Cheating can make someone a "better partner" and in fact lead to an improved relationship, says the founder of a website that facilitates extramarital affairs.

In 2002, Noel Biderman founded AshleyMadison.com, a dating site that boasts the tagline, "Life is Short. Have an Affair."

The site offers the possibility for what it calls "Married Dating" in a host of North American cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton.

It has grown rapidly in the last seven years, to more than 4 million users, and now Biderman has written a book that touts the benefits of adultery entitled, "Cheaters Prosper: How Infidelity Will Save the Modern Marriage."

"I think people who have affairs are totally misunderstood and for the most part they're people who are suffering. They're really lonely within their own marriage and when you're lonely there's a biological driver that's going to make you act out to change that," Biderman said earlier this week in an interview with Canada AM.

"So they tend to have affairs, they have dalliances, and often it makes them better partners, better parents, better bosses, better employees. It's hard for people to accept that, but it's the truth."

While Biderman blames a lack of communication as the primary reason people feel unfulfilled in their relationships, and therefore why they cheat, Biderman also argues in his book that human beings aren't meant to be monogamous, and that increased life expectancy makes it more difficult to spend a lifetime with just one partner.

"If you canvass other creeds and cultures and concepts you'll see it's only in North America that we really perceive infidelity in this manner," Biderman said. "If you look at the culture in France, or in Japan, infidelity rates are extremely high there, yet divorce rates are extremely low. They've really come to put it in a different perspective. That's what I'm trying to articulate in the book."

Dr. Carole Lieberman -- Beverly Hills psychiatrist and author of "Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live with Them and When to Leave Them" -- disagrees that cheating strengthens relationships.

On one hand, cheating "can make a dull marriage more exciting, at least temporarily," Lieberman told CTV.ca in an email interview.

"But, in the end, most marriages suffer terribly from cheating and ultimately break apart because of the loss of respect and trust."

Biderman, who has been married for seven years and has two children, says both he and his wife have never cheated because they are "very honest with one another about what we need and how our relationship will work."

While Biderman and his wife, Amanda, say they know what it takes to have a successful, monogamous, relationship, they simply want to serve a market for those who are not as happy.

"It's not creating the market, the market existed long before AshleyMadison existed," Amanda Biderman told Canada AM. "It's a business and it's really separate from our life."

But if his wife did cheat? Biderman said he would be partly accountable.

"I say it all the time: if she ended up being unfaithful to me I would be devastated but I wouldn't blame a website, I wouldn't blame it on an object," he said. "I would take a look in the mirror and be accountable myself."

And for those that do cheat, Biderman claims that 75 per cent of couples survive the experience because it kick-starts the communication that had been missing.

"Infidelity becomes a catalyst for change, often for the betterment of a relationship," Biderman said. "If you look back over time, for the relationships that do survive infidelity, everyone says 'we have a stronger relationship as a result.'"

According to Lieberman, communication may improve post-affair, but that's "because it's like lancing a boil -- all the putrid stuff that's been kept inside comes to the surface - the suppressed hurts and resentments," she said. "But, in the long run, infidelity causes more marriages to break apart than stay together."

While she agrees that communication problems, as well as a lack of emotional and physical intimacy, can make one or both partners more susceptible to cheat, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to remain monogamous in a me-first society.

"We flit from one person to another too easily, in the hopes that this other person will make us feel more attractive, more feminine or masculine, more powerful, more special," Lieberman said. "We are constantly looking for someone to heal our wounds from childhood. And if our spouse isn't doing it anymore, we're like moths to a new 'flame.'"