As we know, not even statewide lockdowns can keep partners from cheating on each other because monogamy is hopelessly flawed. While it may be a little harder these days to get out of the house for an extramarital tryst, affairs are still alive and well, and possibly more prevalent than ever. As Paul Keable, Chief Strategy Officer at extramarital dating platform Ashley Madison, told InsideHook last month, “This is not going to suddenly create better wives and husbands simply because they’re on forced lockdown.”
In fact, the extramarital dating site had already seen a spike in new user signups since lockdown began, with the platform now welcoming upwards of 17,000 new aspiring cheaters every day. So, where is all this quarantined infidelity going down? The answer probably won’t surprise you, because it’s Florida.
Ashley Madison just released a list of the cities with the most COVID-era user signups, and Miami and Orlando took home the gold and silver, respectively. Tampa also made the top 10, making Florida the most represented state on the list. Other big COVID infidelity capitals include Washington D.C. in third place, with Cincinnati, Ohio and Anchorage, Alaska rounding out the top five. Notable top 10s include Atlanta, St. Louis and Las Vegas.
While the prevalence of COVID-era cheating is hardly surprising, the Ashley Madison survey did result in an interesting political takeaway. While the site’s users typically trend Republican, the most recent survey found that its top 20 cities all went blue in the most recent election.
“It’s been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows, so in a time of huge societal shifts it shouldn’t be a surprise that even the membership of Ashley Madison is changing,” said Keable in a press release. “Past research has suggested that Ashley Madison members have tended to lean right, but in the age of social distancing we’ve seen that cities that skewed towards the left led with the most new members per capita.”
But in times of massive overhaul, it’s nice to know that some things, like society’s obsession with monogamy and simultaneous will to violate it, never change.
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