Wife dumps husband over 'virtual affair'

Wife dumps husband over 'virtual affair'

A woman has divorced her husband after she caught him repeatedly "cheating" on her in the online game Second Life (see pic of the couple above).

British woman Amy Taylor, 28, fell in love with countryman David Pollard, 40, after they met in an internet chat forum.

The pair met up in person and married in July 2005, but both maintained a strong presence online by setting up avatars — virtual representations of themselves — in the game Second Life.

But their relationship ran into to trouble when Ms Taylor arrived home one night to find Mr Pollard at the computer watching his avatar have sex with a prostitute.

When she confronted him about it, Mr Pollard insisted the online encounter meant nothing and maintained he was being faithful to her.

"I went mad — I was so hurt," she was quoted as saying in UK tabloid The Daily Mail.

"But he didn't see it as a problem, and couldn't see why I was so upset. He said I was just making a big fuss and tried to make out it was my fault for not giving him enough attention."

The pair then reconciled — until another incident in April this year when Ms Taylor caught her husband's character canoodling a young female avatar on a couch.

She demanded to view her husband's chat history after learning the female character belonged to a real-life woman in the United States.

But Mr Pollard erased the records before she could look at them.

"I ended up going off in floods of tears," she said.

"He confessed he'd been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks, and said our marriage was over and he didn't love me anymore, and we should never have got married."

Ms Taylor said she filed for divorce the next day.

But in a further twist in the tale, the recent divorcee is now seeing a man she met in another virtual universe — World of Warcraft.

Her new romance had helped her move on from a "terrible" period in her life, she said.