Jennifer was talking to her boyfriend on a cell phone in Manhattan recently when a familiar beep announced that she had just received a text message.
The 30-year-old took the phone from her ear, pushed a couple of buttons and read the message on her screen. She returned to listening to her beloved before he had time to finish his sentence.
But while her partner of 18 months chatted, Jennifer was preoccupied with finding saucy words to respond to the man who had just messaged.
“It was a pretty tricky situation,” said Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be used.
Her use of cellular technology to juggle lovers is shared by a growing number of American men and women.
Divorce lawyers, private investigators and couples counselors all say they meet more and more adulterers who use text messages to cheat.
For Ann, who also asked that her last name not be used, an affair in Massachusetts while she was in a three-year relationship at college sent her sneaking to the bathroom to send sexy messages. She would then try not to smile when the reply came back in front of her partner.
“Often times, it’s very difficult to mask your titillation, so you have to develop a poker face so you don’t get caught,” she said.
The 23-year-old said flirting over text with another person allowed her to escape the reality of physically cheating. “It is a very clandestine way to be devious and not feel so bad about being treacherous to your partner,” she said.
But Ellen Alter, a prominent Manhattan divorce lawyer, said she has acted in cases where partners were devastated to find cheating text messages and determined to make their former spouse pay.
Not only can the messages be stored in the in-box of a cell phone, but in some cases they also have to be deleted many times before they are completely erased.
This was the undoing of Jason, who asked that his last name not be used. When the 28-year-old financial analyst left his phone in the car with his girlfriend of five years while he paid for gasoline, she read an incoming message from a woman he had met at a bar that weekend.
While the message itself wasn’t all that incriminating, he said she then went through a deleted items folder he didn’t know existed and found the more racy ones.
“She threw the phone at me and drove off,” he said. “It was such a stupid way to get caught.”
Message misuse?
Telecommunication analysts say the number of text messages sent in the U.S. grew to 25 billion in 2005 from 14 billion in 2003. Predictions for 2005 go as high as 45 billion.
Long documented as a medium for treachery in Asia and Europe–a 2004 study by a British law firm found 46 percent of Britons used text messaging to help them be unfaithful–the trend is catching on in the U.S.
———-
Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
