Ah, the scandalous 2010s: Anthony Weinerâs sexts, Fifty Shades of Grey, Arnold Schwarzeneggerâs love child. It was in this fecund soil that Ashley Madisonâthe infamous website dedicated to extramarital affairsâbecame a household name. The website and its purposely eye-raising sloganââLife is short, have an affairââseemed to define a decade filled with tawdry turpitude and tabloid titillation.
But when I recently received an email from the Ashley Madison press team, my first reaction was, âThat still exists?â (I am apparently not alone here: The first suggested search when you type the company into Google: âIs Ashley Madison still a thing?â)
Itâs not just that the site suffered one of the most famous data breaches of the 21st century, revealing millions of member accounts and exposing the affairs of government workers, celebrities, and probably your middle school softball coach. Itâs also that, in the golden age of âethical non-monogamy,â when New York magazine is publishing âA Practical Guide to Polyamoryâ as its cover story, and major celebrities are coming clean about their open marriages, you have to wonder if anyone is still having âaffairsââespecially on a website older than Facebook.
But Paul Keable, the siteâs chief strategy officer, says online-initiated infidelity is alive and well. Keable said the company has more than 365,000 new signups every month, a number that has remained ârelatively stableâ for several years. (Use tends to drop off around the holidays.) The site boasted about 38 million members in its heyday in 2015, before the data breachâmore than apps like Hinge and Raya have today.
Without a trace of irony, Keable suggested that the reason Ashley Madison remained popular, even in the era of dating-app oversaturation, is its commitment to privacy. While other apps require users to declare their desire for non-monogamy openly, with their name and face attached, he said: âNot a lot of people want that. They donât want to fight for this. They want to find what theyâre looking for [and] they donât have the world know about it.â
Ashley Madisonâs slogans is âLife Is Short. Have an Affair.â
Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty
On that point, the site seemed very strict. When I made a test account to explore the site and learn more, my account was suspended almost immediatelyâa result, the PR team told me, of indicating in my bio that I was a reporter on assignment. (âWe just ask that she not attempt to interview members through the platform or compromise our membersâ anonymity,â the company said, via the PR team.) The company did offer to connect me with members for anonymous interviews, but when I said I would need to know their full names for my own records, to verify they were real people, they backed out.
When I was eventually let back onto the websiteâwhich looks like it hasnât been updated since 2010âwhat I saw surprised me. There were a large number of men in their thirties and forties who listed themselves as âattached,â but a noticeable proportion (about a third, by my rough estimate) were in their early- to mid-twenties. A large number of that group were âunattached,â or singleâa weird trend for a website that claims to be the leader in âmarried dating.â
It turns out those calculations werenât too far off base. According to data the company shared with The Daily Beast, the membership of the site is now 40 percent Gen Zâup from 37 percent in 2022. And according to a press release from the site, 28 percent of active users are single menâ70 percent of whom said they were looking not for other singles, but for married women.
A billboard for Ashley Madison in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the go-go 2010s.
Gallo Images/Getty
Curious about why a young, single man would want to date a married woman, I consented to a fully anonymized interview with a man Iâll call Chris, whose real name I do not know and who therefore could, for all I know, be an Ashley Madison employee posing as a divorced dad in south central Philadelphia.
Anyway, Chris, who claimed to be in his forties, told me he joined the site a little over a year ago, as a way to ease into dating after his divorce. He works a full-time job thatâs âpretty demanding,â and between that and taking care of his kid, he said, he doesnât have a lot of time for a relationship. Plus, he added: âDivorce sucks. Itâs kind of ruined relationships for me.â
When he tried other dating sites, he only matched with people who wanted committed, long-term relationships. He signed up for Ashley Madison, with some trepidation, looking for someone he wouldnât let down. And he found it: For a year, he said, heâs been dating a married woman in his area whose husband is supposedly âââon the same page.â
â[Thereâs] not a lot of responsibility, not a lot of time and effort,â he said of the arrangement. âWe try to spend time together whenever schedules allow, but itâs not a full-blown involvement.â
âI said, âIâm not going to fall in love with you. Iâm not going to ask you to leave your husband.ââ
Chrisâs story seemed to tally with the data Ashley Madison supplied: 16 percent of the single male members the site surveyed said they appreciate not having to worry about âunspoken traditional rulesâ like waiting to discuss sex; 11 percent said they liked being on the âsame page about commitment;â another 11 percent said they liked being able to indicate specific sexual preferences; and almost a third said they joined for a combination of these reasons. Put simply: Single men are joining Ashley Madison for easy, no-strings-attached sex.
I viewed the data the team supplied with caution; the site has in the past lied to its members by creating fake âbotsâ to flirt with married men to keep them using it longer. Itâs also been criticized for buying up fake domain names critical of the site and filling them with positive reviews. Honesty is not exactly their policy. (In an emailed response to this, Keable said Ashley Madisonâs âpast mistakes are public and we have most certainly learned from them.â)
But if accurate, the data provide an intriguing insight into how the site is being used. Female members, it said, are more likely to sign up as part of an openly non-monogamous relationshipâthe kind of trendy new agreement I assumed had rendered the site so last decade. (Ashley Madison does not use the more popular term âethically non-monogamousâ or âENMâ because it does not want to suggest the rest of its members are doing something unethical.) Of the 16 percent of users who are in open relationships, 26 percent are women and only 14 percent are men.
In response to a request to interview one of these women, the company offered a written âtestimonialâ from an anonymous woman in her fifties, whoâin suspiciously professional-sounding languageâsaid Ashley Madison had âhelped strengthen my relationship with my husbandâ and that it had â[brought] them closer together to know that our commitment to each other is undisturbed by having outside partners.â
Keable said heâs seen a growing number of members with joint accounts, meaning both used the same account to solicit side pieces. Asked why someone might choose Ashley Madison to pursue outside partners in an open relationship instead of a dating app specifically designed for open relationshipsâlike the increasingly popular, kink-positive app FeeldâKeable returned to the idea of privacy.
âI think whatâs the biggest difference is primarily the community of people,â Keable said. âIf youâre on Feeld, you want to be out and loud and proud, you want to push that agenda, you want to be at the forefront of a revolution.â
âWhen you come to Ashley Madison, youâre coming with the knowledge that youâre meeting with people that donât want their kids or their family or colleagues knowing about this,â he said. âAnd thereâs a lot of respect for that.â
Ashley Madison, I suggested, was like training wheels for non-monogamy, allowing members to explore bringing more partners into their relationships without necessarily letting anyone else know they were doing so. If Feeld is non-monogamous dating for the loud and proud Brooklyn set, Ashley Madison is the alternative for tentative, middle-aged suburbanites looking to quietly dip in their toes. (Another stat: 59 percent of non-monogamous users said they had not told anyone else about their open relationship.)
The company appears to be leaning into this new potential market, lining up a spokesperson in the form of Dr. Tammy Nelson, sex therapist and author of the book Open Monogamy: A Guide to Co-creating Your Ideal Relationship Agreement, who lends an air of legitimacy to Ashley Madison press releases and interviews. (Nelson actually wrote a blog post in 2015 on what to do if your affair had been exposed on Ashley Madison, in which she assured couples: âDonât sign the divorce papers yet.â)
Still, if my limited experience on the site is any indication, Ashley Madison hasnât strayed too far from its roots. Of the four messages I received in the five hours I was active on the site, all were âattachedâ men over the age of 35. Afraid of once again upsetting my anonymity-obsessed overlords, I messaged none of them.