Are you faithful to your spouse? It's less common than you might think.
/Ashley Madison, the online affair facilitator with the slogan, "Life is Short. Have an Affair." was hacked this week. Hackers are threatening to release the personal information of its 37 million members.
Did you hear that (in your head, I mean, since I am not reading this aloud to you)?
37 millions members.
That may sound like a lot, but its not. "A lot" doesn't come close to describing this massive number.
Let's do the math:
While Ashley Madison operates in 46 countries, a "significant percentage of users" are American.
For this post, let's pretend that a significant percentage of 37 million amounts to 30 million.
The population of the United States is 318 million. Of that number, 51 percent, or 162 million are married, which means that almost 20 percent of married Americans are members of Ashley Madison.
I suppose this number should not be terribly surprising, since research has shown that 15-25% of married people cheat on their spouse at least once during the course of their marriage, but that would mean that every single person cheating on their spouse is using Ashley Madison to do so, and this can't be true.
So a hell of a lot of married Americans are cheating on their spouses - more than we may suspect - and many of them are using Ashley Madison to do so.