Couple Divorcing Over Second Life Affair
You can do a lot of things in Second Life. You can run a business, you can be a musician, and you can be a totally different person. You can also cheat on your wife! And I don’t mean your Second Life wife, I mean your first life wife.
And maybe she’ll divorce you. Again, in first life.
Ann Taylor, a 28-year-old living in Cornwall, England, is filing for divorce from her 40-year-old husband David Pollard after she found out that he’d been virtually cheating on her.
She told Time magazine:
“It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much. His was the ultimate betrayal. He had been lying to me.”
The ironic thing is that, after meeting in a chat room in 2003, it was their love for Second Life that strengthened their relationship to the point where they got married.
As it turns out, this isn’t the first time Pollard virtually cheated on his wife. Not long after they had gotten married, Taylor caught Dave Barmy, Pollard’s character, having sex with a virtual prostitute.
“I went mad — I was so hurt. I just couldn’t believe what he’d done. I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned.”
After this first act of infidelity, Taylor virtually divorced their characters, Laura Skye and David Barmy, but stayed with Pollard in real life. She then hired a Second Life-based private investigator to keep an eye on Pollard’s character. The PI used a female character to attempt to seduce Barmy, but he refused and spoke of his affection for Laura Skye.
However, it was in April of this year that Taylor caught Barmy schmoozing with a female character named Modesty McDonnell. Pollard insisted that no virtual infidelity had taken place, but that didn’t seem to sway Taylor.
In the end, Pollard blames Taylor’s addiction to World of Warcraft for ruining their marriage.
“Amy never did anything around the house. She just played World of Warcraft all the time. If I wanted to spend time with her, I had to ask, but it was always too much trouble for her to come off the game to spend time with me, so the marriage was a bit of a joke.”
In the end, this story has a happy ending. Ann Taylor has a new boyfriend that she met through World of Warcraft and David Pollard is now engaged to 55-year-old Linda Brinkley, the woman behind Modesty McDonnell, the character that Taylor caught Barmy getting intimate with.
Usually this is the part of the article where I give my two cents on the story, so here goes: what the fuck?!
