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On Monday, Prof. Anderson will present a paper at the American Sociological Association conference in San Francisco whose title borrows Ashley Madison’s slogan: “Life is Short, Have an Affair: Middle-Age Women and Extra-Marital Affairs.”

In it, he analyzes covertly observed conversations between 100 women on the site and their potential male partners, and claims to show the women do this not because they are unhappy with their husbands or wish for divorce, but simply because of “a lack of romantic passion and sex in their marriages.”

These women claimed to want both the affair and the marriage, so he concludes “these data call for a more complex view of cheating and affairs than society currently permits.” It ends by denouncing the “hegemonic control” of monogamy and calling for it to be overthrown.

The paper was not peer reviewed, and was rejected for publication by the American Sociological Review. It is to be submitted elsewhere.

“You can only get so much excitement out of sex with the same person, and all of the efforts to spice it up will only go so far,” Prof. Anderson said in an interview.

The “monogamy myth” of eternally fulfilling sex with one’s spouse “is a very damaging myth because people believe that when they stop having sex, that the love in the relationship has worn out, and what I argue is that it’s just the opposite, that when they stop having sex, the relationship has just begun. Once you’ve stopped having sex with your partner, now you’re in a relationship for the appropriate reasons, the emotional, social connection, the history that the couple have together.”