Tulsa World: Counselors: Online affairs skyrocketing
Married people are increasingly using social networking sites to cheat, they say.
Two decades ago, they were high school sweethearts.
On a whim, he Googled her on his office computer, and found she lived in a nearby state.
"It's innocent enough," he told himself as he fired off an e-mail to her, "just two old friends reconnecting."
Months later, after an exchange of e-mails, then cell phone calls, in which they eventually talked about their tepid marriages, they agreed to meet at a hotel in Dallas.
This scenario, a composite of clients of Tulsa marriage counselor Brent Sharpe, has become commonplace as the Internet and social media lubricate relationships between people.
"In the last three years, we've seen an astronomical increase in Internet-related affairs," said Sharpe, with the Life Connection Counseling Center. "This whole affairs thing is just off the charts."
Sharpe, a pastor who works primarily with Christian clients in his counseling center, said more than 50 percent of his practice is affair recovery, much of it Internet-related.
"Anything that's good always has its dark side," he said of the Internet.
"Twenty years ago, there was no way to find a high school sweetheart," he said. And social boundaries restricted the face-to-face contact needed for an affair to develop.
The Internet has removed those boundaries, he said, "allowing a relationship to begin to flourish where it never got any traction before." …
This all makes sense to me. A stat says that one in eight couples met today through the Internet. If true, then it seems it would also substantially impact illicit relationships.
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