The week after Valentine's Day is boom time for Ashley Madison, the eHarmony of adultery. Spring may be for the birds and the bees, but the barren wasteland of late February is when husbands'n'wives get horny and start busting out.

I clicked on Marginalizer's tip to BroBible's interview of Ashley Madison founder Noel Biderman expecting a fratty fistbump of the "fuck yeah, I tapped that" variety. (Isn't that what "Bros" do?) But the fistbumps were minimal and the content was interesting. Especially this part:

I read that there is typically a spike in female membership right after Valentine's Day. Any reason as to why this happens?

A couple of things just to clarify. It's not always marketing that drives my business, it's life. There's always a spike after anytime an expectation is set and not met. [...] Valentine's Day is a great example. Both men and women go into this with a lot of expectation about romance and sex and a lot of times that goes unfulfilled. So that now becomes the catalyst for seeking someone else.

Spring is for the nubile, young, and unattached (prom, spring break, the annual shedding of heavy winter layers for skimpier fare) but winter is the season of wedded discontent. It's cold and boring, which is always conducive to sitting indoors, overthinking things—which is, in turn, conducive to convincing yourself you need change. The holiday season made you cranky; New Year's forced you to evaluate how you spent the last year of your life. By the time Valentine's Day rolls around, you're in full-on "think about our relationship" mode which sometimes leads to renewed love! Other times, it leads to realizing how much he or she sucks.

So what do you do? Let us move now to OKCupid's fantastic blog, OKTrends, where this week's statistical analysis of the dating site's population proves why older women are a sexual goldmine.


OKTrends also includes a bunch of interactive graphs proving that older women want more and kinkier sex while being safer about it than the youngs. Then, they debunk the myth that younger women being categorically hotter their elders by treating hotness-evaluating polls to various statistical alchemies.

Conclusion: The wintertime reentry of married elders (particularly female married elders) to the dating pool means more and wilder times than young unmarrieds like myself can even fathom.