People do not consider the words 'I love you' to be necessarily unfaithful depending on in which medium they are uttered.

A revealing survey has tried to discover what we feel about infidelity, particularly in the virtual world by asking 130 people to consider what they would think if the person who they were in a committed relationship with said the words 'I love you' and 'I want to marry you'.

Spunlogic's, who conducted the survey, asked participants to think specifically with regards to text messaging, email, written letters, instant messages, chatrooms, forums such as MySpace and Facebook, and within virtual worlds.

The results showed that almost 90 per cent considered face-to-face interactions to be definitely unfaithful but that only 58 per cent said the same was true for virtual worlds.

"Infidelity, a behavior normally deemed unacceptable in human-human interaction, becomes more acceptable when interactions are mediated by various technologies," said Dr Melissa Read, Spunlogic's director of behavioral research.

"What other socially inappropriate behaviors might be perceived as acceptable when produced in technology-mediated interactions. And, more importantly, why?"

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