Jon Austin's wife, Amy, had a blunt assessment for her husband as the Minneapolis couple watched Rep. Anthony Weiner's stunning confessions on television this week.
"You'd be dead," she told him.
Regardless of his professional future, it's Weiner's predicament at home that seems to be launching countless discussions among couples like the Austins. And this time, it's not a question of actual physical cheating - à la Eliot Spitzer and his prostitution scandal - but the murkier backdrop of Internet relationships: sexting, tweeting lewd photos, emailing.
If it's virtual, does it constitute infidelity? Many Americans seem to think it does.
"Would you text it, post it, send it with your spouse looking over your shoulder?" asks Austin, 52, who works in corporate public relations and takes no issue with his wife's frank appraisal of the situation. "If yes, then it's not infidelity. If no, you're cheating."
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In online postings and follow-up phone calls with The Associated Press, dozens of people echoed the same thought: Cheating need not be physical.
"I think the emotional betrayal is just as bad," said Marissa Bholan, a 22-year-old student. "A married person should not be flirting online - or in any manner, really. It demonstrates a clear unfaithfulness. You're married. Act like it."
A specialist in Internet addiction said many people turn to online relationships to escape the pressures of their daily lives, reveling in the anonymity - particularly if, like a congressman, they are well-known.
But some, said Kimberly Young, director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, experience a more dangerous sense of detachment, somehow convincing themselves once the laptop is closed: "I didn't really do that. That wasn't me." And they don't see their actions as infidelity.
"I've seen married people go to great lengths to cover things up, hiding phone bills and the like," said Young, a practicing psychologist. "But they don't think it's cheating. They say, 'I love my wife.' "
Is the Weiner scandal - in which the married congressman finally confessed, after days of denying it, to tweeting a lewd crotch photo of himself to a woman in Seattle - a Mars vs. Venus moment? Do men see it differently than women?
Psychologist Gail Saltz thinks so.
"For men, the sexual act is much more disturbing than anything else," said Saltz, who sees many couples in her Manhattan practice. "For women, what constitutes a betrayal is any emotional or sexual interaction."
