Leela De Kretser, Columbia News Service
NEW YORK – 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.
In one swift maneuver, the 30-year-old journalist 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 appropriately saucy words to respond to the 42-year-old man who had just messaged.
“It was a pretty tricky situation,” she said of one of the more difficult duplicitous moments, so far, in a two-month text-messaging affair.
Jennifer’s ability to multitask cellular technology and lovers is shared by a growing number of American men and women, as they become familiar with the mode of communication first introduced in America in 2002.
Telecommunication analysts say the number of text messages sent in the United States 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 here.
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Divorce lawyers, private investigators and couples counselors all say they meet more and more adulterers who use text messages, which allow cell phone users to send 160 characters to another phone, to cheat.
“This whole affair has been my entree into text messaging,” explained Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be used.
She said the messages began two months ago with her lover simply texting to say he was thinking of her or to arrange to meet up. Then the phrasing grew more explicit. “It’s a good little distraction,” she said. “I have a deadline and here I am trying to send these salacious messages.”
Dr. John Suler, author of the online book “The Psychology of Cyberspace,” said that, like e-mail, a lack of inhibition was common to text-message relationships.
He said text encouraged people to be more open and honest than usual. “But it can also allow them to act out inappropriately,” he said.
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 quick sexy messages to her lover. 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 explained.
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.
However, Ellen Alter, a prominent Manhattan divorce lawyer, said she had 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 have to be deleted many times before they are completely erased.
This was the undoing of Jason, who asked to remain anonymous. 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 on the previous 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, adding later: “It was such a stupid way to get caught.”
Alter and other lawyers said text messages were increasingly being used as evidence in divorce settlements.
“I’ve had cases where some pretty explicit messages were found and others where it was simply a matter of let’s meet up here or go there,” she said. “There are some people who did get into it a little too much, and the messages can be quite out there.”
While it is nearly impossible to print a record of a text message, she said disgruntled partners would confiscate the phone to use its contents in court. She said she had a couple of cases where children had stumbled onto the messages.
“What I keep telling my clients is don’t send anything that you don’t want public,” she warned.
In Britain, superstar David Beckham’s text messages to his assistant was tabloid fodder for months last year. In the Kobe Bryant rape case, his defense was allowed access to the accuser’s text messages on the evening of the alleged rape.
Private investigators, however, said the mode of communication could provide more protection for adulterous liaisons than phone calls and e- mails.
David Schassler, a former detective who tracks down cheating spouses on the East Coast, said text messages made his job harder because the cell phone number to which they were sent is not recorded on a phone bill.
“When you have two people text messaging, often you will find they are no longer calling each other, so it makes the affair more difficult to detect,” he said.
While Jennifer said she was not worried her partner would find out about her dallying with her lover over text, she did have other concerns.
“I wonder if he is texting other women,” she mused.
