DIVORCE INTERNET STYLE

I got E-mail from my best boyhood pal, Stevie Scharfstein, recently. this in itself is not unusual; by now everyone I've ever known has E-mailed me, except a boy named Krepple I once met in Miami Beach in 1967. While the medium wasn't unusual, the message was. Scharfstein, a lawyer in Beaverton, Oregon, wanted the name of "a good Internet detective." My old friend is now learning his way around a curious new growth industry: Internet-sparked divorces.

During the past few months, he has dealt with three marriages that were detonated by electronic affairs. In each, he says, "the woman ran away with a fellow she met and knew only online." One husband returned home to find his wife, children and computer gone. She'd been spending 16 hours a day in online chat groups, where she fell in love with a man halfway across the country.

Now, I'm as big a fan of sensationalized Net affairs as the next guy. My favorite, and yours too, I'm sure, was last year's case of a wife who fell for an online Lothario known in court papers only as "the Weasel." (Was this his online name or a label the husband gave him?) But I always thought affaires des modems were rare. Not so, says Scharfstein. "This is the next big thing in divorces."

I would never doubt my old buddy. But just to be certain we were dealing with a national phenomenon here and not a Beaverton-centric statistical anomaly, I checked with Raoul Felder, one of New York's better-known divorce lawyers (he handled the off-line antinuptials of Robin Givens as well as those of the ex-missuses of Frank Gifford, David Susskind and Carl Sagan). "I have a number of those things where they meet on the Net and talk dirty and arrange rendezvous," confirms Felder. In fact, he says, his firm has handled "50 or so. Easily."

"I think it's going to be more and more of a big deal," says Michael Ostrow, president of the esteemed American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. "People get into these chat rooms and they start talking, and some of it gets really steamy." I went to America Online for some field research and immediately saw what he was talking about. A dozen chat rooms were in full swing, with such names as "WivesWithOtherMen," "F wants Married M" and "marriedandflirting." And this was in the middle of the afternoon.

I'd be lying, though, if I said I was scandalized. As someone who courted his first and only wife using E-mail (we worked in the same office; it was a much simpler time), I think I understand what's going on here. Sex is all in the head, and there's nothing that connects two brains better, without visual distractions, than a good computer connection. That's why I think Felder, the divorce king, is kidding himself if he thinks the next logical step will be good for business. "What's going to happen when you get video E-mail?" he wonders. That's easy. Online divorce will go out of fashion in a big hurry.

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