Matthew is a successful, 48-year-old tech executive living outside of San Francisco. Over the course of five months from 2013 to 2014, his wife — we’ll call her “S” — cheated on him with countless men on the Ashley Madison website. Last week, hackers exposed the site’s 32 million users. Here, Matthew, who asked that his last name not be used in order to protect their two sons, tells The Post’s Dana Schuster his story.



When I heard about the Ashley Madison security breach last week, the first thing I did was check out everyone who signed up in my neighborhood. I’m a computer guy, so it was easy to create database commands to say, “Show me everything in the ZIP code.”

I recognized six names right off the bat. There was a business associate, a handful of family friends and even a dad of my kid’s schoolmate. I always thought he was a decent guy, and here I see he spent $5,000 on the site.

And then there was my wife of 19 years. Or soon-to-be ex-wife, I should say.

I first learned that S was using Ashley Madison on Christmas Eve 2013. I call it D-Day, cuckold-speak for “Discovery Day.”

The breach — which exposed credit card names associated with accounts, profiles, email addresses and more — brought all of that pain back like a sledgehammer.

Not only was I reminded of the torture of discovering that my life partner, now 48, was cheating on a site that flat-out condoned extramarital affairs, but suddenly I could read the profiles my wife, who used the pseudonym Sophia, created during her two stints on Ashley Madison. She paid $20 to have each permanently deleted, but clearly, the company did no such thing.

Her profile, “attached female seeking male,” read: “Not looking to blow up my life … I am looking to stretch my wings a bit and fly a bit farther.”

My wife, to put it bluntly, was a cold fish in bed throughout our nearly two decades of marriage, so it was devastating to see her explicit fantasies laid out there so unabashedly. When we were together, she wasn’t into oral stuff, she wasn’t into kinky stuff — but on the site, she checked all the boxes: “I like to give oral,” “I like to get oral.”

Had you asked me two years ago if I ever imagined S would cheat on me, no less on a site like Ashley Madison, the answer would have been a vehement no.

We first met at a party when I was at business school. She came as someone’s guest. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I was interested right away.

We were a vanilla family, which was fine with me. We had two beautiful boys, now 11 and 16, and had typical dinners out and vacations up and down the coast of California and to visit S’ family.

My wife was a cold fish in bed … so it was devastating to see her explicit fantasies laid out there. - Matthew on his wife’s online profile

Not too long ago, after years of struggling financially, my software company, with a valuation in the billions, had its IPO. We did very well. We lived in a $1 million dream house on the beach just outside of San Francisco. She could do anything she wanted. The only thing S couldn’t do was betray me, but I guess I forgot to be clear about that.

In the fall of 2013, we were going through a rough patch. My wife, who was the picture-perfect mother to the outside world — [parent-teacher organization] president, community volunteer, the works — was turning hostile and contemptuous. In response, I became withdrawn and distant. We decided to go to marriage counseling.

Not that it was doing much good. She had started wearing fishnet stockings out for drinks with the girls and spending a lot of time with the bedroom door closed. One month later, on Christmas Eve, suspicion got the best of me.

I turned on the computer. S didn’t realize that the Notepad app on her iPad synchronized with our email account. I saw a bunch of messages referring to something called “AM,” which I didn’t immediately connect to Ashley Madison. I figured it out, though, once I read what appeared to be a draft of S’ profile.

I confronted her. Turns out she had been on dates with at least six men from the site in a matter of weeks. Right around the same time we started counseling, my wife’s friend (who, mind you, is a licensed marriage and family therapist) suggested she sign up for Ashley Madison, whose tag line is, “Life is short. Have an affair.”

“She said having affairs helped her marriage, so I decided to give it a go,” S told me.

She refused to tell me the names of the other men, but agreed to delete her account. I assumed that meant we were on the path to repairing our marriage.

By April 2014, my wife was still acting erratic. She threatened divorce and told me how miserable it was being married to me. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of lingerie, but refused to let me touch her in bed, as I pleaded for affection. I was admitted to the ER for exhaustion caused by stress and sleeplessness.

So when I noticed a weird gift credit card peeking out from her wallet, I decided to look it up online. I saw that it was used for $80 at a boutique San Francisco hotel. No San Fran hotel is $80 a night! But after calling, I discovered it can be — if you’re only paying for a day rate.

I confronted her once more and she confessed that she was back on Ashley Madison, sleeping with married men.

She tried arguing that it would help our marriage, bring some spice into the relationship, and that being on Ashley Madison was a plus: Since everyone’s married, there’s no incentive to expose the other person. It was as though I was talking to a complete stranger, some bohemian. No one I knew would say something like that.

“You shouldn’t judge me,” S said. “You’re seeing things in black and white when there is so much more nuance to it.”

But really, there wasn’t. She was bored with me and wanted to play. It was very simple.

I tried to stay with her and work it out for three more months, but she ultimately revealed herself to be someone I didn’t want to be with. We separated in the summer of 2014. We are still going through our divorce.

When you’re betrayed in this way, to this degree, you become traumatized and experience post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. The breach, needless to say, made it come back all at once. I triggered hard. My girlfriend of one year (we started dating after my wife and I separated) was a little confused as to why I was still so upset.

“It was really traumatic,” I explained to her.

People are surprised to hear about men whose wives are on Ashley Madison. Typically, guys are considered the philanderers — actively going out pursuing affairs — while women get hit on and reactively decide whether to cheat. But that’s not always the case.

Sure, the hack revealed that only 14 percent of Ashley Madison’s users were women. But it’s a substantial number when you think of all the havoc those people, including my wife, have wreaked.

I’m most worried for my two children. Kids can be cruel, and I don’t want anyone going up to them and saying, “Did you see what your mother did?” My older son found out about the affairs when he chanced upon an anonymous blog I kept on survivinginfidelity.com. He still speaks to his mother, but has a hard time dealing with what happened. Our younger son, thankfully, doesn’t know.

But maybe there’s an upside to the breach. Ashley Madison deserves everything that’s coming its way. The CEO is such a sociopath. Just think about all the misery he helps inflict. The fact that there are already two suicides linked to the breach is just so regrettable.

And for those who were caught, you should stand up and say, “Yeah, I did this. I admit it and I’m working toward being a better person.”

And for those who were caught, you should stand up and say, “Yeah, I did this. I admit it and I’m working toward being a better person.”

I’m currently looking for a new job in the tech world, and you can bet that I’m going to look up any potential new boss to see if they were on Ashley Madison — anyone who would lie to his or her spouse would lie to me.

Being divorced after nearly two decades of marriage because my wife was cheating on me on a site like Ashley Madison wasn’t the future I had envisioned. Back when we were together, I thought what we had was good. Only in retrospect, now that I’m separated and in a new relationship, do I understand how good it can be. My life is 1,000 percent better.

Now I understand what love is. It’s when someone appreciates you for who you actually are, and has your back. And when you’re not with them, you feel like something’s missing. And you can trust them with your life.

I didn’t have that before, but now I do.

Photos by David Butow/Redux