US News

CHEATING HUBBIES’ ‘BIZ’ PROPOSITION

“The economy is going to get much worse, much worse,” the middle-aged Manhattan lawyer sitting across from me says as he slathers butter on a hunk of bread. “We haven’t seen anything yet.”

He licks a glob from his thumb and locks eyes with me.

“2009 is going to be a good year to have an affair,” he adds with a lopsided smile.

This isn’t an attempt at wit or a bit of provocation – he’s actually trying to convince me to become his mistress.

We’re having lunch in a swanky Midtown steakhouse, both furtively looking around to ensure we’re not recognized by anyone we know.

Well, he’s looking around. I’m only pretending to be married, to want to be a mistress, to live on the Upper West Side, and to be a jewelry designer on an innocuously named infidelity Web site, AshleyMadison.com – with the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair” – where my posting elicited 544 e-mail come-ons in six days.

So, this is what the men who built this city are doing as it’s brought to its knees by a sinking economy.

“Look, marriage is like a corporation,” Brad, a 43-year-old attorney, tells me. “You have a budget, you have employees, and you have a business plan to keep it running smoothly. Sometimes you have to subcontract out the romance.

“I think you probably need a friend like me,” he says, kissing my hand.

Next I met Todd, 40, a Manhattan real-estate developer, who confessed, “I love being a dad, and I will never leave my wife. I just don’t believe in monogamy.”

Then there was Jim, a handsome, 40-year-old, married ad exec with what looked like hair plugs.

He recently kissed a co-worker at an office party and liked it more than he should have. That’s when he decided to go online.

“More discreet,” he says. Plus, he says, he wanted to know if, “A) women still liked me and, B) if I still had game,” he says.

“And?” I ask.

“Check and check,” he says.

His wife has let herself go in their 15 years of marriage, he said, and he’s not turned on anymore.

Doug, 35, a financial analyst, trudged through the first major snowstorm of the year to have a drink with me at 4:30 on a Friday. He isn’t married; he’s simply cheating on his girlfriend of six years.

“We don’t have enough sex,” he says. “I need to have a lot of sex.”

As almost every economic indicator in America began to point downward, the 6-year-old Web site was enjoying its two best recruiting months ever – 221,000 new members signed on in October and 262,000 in November – according to happily married and allegedly monogamous Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.

Men pay $49.99 for a basic package with 100 credits that can be used to start online conversations with willing women.

The women join for free and, Biderman says, are mostly bored housewives who haven’t been touched in years or single women looking for sugar daddies and women in new marriages without any children.

“We believe we save more marriages than we end,” Biderman says.

stefanie.cohen@nypost.com