“Life is short. Have an affair.” That’s the slogan of the extramarital dating site ashleymadison.com. No—scratch that. Be faithful. Fidelitydating.com is a dating site launched in January 2015. It tells potential members: “By signing up you agree you are not in a relationship. You will be honest and faithful. The catchphrase is: “Love is precious—be faithful.”

I am amazed that, at least as far as I’ve heard, this appears to be the only dating site for the fidelity market, especially given the fact that it is an STD jungle out there for online mate-shopping.

Ashley Madison and other polyamory sites appear to have grave shortages of willing females ready to explore the frontiers of love. In fact, Ashley Madison faces class action litigation over the use of fake female profiles—“fembots”—to lure men in.

I wondered whether fidelitydating.com would have the opposite problem—more women than men signing up, given that women tend to be considerably more monogamous than men. If so, would the site be too honest to create “manbots”? Fidelitydating.com’s founder, Gary Spivak, says that the ratio of male to female members averages around 50/50 with sometimes slightly more women and at other times more men. Although people who have been burned by an unfaithful partner comprise the bulk of the sign-ups, Spivak insists that not all of the members have been cheated on—some simply believe in fidelity.

Spivak says that online dating is at its highest between December and March. Some people are unhappy with their partners (and having to spend a lot of time with in-laws and other relatives) over the holidays and they break up then. Some wait till the festivities are over. Still others see the New Year as a time to re-evaluate their lives and decide to try online dating to look for a new partner. It is also a common story for cheating to be discovered during the holidays while both husband and wife are off work at home together. Receipts for Christmas gifts to a mistress might come to light, or the cheater might be caught on the phone with her or sneaking out for a tryst.

In January 2011, christianitytoday.com featured WeWaited.com, formerly known as YouandMeArePure.com, a dating site exclusively for virgins (see http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2011/january/virgins-only-dating-website.html). According to the article, only 30 percent of applicants to the site would be admitted, and they would have to pay a fee and a pass a test designed to assess their trustworthiness. However, when I recently tried to access WeWaited.com, it was offline. Clearly there must have been too few virgins out there to make the site viable. Nevertheless plenty of Christian dating sites still exist that are geared more towards the monogamy market, but demand no fidelity questionnaires, proof of virginity, intact hymen certificates or suchlike.

Fidelitydating.com is unusual in the monogamy dating world as it is non-religious, although members can search for a dating partner of a specific faith. The site’s founder, Gary Spivak, described his multicultural background to me: his dad is Jewish, he was brought up Catholic but is now non-practicing, and his wife is African American.

Fidelitydating.com aims to ensure that you don’t find yourself dating someone who is married but pretending to be single, or who is seeing a lot of different people at once. Nevertheless, like any other dating site, you have no references from trusted friends and no way to be sure anyone is being truthful in their online profile. Even if they are not out-and-out liars, they still have to do a sales job, promoting the hell out of their good points and brushing anything negative under the carpet. You have most likely done the same with your own online persona.

On many dating sites, men are often looking for girls who are considerably younger. For that reason, women tend to lie about their age and post decades-old profile pictures. One male friend of mine doing online dating noted that almost all the women he met up with looked considerably older than the photos they had posted online. Another guy told me that several times he’d arranged to have coffee with a match.com date and could barely recognize the woman from her profile picture. “Why do women do this?” He asked, exasperated. “How could a guy not notice she was lying about her age? She might as well just post her baby pictures online!”

I have to admit I’m a bit of a dinosaur as regards online dating. I find the idea of shopping for a man on my laptop using a dating site to be rather creepy, even if he does comes with an anti-Lothario warranty—stamped on his bottom, maybe? I find life is too short, not to have an affair, but to have enough time to meet up with all the flesh-and-blood friends I want to see and accomplish all the things I want to do. Spending screen time trying to cultivate online relationships just gets in the way of all that.