And then love?

Ashley Madison had the honesty to say it is for married people to have affairs as opposed to encourage married and partnered people to pretend they're single. And for that their customers have had their personal information, including apparently credit card information, released?

While cheating can be extremely damaging to most relationships, an affair actually begins long before the act itself. Having an affair is often one person's way of signaling to their partner that something is wrong in the relationship. And, often one person uses cheating as a catalyst to either fix or flee from the problems.

Let's be clear -- no one who signed up for Ashley Madison has committed a crime or participated in illegal activity. Shouldn't we be channelling our outrage towards a group of hackers for taking it upon themselves to determine what's immoral and what's appropriate conduct on the Internet? Using cyber-terrorism as a tool to shame people who may not navigate by the same moral compass as you is not only the ultimate breach in privacy; it's an attack on net neutrality. Imposing fear on people for how they behave online is just as repressive as restricting certain behaviours and content in the first place.

Should we still be signing up for monogamy 'til death do us part? When we sign up to be faithful, what assumptions are we making? There are so many assumptions we make when we sign up to be faithful 'til death do us part. But we shouldn't make promises we can't reasonably expect to keep.

It struck me that our marriage has functioned a lot like the arrival of the new fridge. Like the delivery men, David and I have managed heavy burdens by sharing the load, reaching out towards each other, and moving carefully in the same direction. A cracked fridge doesn't even hit the radar.