Infidelity affects 80% of marriages, author says

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

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A don't-do list for dealing with infidelity If you suspect your spouse is cheating, here's what self-described "infidelity expert" Ruth Houston says you should not do: Leave them: That's your last resort. Keep a close eye on what's going on while you are still living under the same roof. You can even try to work things out. Tell the whole world: It's natural to want to confide in somebody, but be cautious about whom you tell. Your friend could turn out to be the "other woman" (or the other man). Confiding could complicate things. Ignore it: Going into denial will only make matters worse. The sooner you confront your spouse, the better. Fight without thinking: Don't confront your cheating spouse without the 3 P's — Proof, a Plan and a Purpose. Waste time on the cheatee: It's natural to be curious, but don't obsess about the person your spouse is cheating with. Concentrate on working things out. Do not humiliate yourself by calling or confronting the other person involved. You'll be driving them closer together. — Ruth Houston is the author of "Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs"

He told her about the time his wife busted him for trying to have a cyber affair by setting up a profile on a Yahoo dating site, only to have a message turn up on his home account that she read.

Guirao, 31, of Makiki, knows she is toying with danger in the on-again, off-again affair that has been going on for almost two years.

"There's a rush, I guess," she said. "It's the right person at the wrong time."

The one thing she is savvy about is communicating with him via computer. If she sends an e-mail to his work address, she keeps it professional. She doesn't put anything in print that could get them in trouble.

Good thing, because that's exactly how plenty of people are getting caught — or finding ways to get away with cheating.

"The Internet is making it tons easier to cheat," said Beatriz Avila Mileham, who surveyed married people cruising online chat rooms such as Yahoo's "Married and Flirting" last year for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Florida. "If it's not the most common form of infidelity already, it will be in the near future. It's so convenient."

She found 28 of the 86 people she interviewed went on to meet their online chat partner, and 26 ended up having real-life affairs. Two study participants, a 66-year-old man and a 53-year-old man, told her they each ended up having 13 affairs that way.

But where there's cheating, there's also snooping. There are Web sites such as chatcheaters .com and infidelityCheck.org that allow suspicious lovers to track a cheater's e-mails and online chats.

And seeking revenge takes only a few keystrokes on sites such as cheatinglovers.com, which lets the jilted post anonymous profiles of people who did them wrong.

Jason Kaneshiro, a 26-year-old independent filmmaker and Army reservist from Pearl City, likes the idea of an Internet warning system for cheaters. He also knows there were times when his face could have been posted there.

Kaneshiro has been on both ends of the cheating spectrum.

"It was me who was cheated on first, and it felt terrible," he said.

"I couldn't imagine anything more hurtful to do to anyone else, and I said to myself that I would never do anything like that."

Two years later, he was on the other side.

"Dishonesty is dishonesty no matter what the specifics are," he said. "No one deserves to be lied to and betrayed, especially someone that you've shared so much with."

Yet, a survey by online dating site iMatchup.com found men and women can't even agree about whether it counts as cheating when married people chat online.

Of those who responded, 48 percent of men said online flirting and chatting was always a form of cheating while only 35 percent of women said that chatters were always cheaters.

Carole Altman, professional therapist and content provider for iMatchup.com, says the reasons behind those numbers could just be that when men chat online, they want sex, while women more often are just looking for a friend.

Roland Nip is more familiar with that kind of cheating happening the old-fashioned way.

Years ago, Nip's "best friend" took out his "girlfriend" on the sly and Nip lost both friendships.

The "friend" and the "girlfriend" married and had two kids. But eventually, what came around went around, and the friend left the girlfriend.

Nip took no joy in the breakup.

It just reminded him of the destructive power of broken trust.

"It's nothing that I speak of or remember lightly," said Nip, 54, who divides his time as a Honolulu attorney, actor, massage therapist and qi gong instructor. "It was a hard lesson."

Newfangled revenge sites are a fad he would rather skip.

"It's not a matter of revenge," he said. "It's a matter of trust. I realized from that situation that you cannot just go and offer friendship to everyone and think they will honor that friendship."

Jeanna Hurt also has built up her defense mechanisms, and she wishes she could have had some Internet alert or some kind of warning before her marriage came to a crashing halt.

"I was a victim of a cheating husband, which is why I am now single," said the 29-year-old divorced mother of two in Kane'ohe.

Author Ruth Houston says infidelity affects 80 percent of marriages, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of a relationship.

"When people say, 'It couldn't happen to me,' it could," said Houston, author of "Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs" (Lifestyle Publications, $29.95). "Infidelity knows no boundaries."

Houston says a relationship can be saved if the guilty party comes clean, owns up to the cheating and lets the healing begin.

(Her own marriage to a cheater? It couldn't be saved. She's since remarried.)

Tanya Bricking writes about relationships for The Advertiser. Reach her at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.