Sex with a virtual prostitute. Is it cheating if it doesn’t take place in the real world?

One woman in England decided that her husband’s affair with a virtual prostitute was unacceptable. The couple met online in the virtual world known as Second Life, where people create virtual characters, or avatars, to live and exist in the fictitious universe. It isn’t a “game” in the traditional sense. Players can’t win and lose – rather, they go through the motions of a whole separate reality.

According to CNN, the couple got married in a lavish fantasy-indulged Second Life wedding ceremony that outdid the real wedding they had in real life.

Amy Taylor, 28, said her marriage fell apart when she saw husband David Pollard’s avatar “cheating” with a virtual prostitute, and then later caught him snuggling up with another virtual woman on a couch.

“It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned,” she told Sky News about the cuddling.

Wow. This whole thing is completely strange to me. First of all, she felt betrayed when her husband’s weird online persona (whom she did fall in love with, let’s not forget) was having fake sex with a fake person. Isn’t having sex with a virtual prostitute kind of akin to looking at porn online, but instead of real people, they are virtual characters?

So then Pollard, 40, “cheats” with another woman whom he presumably formed an emotional bond with, and their marriage is over. Still, he said he never had cybersex, which I personally think would be much more upsetting.

Now, seeing as I wasn’t completely sure what Second Life was, I decided to do some research about the game. I found that it was very difficult to learn information about it directly from the source without doing a free trial run and creating an avatar for myself. I did find that there isn’t a real “objective” to the game, but that “your imagination is your limit” (Pollard met his virtual snuggle buddy at the nightclub that his avatar owned where her avatar was employed). From what I have read, though, it sounds like players are more limited by their checkbooks than by their imaginations.

The rate to be a “premium member” is $9.95 a month. Basically that gets you a weekly income of 300 Linden dollars, the game’s virtual currency, and some land so your avatar can build a house or business. After that, what you do is up to you.

However, it gets more pricey when you want to buy more things and can cost upwards of $1,000. The game also lets you trade goods and services with other people in exchange for Linden dollars that you can turn into real U.S. dollars, although it seems as if few people make any real money this way.

What really disturbs me is that there is no way that some of these people getting sucked into this game can be productive members of our society. If you’re spending all of your time trying to make your fantasies come true in your virtual world, then you have no time left for reality. And this couple getting a divorce is a perfect example.

If you meet someone in a virtual world where everything is perfect, reality is not going to be able to compete with perfection. Your husband’s avatar could be the perfect person, completely flawless, but your real-life husband is not going to be. Humans have flaws, avatars don’t. There is a reason that so many people are a part of Second Life – they want to escape the pressures of reality and be themselves, but better.

Even if these people want to create a character who is completely different than they are in real life, they are still going to want to create someone who is awesome. That’s why it’s a fantasy. This couple was doomed from the beginning when unattainable fantasy and reality mixed.

So where does that leave the unhappy pair? Well, Dave Pollard’s snuggle buddy said it was “love at first sight” between herself and Pollard, and they soon became so serious that Pollard proposed to her online, and the couple is now engaged in real life, despite never meeting each other in person, the Daily Mail reported. Luckily for the wife, she is currently in a relationship with someone she met while playing World of Warcraft.

Colleen is a senior in Media who wanted to create a virtual avatar but was unable to use the name Princess Colleen, so she decided it wasn’t worth it. She can be reached at [email protected].