I graduated from law school in the 1990s. During my early years of practice, I did a substantial amount of divorce cases. Often these cases involved adultery more often than not.
This time period coincided with a time people were getting computers for the first time. It is hard to think about now, but 30 years ago, most people still did not own computers and people were just started to use them at home, though many people used them at work or school. The internet was new to say the least. There were no smartphones, so a computer or something like a WebTV was the way to interact online.
In 1993, a classmate showed me a “web page” on the Mosiac browser. He said that there were only 40 or so webpages in the world at the time. We had email through the university, so that was not new, and a lot of people had email through work, but all this was really new for most people.
In the pre-Internet world, there were places people could go for social interaction online. In the 1980s, people used bulletin boards and services like Compuserve and Prodigy to get online and do things like read the news or check stock prices. These were not easy to navigate and use and were very premature. Most people accessed these systems through dial-up modems, and the speed was very slow. Compuserve and Prodigy and similar systems also charged by usage, if I remember correctly. Not many people used them in those early days, especially on home computers.
There were discussion forums on Usenet, which was a bulletin board system across different hubs, so one could have flame wars over some band or author. It just was not that easy to navigate, sort of like using pre-Windows PC computers. And following a conversion was painful, as all the posts on a subforum went together, so a flame war over what was going to come next in a book series might be interrupted by people trying to meet up socially or talking about the weather. There really wasn’t any moderation.
I did have a friend in 1993 show me AOL, which was brand-new and with the chatroom as one of its key features. Back then, AOL gave users 5 hours free. I can’t remember if that was per month or just pre new account. Anyway, people often got hooked on the chatrooms and ended up paying hundreds of dollars per month. AOL offered free hours for those who would moderate a chatroom, so AOL superusers spent hundreds of hours online, while curating the discussions. Later on, these superusers actually sued AOL to be paid.
AOL transitioned to a 6-month free trial after that, often bundled with new computers. People would buy their new Packard Bell or Compaq or HP computers and see the little disk to let them go online. Of course, those early computers mostly could be used for games and word processing, especially the underpowered entry level computers so many people bought. Eventually, they would just pop in the AOL disk and connect to the AOL network and discover chatrooms.
It seems so quaint today, given that universality of cell phones and chrome books and laptops, which can now be found throughout the poorest countries in the world and places without cell service or internet, but back then this was pretty cutting edge. AOL was a highly managed walled garden, meaning users were trapped into the world of AOL and limited from the wider internet except with email.
Even things like online email services like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were new and unique, because they were not connected to an employer or university. Connectivity was expanding in brand-new ways. Even map programs suddenly allowed things to be brought out of obscurity. Yahoo and similar services had a directory-based interface. Yahoo put links to websites into distinct sections, so that a sports fan could gradually get to a list of websites about their favorite teams. This was not all the websites on the topic, but these were ones that Yahoo or similar services had organized to make it easier to browse and find, a very different model from the Google search-based interface that took over later.
Most people still used dial-up internet in the 1990s, though some people used ISDN lines, which provided about twice the speed or more than dial-up. Cable was available, but much more expensive. I remember trying to play early first-person shooter games in the 1990s with a dial-up connection. Usually, one player had a cable modem or used a university connection and was just so much faster, so it was like they were running at light speed and the rest of us were in slow motion. We called those people “Low-Ping Bastards”. Looking back, it seems so primitive.
As a young attorney, I started to see a pattern: first, a couple would buy a computer for Christmas or a birthday; second, they would use AOL and go on chatrooms; third, they would connect with people over obscure hobbies and interests; and fourth, they would get divorced, all within a year of buying the computer. We called it the AOL divorce.
I remember one case in particular. This couple had been married for over 20 years with no kids. He worked for the school district as a trainer, getting paid really well. I can’t remember what she did for a living. He was a rather slight man and she was built like a linebacker, not unattractive, but not slight at all.
He came to my office and describe the problem. They bought a computer and she started chatting online with people for hours. Then she called them up, running up huge phone bills, as long-distance calls were billed by the minute still back then. After that, she started to fly around the country to meet with people in person.
His wife had decided that she what we would now call polyamorous, but that was not the term used back then. She decided she needed to explore her sexuality and had affairs with men and women around the country, often in groups. She did not want to divorce her husband, but she insisted that he was bisexual as well and needed to start having sex with men and other women, like she was doing.
He did not like this at all and attempted to return the computer. She hit him, and given that she outweighed him by 40 pounds and was a strong fierce woman, he had no means to resist her. He told me that he called the police and they laughed at him. The idea that at a man could be the victim of domestic violence was crazy to them.
I was able to secure his divorce without any alimony and without her taking any of his pensions or taking the house. She got her freedom to go off and explore, I guess, but it was one of many AOL divorces I encountered as a young attorney.
The domestic violence issue was troubling to me at the time. I had other clients that had told me that in the early to mid 1980s, police refused to prosecute men for domestic violence. I had one woman who told me that after she separated from her husband, he came to her new apartment and started hitting her. She called the police, but they started to yell at her and threaten her with arrest once the police found out she was still married to her husband. The pendulum went in the opposite direction so far that a man who touched his wife after she hit him could still get arrested, even when she had already been hitting him repeatedly before he responded. Domestic violence shelters regularly ignored men for a long time and there was nowhere for an abused man to go. An abused man was just required to take the abuse or be shamed for being less of a man, unless he wanted to file for divorce and risk losing his children and his money.
We are in a much healthier place today and no one gets a free pass for abuse and no one is assumed to be a victim. As to computers, the AOL divorce was replaced by the Facebook divorce. Social media still fuels marital problems, as people find solace in others instead of dealing with the issues with their spouses. It is just so much easier to find and connect with random people online today.
I rarely touch divorces these days. They were a lot of fun as a young attorney, but divorce cases were the only cases I ever did that kept me up at night. The clients were too emotional, and it took too much out of me to be their advocate. Give me an accused murderer or a multimillion-dollar contract dispute any day of the week over a divorce. However, I have found that even the most sterile business dispute is, at its core, an emotional dispute. I still have to help my clients deal with their pain and help them to find a solution that helps them. Rarely will winning a lawsuit remove that pain inside that drives them to the conflicts in their lives.
ahhh the early days of computers. Fun tikes they were.
My group of friends were Computer Scientists, I was not. But we would often take over the Campus Computer Lab at night time, and play Net Doom until someone fell asleep.
I was at UW Madison from 95-99 and knew almost nothing about the computers I was using. Still don’t, really. But it always amused me that the male middle eastern students would openly look at porn on the library computer lab computers and nobody would say anything to them about it.