Ashley Madison is a website founded by Darren Morgenstern in 2002. It is a Canada-based, super classy online dating and social networking service that is marketed to people already married or in a relationship. It is the largest of its kind and caters to those who want to date outside their marriage! A sure way to catch if your better half is cheating on you is to find out if they have an Ashley Madison account, whose tagline is “Life is short. Have an affair.” (Ouch!)
Image source: Ashley Madison
In July of 2015, a group called “The Impact Team,” breached the user data of this cheating site because it enabled extra-marital affairs. The team copied all the personal info of the Ashley Madison account holders and made threats to expose the names of the users if the site wasn’t shut down. More than 25 gigabytes of site info was leaked in August, along with the personal information of the users. Since the site does not delete the real names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit card transactions of the users, many were publically shamed!
Suggested read: 9 traits all men who cheat have in common
But what about the wife, girlfriend, or partner who finds out that her other half had an Ashley Madison account and was involved in infidelity? What is the trauma that she goes through? How does she take action? Let’s find out!
1. You face your feelings
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If you are someone who just found out that your partner had an Ashley Madison account, you are most likely to feel that you are the only one who is suffering, but that isn’t true. There are 32 million others like you whose significant other was registered on this site. You are not alone.
“How could I miss the signs?” “Why didn’t I see this coming?” You have to stop blaming yourself! As Jane Greer, author of What About Me? Stop Selfishness from Ruining Your Relationship, says, “It can be very easy to miss the signs that your husband has signed up for a site like this or is being unfaithful in some other way.”
When someone is not happy in a relationship but wants to stay committed, he will speak often about his concerns with you and try to look for a solution. However, if he’s thinking about having an affair or is already involved in one, he will stop making efforts because he is getting what he wants from elsewhere. So it is not your fault!
2. You visit the site to kill yourself a little more
You will Google the list given out by the hackers and try and visit your man’s account. Once you succeed, you will dig into the details. You will read the chats, see the transactions, and view the pictures and sexts exchanged. It will feel like you are piercing a dagger through your heart. You will remember all the vows you made, all the moments you shared, all the fights you had, and all the hints, which now seem so clear but never appeared to you then. You will break yourself down.
3. You try to figure out if you could have done something to stop this
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He is the one who has an Ashley Madison account. He is the one who cheated. He is the one who strayed. But you will blame yourself. Why do men cheat? There can be many reasons. But registering oneself to a site that promotes infidelity is a red flag that he is the one to blame. Only him.
4. You ask yourself whether you should stay or leave
Once his Ashley Madison account is out in the open, you have to make a decision: Are you going to work through this cheating or will you end the relationship? Whichever option you choose for yourself should be chosen deliberately and not on a whim. Your feelings and emotions at this stage are running wild. You want to rip him apart, and at the same time hold him and cry. Emotions are built on assumptions which can be subjective and untruthful. You need to be sure before you make a move. There are two approaches that women usually take when they decide to stay. First, they live with him and act like nothing happened (many women do this and we are not here to judge them). Second, they are in a relationship where the man continues to cheat. The difference is the women know it and the men know that their wives know it. This is a disaster.
5. You think renegotiation
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There are many reasons why you may not find this kind of an affair a deal breaker. It could be that you are considering what would happen to your children if they knew or thinking about what people would say. Whatever be the reason, it is your choice to stay with this man. Megan Fleming, a relationship and sex expert, states that, “It doesn’t mean you’re a sucker, and it doesn’t condone the experience. If you’re willing to do the work, you can come out with a far better relationship after cheating.” (However, we want to tell you that if this relationship makes you upset, you don’t have to live with it. You have other alternatives.)
While making your decision, you also have to be aware of the fact that his straying and going around with other women could have an effect on your health. You may have to visit a gynecologist to get yourself tested for STDs.
Suggested read: Is is ok to cheat if your partner doesn’t know about it?
6. You are not sure
This is the point when you are not clear about what your course of action will be. Whether you can talk this through or whether you deem the marriage irreparable is something you can’t be sure of from the get-go. According to Greer, “You need to have an honest conversation with him about what kind of toll this is going to take on your marriage.”
This is when you need to ask him everything that is on your mind. Greer tells us, “You may want to know if he’s actually met anyone from the site in real life, how long he’s been on it, and how many women he’s talked to.” He is most likely to tell you that he didn’t meet anyone and spoke to none. You can check that later. Your gut will tell you right away if he is lying or not, and you might need to ask for evidence that he is telling the truth.
7. You want to split up
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At this stage, you realize that to your man, this is just the ‘hottest’ in a string of cheating. He is neither remorseful nor willing to change. You want a divorce. We say you hold off on that for now. Your anger might be clouding your judgment and forcing you to make rash decisions. Megan Fleming, a relationship expert says, “When there’s an affair, there are such intense emotions involved on both sides. If you’re going to walk away from a relationship, you don’t want to have any woulda, coulda, shouldas. Going to couple’s therapy can help you make sure you’re acting from a place of clarity.”
No matter what your decision is, in case you have kids, you need to shield them from the storm. Fleming points out, “You don’t want them exposed to explosive anger or name-calling.”
8. You struggle to control your emotions
As you are trying to decipher the trauma that you have been through, what you think and what you do will tend to spin out of your control. You will find yourself becoming obsessed with each little detail that happened between the time that you found your spouse has an Ashley Madison account to the time of your separation. You might become an Obsessive Compulsive at work, pushing yourself too hard so that you can distract yourself.
But you need to pull yourself together. You have to slow down and confront the pain. Don’t keep hanging on to what happened because you cannot change it. Think of what lies ahead.
9. You learn from the experience
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Rather than blaming yourself for what your partner did, you will now start appreciating your worth. You will realize that you are more than enough just the way you are. The infidelity had very little to do with you. You weren’t a party to it. On the other hand, if you were stuck in the quicksand of intense hatred towards your partner you will begin calming down. This is the time to let go and walk away from the memories. You have dealt with it for too long. Now you have to heal yourself. Stop taking the ‘affair,’ or the willingness of your partner to be in one, personally. You will feel more positive now and think of moving forward in life. Erik Erikson, the famous psychologist once said, “A crisis can be a turning point; by making you vulnerable it can heighten your potential for positive change. Sometimes it takes the threat of losing something to make you realize its value. Until you feel compelled to leave, you may not realize you are happy where you are and want to stay.”
Suggested read: 9 stunning scientific reasons why good men cheat
10. You work on restoring the trust
As a woman who found out that her man had an Ashley Madison account, you are most likely to be trust-broken more than heart-broken. Rebuilding the trust with a partner who cheated on you is too devastating. It is equally hard to trust someone else if you decided to move on from your previous betrayed relationship. As a person who has been badly hurt, the possibility of trusting someone with your love and life again is work that will take a lifetime. But you will eventually get there. 
We know you are inconsolable. We know you think your life has ended. But it hasn’t. This stage calls for re-invention. Love yourself and allow others to love you. Don’t let one spoilt relationship color your future relationships and hamper your life forever.
Featured image source: Google, copyright-free image under Creative Commons License
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