Does it matter that many men on Ashley Madison probably never cheated?

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Maybe it was all a mirage?

With a ratio of about 28 million men to five million women, Ashley Madison had already been dubbed "the world's biggest sausage party" when a crippling hack revealed its actual ranks last week.

Now, a journalist at Gizmodo has crunched the numbers and found that very few women on the dating website for cheaters ever used it, beyond creating a basic profile.

"When you look at the evidence," Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz writes, "it's hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren't having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy."

Newitz pored over the data and discovered that tens of thousands of female accounts had Ashley Madison e-mail addresses or were created on the company's internal computers – this nodding to reports that the site is littered with fake profiles to artificially boost the numbers.

More tellingly, just 1,492 women had ever checked their messages, versus more than 20 million men who had scanned their inboxes anticipating sultry notes. And only 2,409 women had ever engaged in an online chat on the website, compared with more than 11 million anticipating dudes.

"This isn't a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives," Newitz writes. "It's like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly designed robots."

The hackers, named Impact Team, intimated as much in their manifesto the day the first dump of user names and sexual fantasies was unleashed. Citing slim female numbers, the hackers wrote, "Chances are your man signed up on the world's biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters."

The fact that so many husbands tried and failed to see action on Ashley Madison adds another layer of pathetic to this whole sordid tale. Will wives leave them for opening Ashley Madison accounts to "write mail, chat and spend money for women who aren't there," as Newitz put it? Does it matter that many of these husbands probably never landed a flesh-and-blood mistress?

Big-time: Researchers say that "sexualized online behaviours" such as browsing singles websites and sending racy texts, e-mails and photos register as "unfaithful" to many partners, even if no in-person sexual contact is had.

"Adults likely perceive online behaviours to be just as 'real' as offline behaviours, with both having a similar impact on people and their relationships," University of New Brunswick psychology professor Lucia O'Sullivan and her colleague, Ashley Thompson, write in research to be published in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Sex Research.

People in the study who did not label sexual online activity as infidelity deemed it "unacceptable" anyway. In the Ashley Madison case, it's the intent to cheat that deeply disturbs spouses, O'Sullivan says. That and the notion that your partner finds other people hot – even though it's pretty naive to assume otherwise.

The No. 1 reason people cheat, O'Sullivan found, is not their personality types or the quality of their current relationships, but a "recent attraction to another" – be that your "work wife" at the office or a fun and flirty avatar on Ashley Madison.

"It's the unnerving feeling that your partner is attracted to others, that they are aroused by someone else, that someone is distracting them from you," O'Sullivan says. "Part of the discomfort we feel is that when we talk about monogamy, exclusivity and fidelity, we're hoping deep down for some assurance that they will never be distracted by anyone."

Even as this need for exclusivity is huge, most people do not actually negotiate monogamy in their relationships explicitly. Even fewer are discussing deal-breakers or boundaries with the things they get up to online.

"Exclusivity is a fuzzy concept," O'Sullivan says. "Is it okay to have a flirty text exchange with an ex who lives in a different country? Is it okay to check out pornography or have a real-time sex chat? To have an online dating profile even if you never use it? There are all these new realms of exchange. … It's expanding our idea of how we might be violating an agreement."

Whether or not a husband scored on Ashley Madison, the hardest takeaway for spouses has been this: The way we blindly navigate long-term monogamous relationships is dysfunctional. And an unfailing, lifelong attraction to one person may be as much of a mirage as the armies of mistresses waiting on Ashley Madison.

"We need to be more realistic about this," O'Sullivan says.

Follow Zosia Bielski on Twitter: @ZosiaBielski