Up until a week ago, I would have told you that a website called Ashley Madison must be a name generator for preppy girls who like monograms. I know. Color me naïve. Suddenly, the website and its torrid details are everywhere.
People I have known for years are on the list. Lives are falling apart. Marriages feel like shams. The sins of the world are delivered up on your computer screen free of charge. And, based on the numerous opinions on social media, everyone wants a piece of the action.
It really is a fabulous opportunity for moral superiority. This is our chance to hold out our own vaguely intact marriages and yell out, “Hey Losers, How you like me now?” But let’s be real here, this isn’t a moment to showcase the 7th commandment on a hot girl wearing a placard. (Although, maybe the dudes might heed her warning with more fervor.)
And I’m not interested in talking about the offenses of Josh Duggar. Again. But I can tell you if I were his wife I would have burned his prized possessions in the front yard whilst playing Miranda Lambert on a loop. He’s lucky he married up.
Nope, this isn’t a moment about other people. This is a moment about us. And it’s a moment about us on the internet. It is a landscape that is always shifting and forever surprising us. I remember David Zahl commenting to me a year ago that the internet is still in its “Wild West” phase and we don’t even know what it’s for yet. This week, its main purpose appears to be exposing extramarital affairs. Next week it will be for looking at photos of the latest royal baby being baptized. Oh internet, you’re like an even weirder Santa Claus.
My point here is that the internet can feel like it just happens to us. We simply sit in the privacy of our office or (wo)mancave and get to look at whatever and talk to whoever about whatever whenever we want to. We get to live out our darkest fantasies with zero repercussions for real life. Or so it seems.
There was this bizarre commercial a few months ago from Nature Valley. In it they in they asked three generations to talk about what they did for fun as children. It will reel you in with bucolic images of childhood offered by the grandparents and parents. They talk about blueberry picking or fishing. Their stories are fun and adventurous. But when the third generation answers that same question, “What do you like to do for fun?” their answers are terrifying. Small, sweet faces look at the camera and say that they love to text, email, and watch videos for hours on end. It is so disturbingly creepy that I kept waiting for one of them to blurt out “Red Rum.”
One little boy looks innocently at the camera and says of his screen time, “I forget that I’m in a house, that I have parents, that I have a sister, that I have a dog. I’m just in the video game. I completely get lost.” It is difficult to think that these kids aren’t getting outside the way previous generations did. However, the real heartbreaker is that for these kids, the world of the internet has become the most comfortable world they inhabit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is5W6GxAI3c
But of course, if the adults around them are always seeking escape from their realities through the internet (Ashley Madison/Madison Avenue/Ashley Olsen), then why shouldn’t they? Dear Trees, Meet your Apples.
So, here comes the advice portion of my article. And yes, we at Mbird tend to shy away from giving advice. But here goes nothing. If you have an addiction to internet porn, or you turn to your iphone for a way to hookup with strangers, or even if you just like to yell at people in the comments section of the New York Times, then it’s time to tell Jesus to take the wheel because you are going to need that hand to type L-O-C-A-L (space) T-H-E-R-A-P-I-S-T into the Google.
I’m not trying to put a Jesus Blanket on things. Sometimes when we find out that everyone we know (including us) has horrific moral behaviors we like to say things like, “We just need more Jesus in our hearts.” Well, here’s the Good News: Jesus is all for that. Here’s the Bad News, though: you’ve got some very painful days of reckoning ahead before that actually happens. Have a hard conversation with your therapist and your pastor. And if your pastor can’t have a hard conversation with you about it, then add “Church Shopping” to your to-do list. Because the thing about extramarital affairs is that they aren’t nearly as exciting or original as we give them credit for being. They are old as time. As Biblical as King David. And for all of the escapism they promise, they offer only brutal real life consequences.
Life was not made to be escaped. It was made to be lived. We were made for intimate conversations with that person we chose to marry. We were made for arguments about who should pick up the kids or how much vacation we can take. We were made for real love over frozen waffles and drip coffee. And after years of faithful companionship, we were made to hold one another’s hand as we pass from this life to the next. Married love is sinful and beautiful all by itself. We don’t need Ashley Madison to up the ante.
David Zahl was right. We don’t know what the internet’s ultimate use will be (Lord Jesus, please let it not start with a K and end with a Shian). But we do know that the sins that happen in the elusive “cloud” eventually rain down into the real lives of people everywhere.
COMMENTS
9 responses to “The Wild West of an Ashley Madison Internet”
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I’m sorry to be a scourge but…find a therapist? Talk to a Pastor? Vagueries about the nature of sin (it’s everywhere and all over us) do nothing to arouse (pun intended) people to begin to question the very fabric of the society we live in, and whether the practices we commit to are conducive to being ‘alive’. The Nature’s Valley commercial raises the question (though extraordinarily superficially), but you dash it without serious consideration.
What is therapy to do besides dull the deep existential pain that might awake Western people to the nightmare we live in? What if our desires, expectations, imagination, and routines are so warped to ignore a different way of living? The Flesh, yes, but the Apostle warns us of the World and the Devil too.
cal
Hey Cal,
My experience of therapy has never been that it would dull pain. In fact it usually makes the harsh realities of my addictions and sin even more painful. And I think talking to a pastor about the fact that this is sin and is the devil at work in the world (and in my life specifically) is vital and goes hand in hand with my confession in light of the cross. But that’s just me.
And yes, we should question the fabric of the culture we live in. I had hoped in some small measure that’s what I did. Thanks for your comments.
First, let me apologize for some hyperbole.
When I speak of therapy dulling pain, I’m not disregarding pain in the process. But many times it’s trying to reconcile and accept what has happened. And this is not wholly bad. But your flippant remark (i.e. type local therapist in google) as a fix to perhaps a much darker and sinister reality (porn addiction, predatory and/or promiscuous sexuality) is a vague appeal to go find an expert.
Maybe our modern patterns need reevaluation, one that forces me out of myself, though not neglecting my own complicity (that day of reckoning you mention).
I mean, look at the reality you were abiding by: we don’t even have mature friends we can turn to and explore pain, emotion, guilt etc. We need to go find a stranger to consult. I’m not discounting the need for counseling nor engaging in confession with an ordained minister.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that you touched on something fantastic through the granola commercial, but this became a springboard to a truism (we’re all sick). There is no golden age, I’m not saying that. Every age has its sins, but this shallow advertisement unveiled (inadvertently perhaps) that we are physically ‘bent-in-on-ourselves’.
Trite ‘get more God’ answers do not apply here (or anywhere). But it’s surely a sad state that we have no friends to be with, no disciplines to aid in unwiring a pornified and narcissistic mind (one that I too possess), and a neuroticism because we don’t know how to simply suffer well (something that is more unique then we, the ‘West’, let on).
Forgive me if my tone sounded harsh. I don’t mean to only harp on the negatives. I do appreciate you trying to tackle this issue.
cal
Always love to read your thoughts. A good use of the Internet.
PS. And so I’m a little bit more concrete with the praise: I’m glad you mention true love is one that exists in the regular comings and goings of life, and that love is not confined to the ‘epic’, the thumping of the heart, the butterflies in the stomach, and explosion of romantic panengyrics. That part was very very good!
cal
Hi Sarah,
I was reading this post in an in-Target Starbucks, about to put in my earbuds, when an old man in the corner started playing his ukulele. He sang softly, played, and scribbled in his notebook. Thankfully, no one stopped him.
Your post and the old man reminded me that there is a real world outside my internet bubble. The real world has real marital fidelity and infidelity; it also has old men playing the ukulele in the corner.
Thanks, as always, for your thoughts.
Best regards,
Tim
Sarah, you managed to put in one post everything I love and loathe about Mbird (okay, not *loathe* exactly, but how could I not alliterate?). The paragraph with “married love is sinful & beautiful all by itself” is exactly the kind of thing I come here for, it is water for my parched soul. And the section with “let’s be real here, this isn’t a moment to showcase the 7th commandment..” and particularly “he’s [Josh Duggar?] lucky he married up” frustrate me. I think it hurts me to read glib comments about serious victimization and betrayal, and I feel confused by the implication that we shouldn’t make such a big hairy deal out of this b/c “extramarital affairs are…as Biblical as King David.” I’m filled with confused emotions & thoughts, and perhaps that is good as it forces me to seek God’s help in untangling them.
Hey Noelle, You are right to feel hurt by my glibness. I have found that sometimes humor helps people to hear. But I do not intend for the victimized to be undercut. Extramarital affairs are a big hairy deal. I certainly don’t want to down play that. Perhaps want I want to downplay is the excitement of them. They are not novel. Or new. Or anything worth throwing your marriage away for. I am sorry if that came across as them not being hugely sinful.
I also have seen the numbers for AM. And they are so huge that I wanted anyone who was reading this piece who has participated in the website to know that they could get help. So I was (perhaps too?) cautious in calling a thing a thing.
Sarah…nothing hurts more than an affair…. Nothing, no rationalizing. No understanding, no being an adult. It just hurts and your faith in your partner is gone forever. You still love your family, David, Michael, old Bob,but if it’s your husband thr hurt is forever.