were far more thrilling than the banal stories he was telling me from across the table. He had not lied about himself online. But it was exhausting when I realised that after getting to know him intimately on chat and email,I had to start getting to know him again as a flesh-and-blood person. Her faith in her own relationship and her boyfriend was reaffirmed. That was of this world,Gtalk wasnt.

Peoples virtual lives can overwhelm and often wreck real ones. Niloufer Akhtar,a Mumbai-based divorce lawyer,says most of her clients found their partners were cheating when they chanced upon explicit text messages. But the ways of hiding are many. As psychologist Varkha Chulani says,Phones offer the options to delete text messages and call logs. Some have dual SIM cards. And you can pay your bills online. With all these features,you can easily go undetected. On the internet you can have multiple email IDs of which one can be reserved for your online lover. She says she hasnt come across a single case of marital discord where technology has not made it easier for the cheating partner to carry on an illicit relationship.

There is also the simple method of saving the same number on the phone under different names. Sameera had been dating her colleague Ashok for eight months. They both worked in a Mumbai TV studio. They worked together all day and would catch a drink with colleagues at night. One day Sameera tried to call her colleague Alpana from Ashoks phone. He had the number saved but when she went to the Contacts and called Alpana,her name didnt appear on the screen,only the number appeared. It was then that Sameera felt something was wrong. She realised that Ashok had saved Alpanas number under two different names,which meant that every time he called her only the number would appear and no name. This is the easiest way people two-time on their partners. An unlisted number doesnt prompt curiosity and questions the way a name does. Sameera never checked unlisted numbers,thinking they are spam or bulk texts. But now when she opened one,it read,Im yours alone as u r mine alone.

If Ashok was caught because of his phone,his relationship with Alpana had also started through the phone. At office parties,he would sit at the bar with his friends,while she sat with her group. His messages to her were originally about office gossip. Love your neighbour,but dont get caught, he wrote one day,from the adjacent cubicle. The messages soon got explicit.

Relationship 2.0 is not easy: it can begin with a chat and be wrecked by another. How do you then protect couple space? Reena Nath,a therapist in Delhi,has an old remedy spend large chunks of time together and a new one share passwords.

Names have been changed to protect identities

Shruti Nambiar,V Shoba and Dipti Nagpaul-DSouza