THE IMAGE is of a youngish couple, she looking over her shoulder and him apparently gawking down her top.

Lamely the tagline asks: ‘Can you keep a secret?’ Yes, it’s that advert in Poole’s Alder Road, which promotes a website for people who want to have affairs and which has caused enough distress already, if the messages already slapped on top of it by the cuckolded are an indication.

‘My cheating girlfriend is on this dating site,’ claims ‘Rob’.

‘I have just found my cheating husband on this website,’ says another.

Little, anonymous notices but anyone with an ounce of compassion can imagine the heartbreak that’s been caused to perfectly innocent people, maybe even children, by these affairs.

There are so many things wrong with this advert and the website it promotes that it’s hard to know where to start; the effect such insidious messages will have on young people who see them, the ideas it puts in other people’s minds.

But the most pernicious thing of all is the credo of the company.

“You can meet like-minded people who are looking to have an affair when divorce is not an option,” its website trills.

Divorce not an option? When?

When you’re too greedy to leave your wife in case she’s entitled to half the family assets? When you think it would impact on your job or social standing to split up from your partner? When you just don’t fancy him much anymore but love the credit card he gave you, and that nice, shiny new car?

This is not Tudor Britain or Saudi Arabia. Anyone can get divorced. They can make a decent break with their not-loved-anymore-one and then re-make their lives. Not slime around making excuses for their cheating.

Despite all this, however, it does have its amusing side. If it isn’t the company’s abysmal punctuation (it’s life’s too short, not lifes, you bozos!) it’s their extravagant claim that: “This site is designed for normal, cool people who are finding a good old-fashioned date hard to come by in today’s mad world.”

Have these ‘cool, normal’ types ever stopped to wonder why love – or even a hot date – just hasn’t come knocking?

When the Daily Echo ran this story many were quick to point out that extra-marital affairs are no-one else’s business.

If only that was the case. If only marital and relationship breakdown didn’t lead to family breakdown, to kids failing at school, to depression and even, in some cases, suicide. And the financial bills that go with it.

The truth is everyone pays for this kind of disaster, one way or another.

And if you do find love on sites like these, how can you ever trust them?