ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Several years ago an American friend told me that he had been married 26 years, 18 of which had been unhappy. Yet he didn’t want a divorce because as a Christian he believed in his marriage vows. For him, there was nothing noble about his situation, he was just doing what lots of middle aged men and women do – living in an unhappy marriage and simply getting on with life. I wasn’t sure what to think other than reflect on what is the cost or reward for fidelity. What does marriage mean when its unfulfilling or when couples pretend nothing is wrong rather than confront real problems. This issue has been brought into focus with the recent story of the online dating service, Ashley Madison. A service marketed to people who want to cheat on their spouses, the website promises complete anonymity and has the motto, `life is short have an affair. Hackers, going by the name Impact Team claim to have obtained personal data about the service’s 37 million members and threaten to publish intimate details about users unless the site, known as the 'Google of cheating', is shut down. Online responses to this story vary from `serves them right, dirty cheating scumbags’ to `no-one has the right to make judgements on other people lives.’ The story of this website is very much a story of our time. Adulterous affairs are nothing new and our moral attitudes to marriage and sexual desire have always varied. Even in Islam, where a faithful marriage is encouraged as the ultimate basis for a good society, where husband and wife are mentioned as garments for one another, there’s the recognition that to be human is to desire. And while principles of mutual fidelity, trust and sexual fulfilment are intrinsic to a good marriage, marriage is no guarantee of human happiness. But with such dating sites, it’s the wish for anonymity made possible through this online world and the illusion of privacy, which lulls people into thinking that secrecy gives power, that secrecy protects the forbidden and that secrecy means being free. Free to do what we wish and free from judgement. The threat of having your details exposed is as much about having that power taken away as it is about the hurt or humiliation of being found out. We flourish or fall on the basis of our relationships where the most rewarding are those which demand loyalty, time and commitment. But even when we console ourselves into thinking that we can have endless relationships in our search for more and more happiness, when nothing and no one has the right to be the moral arbiter of our lives, it is often our own conscience which eats away at our sense of well being. For after all the most important relationship in our life is the one we have with ourselves.