I was bored but the grass definitely isn’t greener

Apr 30 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

A STUDY last year showed that 72% of respondents knew at least one person who had engaged in a sexual cyber affair.

Property developer Alex Mullen, 34, from Hoylake (name has been changed), is one of them. He was soon spending four hours a day on adult dating websites after logging on when the relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Angie, hit a stale patch.

“I was bored at home,” he admits. “Sex wasn’t that good at the time and we weren’t really getting on. I was looking for some sort of excitement and something which might have led to a relationship.”

He logged on to adultfriendfinder.com, and was soon receiving messages from women.

“I’d get into work, get my work stuff sorted, then get on the website to see who had winked at me or whatever,” he says.

“It got to the point where I was logging on all the time. I became addicted to it, to seeing what was out there. I’d wake up in the morning and wonder if there were any messages for me. I’d spend three or four hours a day on it at work, trawling through the site. It was bizarre. At home, I couldn’t wait until she went to bed so I could get on the computer.”

He secretly arranged to meet four or five of them after weeks of chatting, but found the grass was not always greener.

His girlfriend suspected he was up to no good and packed her bags.

“Now, when I think of being in a hotel lobby chatting to these girls, I think I must have been up the wall,” he groans. “They didn’t turn out to be anything like their profiles. Angie is a stunning, beautiful girl, and I’d been begging her for months to move in with me. The irony is, that if I’d seen a picture of her on the website, I’d have sent her 100 emails. I suppose it’s the possibilities of the unknown.

“I didn’t realise until she left that I had someone attractive, very loving and very warm already at home. I’m now trying to piece back together my relationship with her and I’ve banned myself from the internet. It’s part of my rehab. What’s out there can be very, very destructive.”