‘I’m having an electronic affair and I just can’t stop’: the rise of digital infidelity

I have absolutely no intentions of ever outing us and I can’t particularly see his current relationship status updating any time soon. But I can’t help myself. It’s been almost a year since our professional communications slipped and we plummeted, side-by-side, into the gutter, and since then it’s been a hot mess of sexting and sex calls.

“You know that you kill me too,” I messaged him back, thinking about exactly what I was doing lying down on the couch at the time. “I’m the one who’s been here thinking about you all day.”

The cat and mouse game has become all too familiar for the both of us, as we simultaneously struggle with the guilt of infidelity, but it’s one that I haven’t grown tired of. Because while I know it’s wrong, I just can’t stop it. This pulsating connection between us simmers through the phone line and the longer it goes on the more I want him. Because it’s not just palpable sexual tension that draws me in. It’s the growing friendship and deep attachment that mean more to me than I ever expected.

The rise of digital infidelity

Long gone are the days of seedy motel rooms that charge by the hour and lipstick stains on shirt collars. Cheating – which is something one in five Aussies admit to according to the Body+Soul 2024 Sex Census – has taken on a whole new meaning with the emergence of technology.

“Since our lives are becoming increasingly online, it’s changed the way we date and relate, and it’s also changed the way that many people will cheat or where they might engage in infidelity,” sex and relationship coach Georgia Grace tells Body+Soul. “Because it’s so accessible and a lot of people say that it’s easier too.”

In fact, it’s become almost as common as physical cheating. In a new meta-analysis, published in Personal Relationships, researchers synthesised data from over 300 studies involving more than 508,000 respondents from 47 countries to explore the true prevalence of infidelity.

According to the paper, while 25 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women admitted to sexual unfaithfulness, 23 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women have engaged in intimate behaviours online, such as sexting, and 35 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women reported being emotionally unfaithful by forming deep bonds with someone outside of their relationship.

Grace says she’s not at all surprised by the results.

“Technology is such a big part of our lives, and I think that those lines between what is reality and what is online can become really blurred,” she explains. “But while decades ago the online world didn’t seem like the real world, now we can’t ignore the fact that it is the real world.”

But if we haven’t had sex, is it really cheating?

This is something that I tell myself a lot. That it’s not that bad because we haven’t actually slept together. That it’s just flirty chit-chat over WhatsApp. But in reality, I know it’s practically worse.

“A lot of people still think that cheating is just the act of having sex, but betrayal can also come from these more emotional or romantic connections that you have with people,” says Grace. “And you can maintain an emotional and romantic connection with someone online.”

“Although when people tell me about it in session they’ll often say, ‘I knew it wasn’t right because my intention was to be sexually intimate with this person’. So just because it’s online, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less real or any less of a betrayal for that person.”

In fact, an online affair can be harder for the innocent partner to deal with than a one-time sexual encounter. “Some people will say, ‘I wish they just slept with someone and that there was no emotional connection because that would have been so much better’,” she says.

If only it was that easy to cut off. Because an electronic affair can be so much more than just a digital connection.