Love blooms wherever people gather, and so the Internet has become the dating center for a global population of romantics. Freed of limitations posed by physical bodies, identities, reputations, or accountability, people are experimenting with new types of relationships.
Connecting in this new world, people are engaging in love and romance at astonishing rates, and often with disregard to their monogamous offline relationships. They and their loved ones are often not sure if they are cheating or just experimenting. Infidelity on the Internet will help you define cyber-infidelity for yourself. The book will come alive for you with many personal stories and individual conversations that help you understand how people have fallen in love—or what they believe to be love. It will outline their paths to virtual romance and cyber-infidelity. You will hear their experiences, share their joys, cry at their heartbreaks, and somewhere in these stories find answers to your questions.
This book is written as a survival guide. It will examine motivations and benefits, as well as repercussions and long-term effects of experimenting with cyber-infidelity. We will discuss how to understand and deal with the eleven types of virtual lovers, and we will reveal their motivations. Some people are sincere, some are harmless, and some are dangerous. Quizzes will help you decide if one’s behavior has slipped into cyber-sexual compulsivity or cyber-infidelity. We will also provide you with a checklist of signs of a cyber-affair. If your suspicions are correct, we will explain the normal course of emotional reactions to cyber-affairs, and teach you techniques to manage your reactions.
We will discuss how to deal with the discovery of a cyber-affair, how to cope with the emotions that typically follow, and how to recover from its often-devastating blows. After the discovery of cyber-infidelity, decisions must be made about the future of your relationship. Infidelity on the Internet will help you think through the important considerations involved with those decisions. We will help you through the path of recovery, by teaching you how to deal with the strong and often troubling reactions experienced by both the faithful and unfaithful partners. We will suggest ways in which the unfaithful partner can help restore trust and intimacy in the relationship. Infidelity and the Internet will show you what constitutes an apology for cyber-infidelity, and how to bring closure to these painful episodes. We will also provide you with a number of resources to help you find added support and direction both online and offline.
Book Description
Use the Internet. Know its dangers.
Internet use is catching on faster than any form of technology ever invented. Its potential for human benefit is beyond measure. But it is not without problems:
• Marriages break up over emotional relationships forged in chat rooms.
• College students risk grades and health to spend time online.
• Child abusers lure kids by contact through the internet.
• Adults spend fortunes to subscribe to internet pornography.
These people have crossed the boundary between healthy use and obsessive preoccupation with this versatile electronic medium. An avid net-surfer himself, therapist Gregory Jantz has seen an increasing number of clients coming to his counseling centers for help with internet abuse. Jantz writes for two audiences: those who are worried about a loved one's use of the net, and internet users who may have a problem. He offers both groups concrete and biblical steps for working towards change.
Book Description
It might start with an innocent exploration of chat rooms, or a stab at an interactive multiuser game. But the Internet, for many Americans, has the potential to become an addiction that wreaks havoc at home, work, school, and in real-life relationships. The author, an expert on Internet addiction, began researching obsessive online behavior when he noticed that an increasing number of couples seeking marriage counseling were suffering from cyberspace-related problems.
Book Description
"This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to--anybody at all--because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging." In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with "female trouble" in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships.
