by Fonda Ippolito

Created on: November 02, 2009   Last Updated: November 03, 2009

In a society where "passing the buck" has become an art form, laying the blame for cheaters on the Internet seems perfectly acceptable, but truthfully, if a spouse is going to cheat, they'll find a way, right?

Wait a minute; of course cheaters will find a way, but that's not the question here, is it? What we're asking is does the Internet encourage cheating. What we are asking is if there would be any less cheating without the Internet. Is the Internet creating cheaters out of otherwise perfectly contented monogamous partners?

Oh, yeah. Big time.

We can see this demonstrated in what I like to call the 3 A's: Availability, anonymity, and avoidance.

The Internet is the perfect tool for providing instant gratification, no matter what it is that you desire. Want to play a few hands of cards? Bam! pokerstars.com. Want to find that perfect Alfredo sauce? Abracadabra... recipe.net. Wondering what ever happened to that cutie-pie cheerleader in high school? Why not log onto classmates.com? Is there anything that can't be "Googled"? I think not. So why wouldn't the Internet be a source for an instant emotional connection as well?

Not only is the Internet responsible for teaching us that we can have whatever we want whenever we want it, but that we can have 5,000 varieties of what we want even if we didn't know there were that many. Take the Alfredo sauce, for example. Before the Internet, if you were looking for a good Alfredo recipe, you might check the three or four cookbooks you have in your kitchen, call your mom, or perhaps a couple friends for their ideas. Now, "Google" the term Alfredo sauce. You just went from having maybe six choices available to about 890,000!

Now, take that increase in availability and superimpose it onto the Internet cheating scenario. Before the Internet, a spouse's possible cheating partners consisted of the people at work or school, the local pub, maybe that cute tool booth collector; not a lot of options there. But how many people use the Internet everyday for social networking. To give you an idea, facebook.com alone reports 200 million active users (http://mashable.com/2009/04/08/facebook-from-100-to -200-million-users-in-8-months/).

Furthermore, the advent of the Internet has created a social anonymity on which we as a society have only just begun to focus. Mostly this focus is reserved for the vilest of impostors: pedophiles, sexual predators, or serial killers. The FBI alone has an entire branch dedicated to cyber crimes, with much

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