The recipe for happiness? An enduring marriage and an affair with lots of sex

By Catherine Hakim

7:00AM BST 20 Aug 2012

The setting is the quiet corner of an Italian restaurant in the City; the players are George, an IT specialist, and Zoe, who wears a pretty dress and a big smile; they drink an especially good bottle of wine and when they get to coffee he reaches over and kisses her on the mouth. She surprises him by kissing him back. To onlookers it might be the classic opening scene of a traditional romance.

Yet both parties are married to other people, whom they have no intention of leaving. Although they will go on to enjoy all the spoils of a relationship, from intimate phone calls to Christmas shopping trips and, of course, regular sex, this is understood from the outset. They are in fact launching into a “playfair”, a 21st-century affair in which would-be adulterers meet, via specialist dating websites, to enjoy the excitement of an illicit relationship without any of the domestic fallout.

Alongside the internet dating revolution, these “playfairs” are evidence of a potentially dramatic shift in British marriage. As dating websites open up a global shop window of sexual possibilities, as life expectancy continues to rise and we become increasingly sexually aware, how can we still take the crushing old rules of fidelity, that turn marriage into a prison, for granted? Why should we not be able to recapture the heady thrills of youth, while protecting a secure home life?

The time has come, alongside the technology, to redraw the rules of marriage for the 21st century. Just as the Pill opened up premarital sex in the Sixties, the internet is opening up a whole new culture of affairs among married people. Sex has become a major leisure activity of our time, accessible to everyone, married or not, rich and poor. It’s time to start honing our seduction skills and join the playground.

Yet it is the most puritanical nations, including Britain and America, that have traditionally resisted the notion of adultery most rigorously. Here, couples endure the challenges of child care, work pressures, mid‑life crisis and dwindling marital sex against a backdrop of repressive Anglo-Saxon hang‑ups about infidelity, seen always in pejorative terms such as “cheating”.

And they do so at a cost. Statistics confirm that British and American divorce rates are among the highest in the world. Around half of American first marriages end in divorce, closely followed by a third of first British marriages, floundering under unrealistic pressures, often celibate marital beds and drastic overreactions to infidelities.

I have always been baffled by the sour and rigid English view of affairs. Marital love and passion only rarely provide an equally rich source of the exalted feelings, transports of delight and misery associated with love and romance. Affairs are about excitement, being alive, seduction, flirtation, love, affection, sexual bliss, lust, caution, eroticism, fantasy, danger, adventure, exploration and the determined refusal to grow old gracefully.

There is also evidence that the more permissive the attitudes of a country, the longer marriages last. In France an affair is dubbed an aventure, free of insinuations of betrayal. It is estimated that a quarter of men and women are enjoying casual flings and affairs at any one time. Indeed, the conventionality of affairs is displayed in the concept of le cinq à sept, the magical space between 5pm and 7pm when men see their mistresses.

In Japan a tradition of geishas has evolved into a modern society where sex is seen as a pleasure to be enjoyed. Japanese pornography is consumed openly, by women as well as men, on the metro and in other public places. Sex is everywhere and it is also clearly separated from marriage.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries are already way ahead of the game. Couples openly discuss “parallel relationships” within marriage. These range from affairs between work colleagues lasting years to holiday flings lasting a few days. Almost half of Finnish men and almost one third of Finnish women have had at least one significant parallel relationship. Yet marriage is a protected and respected institution in these countries, where families can function and flourish without compromise.

And let’s not ignore the past in drawing up a new 21st‑century road map of adultery. If the internet offers a direct line to affairs, with a proliferation of websites for adults seeking a sexual partner outside of their marriage, it is worth remembering that our richer ancestors practised their own privileged version. Emperors cavorted with courtesans, kings chose their wives for political manoeuvres and their mistresses for company, the aristocracy married for money and took lovers for pleasure.

So why have modern British couples resisted for so long and are they finally ready for this new 21st‑century approach to marriage? Inevitably there is the morality question. Even as religion has lost its influence, Britain has remained coy about openly embracing sex for pleasure, stubbornly conflating sexuality with procreation.

There is also the army of therapists and counsellors who continue to pedal their own secret agenda of enforced exclusive monogamy. This killjoy attitude frames affairs as deviant escapism and fantasies without merit for people who have failed to grow up. Counsellors form a kind of emotional and intellectual police intent on keeping the door to infidelity locked.

Meanwhile, British feminists have already missed the chance to find a new kind of modern sexual morality appropriate to the 21st century. In practice, Anglo-Saxon feminism never liberated itself from the Puritan morality that downplays or rejects all forms of pleasure as sinful.

But sex is no more a moral issue than eating a good meal. The fact that we eat most meals at home with spouses and partners does not preclude eating out in restaurants to sample different cuisines and ambiences, with friends or colleagues. Anyone rejecting a fresh approach to marriage and adultery, with a new set of rules to go with it, fails to recognise the benefits of a revitalised sex life outside the home.

Already two American economists, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, have attempted to measure happiness through sexual fulfilment in monetary terms. They estimated that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week was equivalent to £32,000 a year in happiness. They also estimated that a lasting marriage provided the equivalent of £64,000 a year. If you add the two together, an affair providing lots of sex and an enduring marriage, that’s a recipe for a lot of happiness.

It is also a handsome sum when you consider how much longer people are living. In pre-industrial Britain marriages only lasted about 20 years, due to early death. Today, marriages can last 40 to 60 years. It is no coincidence that the peak ages for affairs in Britain and the United State is 45 for a woman and 55 for a man.

Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that married dating does not have a certain morality of its own. Just as there are rules for dating non-married people, a new set of rules is necessary to navigate the way through the secretive world of married dating on the internet.

For many interviewees that I spoke to, whose names have been changed, negotiating the new rules can be a fraught business. Married people have less spare time and are often more specific and cautious in their search. Amy liked a man in his advert, but was put off by his wearing a shabby grey cardigan under his suit jacket; Kate was delighted on meeting Benjamin, elegant, clever and amusing, until it emerged he was into very experimental sex; when Oliver met Scarlett at her house for a first date, a swinging party was already under way, which was not what he had in mind.

But regardless of who you meet, the first rule is “never in your own back yard”, where you are most exposed to discovery. This is one of the successes of the websites: they allow everyone to reach well beyond their own social circle. Both parties can quickly establish that they want the same thing and that they are equally committed to secrecy and discretion.

It is also a world away from the deeply unfair old-style “asymmetric” affairs, in which hapless wives would be left at home while older, richer husbands wooed younger, poorer women – often in the workplace – disparagingly referred to as a “bit on the side”.

If anything, married women are at an astonishing advantage in this 21st-century world of modern adultery, not least because of the disparity in sexual desire in modern marriages. Recent sex surveys all prove that the received wisdom about men wanting more sex than their wives is not an unfair stereotype but a fact. The gap in sexual desire between men and women is observed in every country and culture where such surveys have been carried out.

Unsurprisingly a sexless, or low-sex, marriage, in which couples have sex less than once a month, appears to be the most common root cause for married internet affairs. In Britain, according to the British sex survey of sexual lifestyles, couples aged up to 60 had sex around 10 times a month in the first two years of their relationship, with a sharp decline to an average of twice a month after six years together.

This puts women, entering the new online “meet-market” of married dating sites, in a dramatically stronger position. While dating websites for singles are dominated by women looking for “the one”, those for married people are dominated by men looking for a sexual adventure. The ratio is around one woman to every 13 men, giving the women the power to dictate terms, from dates at the most expensive restaurants and luxury gifts to financial rewards.

Take the case of Peter, a rich 62-year-old judge who lives in a beautiful historical country house with his lively wife. He regularly travelled into central London to sit as a judge in important commercial disputes. He also stayed in the same hotel, with views over the Thames. After several years of this routine he began to welcome the idea of a sexy girlfriend to entertain him during his weekday stays. He signed on to a dating website.

When he met his first date, Maya – beautiful and in her thirties – he could not believe his luck. They had a cheerful and flirty lunch, sitting in the sunshine. At the end, they discussed meeting again. Maya suggested a monthly fee for unlimited time with him at his convenience. Peter laughed, assuming she was joking. He considered an expensive dinner generous enough.

But as he worked his way through a similar series of first dates, that were also not followed up, he realised that Maya was right: a crucial rule in this modern world of adultery is that the women are able to call the shots, especially when the men are past their prime.

There are, however, as many success stories. Claire had been happily married all her life to a much older man. When the marriage became sexless she started a sexually rewarding affair with a younger man that lasted eight years. When her husband died, she remarried another kind, loyal and considerate man. But she sought out an affair again, on a dating website for married people, because she wanted the excitement of a lover who would always be a novelty. Already, for Claire and others like her, the new adultery is a way of life.

Crucially the globalisation of sexual cultures facilitated by the internet, where it is said sex in one shape or another constitutes half the traffic, has helped to bring far more varied and adventurous practices into closer view. As a result, we can no longer assume that our own perspective is the only one going, and that it is inevitable and “natural”.

On the contrary, the emphasis on sex as a leisure activity in consumer society allows people in celibate marriages to see their situation as something that can and should be remedied, instead of something to put up with. Websites make it easy and provide mass access to finding your own mistress or lover. Something that used to be a luxury of kings and millionaires is now open to all. Many get lucky, some go away empty-handed, but either way British marriage is finally taking a walk on the wild side.

'The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power’ by Catherine Hakim (Gibson Square Books) is available to pre-order for £9.99 plus £1.10 p&p from Telegraph Books. Call 0844 871 1515 or visitbooks.telegraph.co.uk.

We can all learn from Gwyneth Paltrow

Terence Blacker in The Independent Friday, 9 September 2011





The scavengers who live off the scraps of celebrity scandal will be paying particular attention to the marriage of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin over the next few weeks. Not only are the couple blessed with talent, looks and success – provocation in itself – but she has just made a statement which has caused considerable outrage in some quarters.





Prepare to be shocked. "The more I live my life, the more I learn not to judge people for what they do," Gwyneth has said, quite openly and without apology. "I think we're all trying to do our best but life is complicated." As if that were not controversial enough, she added: "I know people I respect and admire and look up to who have had extra-marital affairs."



The response to these dangerous and reckless remarks has been predictable. There has been clammy speculation about the state of Paltrow's marriage. Seven years of married life, and suddenly she's relaxed about infidelity. What could be going on there? Then, naturally, there have been gusts of moral disapproval from the media. Famous people who express sane, reasonable views are instinctively mistrusted – we expect our celebrities to be out of touch and entertaining – and sneering reference has been made to Paltrow's "latest flirtation with controversy", not to mention her "superhuman compassion".



Paltrow is, though, making a worthwhile point. It is a very contemporary habit, the need to stand in judgment over every little muddle in which a public figure finds herself or himself and draw sorrowful conclusions from them, as a vicar does in a sermon. Scandal and misadventure have always been part of the media, but the busy drawing of moral lessons, the pious scolding from the sidelines, is something new. Disapproval is to the 21st century what primness was to the Victorians.



Both, to a large extent, are propelled by sexual frustration. Prurience, today as over a century ago, tends to disguise itself as moral concern – we need to know every excitingly shocking little detail, in order to condemn it. When a photograph was published recently of a uniformed American cop having sex with a woman on the hood of her car, it was published around the world – it was funny and played to some well-worn erotic fantasies. The story accompanying the picture, though, was the scandal, the abuse of power, the controversy. The randy cop was quickly fired.



It is worth remembering who is doing the judging on these occasions. Unlike the Victorians, today's wet-lipped moralists are not eminent politicians or churchmen. They are journalists.



Such is the hypocrisy when it comes to public misbehaviour that it is now taken for granted. When MPs were being pilloried for taking liberties with their allowances, the moral outrage was orchestrated by those who belonged to a profession in which, over the previous decades, the large-scale fiddling of expenses was a matter of competitive pride. Nor, for all their shrill moralising when a celebrity is caught in the wrong bed, are those who work in the media famous for their high standards of sobriety or sexual fidelity.



Here, perhaps, is the truth behind the new need to judge. Commentators scold, and readers allow themselves to be whipped into a state of excited disapproval, for reasons of guilt about their own less-than-perfect lives.



As Gwyneth Paltrow says, life can indeed be complicated. Taking the high moral ground is only worthwhile when something truly bad has been done. It is fine to be interested and excited by scandal, but why do we have to condemn quite so much? Since when have we all become so sanctimonious?



Few lives would bear the closest scrutiny day by day. Indeed, in a world more full of temptation and dodgy role-models than ever before, a bit of complication along the way may simply be a sign that you are living it to the full.

Not Every Adulterer is a Villain

Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain

A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.

No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.

"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."

Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.

A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.

The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.

Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.

Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.

With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.

These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.

Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.

As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.

Is Monogamy Obsolete? New Books Challenge Our Ideas of Fidelity

by Jessica Bennett
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am

Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.

As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."

The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."

But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.

Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."

Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships

Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH

It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)

“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”

There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."

She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."

And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”

Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.

10 things to know before confessing to an affair

If you've had sex with someone other than your partner and are thinking of spilling the beans, read this first

Suzi Godson

1. Infidelity is not as common as you might think. A 2006 online survey of 46,000 people revealed that one in five married men and one in ten married women had committed infidelity during their marriage (BBC's UK Lovemap).
2. If there is no way that your partner will find out about a one-off misdemeanour on a business trip, and you want your relationship to survive, honesty is not necessarily the best policy.
3. Crippled with guilt or need advice? Respect your partner and talk to a neutral third party rather than confiding in a friend. Relate offers telephone counselling for £45 an hour on 0300 1001234. Or call the Samaritans on 08457 909090.
4. If the affair is ongoing and there is a chance that someone else will tell your partner, come clean. A one-night stand might just be excusable; lying never is.
5. Nor is compromising your partner's sexual health. If you were dumb enough to have unprotected sex, get tested for STIs. Some STIs can't be picked up for two weeks or more, and HIV has a three-month dormancy period. So even if your initial results are clear, you may need to tell your partner the truth so that he or she can get tested too.
6. When you tell your partner your motive should be a genuine desire to improve or, if necessary, gently terminate your relationship. Don't confess to ease your own guilt, vent anger or get even.
7. Infidelity is often a symptom, not a cause, of trouble in a relationship, and confessing may force you to address the underlying issues. For example, if you were drunk or high when your infidelity happened, drugs and alcohol may be the real problem.
8. Frank Pittman, a psychiatrist and relationship expert, says there are four types of infidelity: accidental infidelity (an unintended act of, usually drunken, carelessness); the romantic affair (you meet somebody wonderful while you are going through a big crisis in your life); the marital arrangement (comfort while you avoid dealing with a marriage that won't die and won't recover); and the philanderer (men who continually need their masculinity affirmed, women who are the daughters or ex-wives of philanderers).
9. Extra-marital affairs remain the biggest cause for divorce, according to the UK management consultants Grant Thornton.
10. Only 3 per cent of 4,100 high-powered, but unfaithful, men divorced their wives and married their lovers (Dr Jan Halper, the author of Quiet Desperation: The Truth About Successful Men). And the divorce rate among those who marry their lovers is 75 per cent (Frank Pittman).

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Oh come all ye unfaithful - In praise of Infidelity!

The world is quick to condemn infidelity for the betrayal and the pain it causes. And yet, argues Terence Blacker, there is something uniquely authentic about love that has to be kept secret

Sunday, 21 September 2008

Even in this knowing, decadent age, infidelity has an image problem. The absurd politician caught with his pants down, the shifty celebrity snapped emerging from a basement flat in the early hours of the morning: these inglorious archetypes of modern adultery tend to represent sex at its saddest, silliest and most furtive.
Almost any other contemporary sin is treated with more respect, either glamorised or demonised but, according to the everyday media which informs our culture, there is nothing tragic or interesting about an affair. Adultery is a low-grade, contemptible form of domestic misbehaviour. Advice columnists, professionally sympathetic about most personal problems, reserve a special brand of scorn for those, particularly men, caught up in an affair. "That's why adultery is called adultery – because it 'adulterates', which literally means to make something poorer in quality by adding another substance," Bel Mooney recently scolded an unfaithful husband who had rashly written to her for guidance.

It is odd, this chilly social disapproval because infidelity is all around us. When, every month or so, a marketing firm or a dirty-minded academic conducts a survey into sexual behaviour, a large proportion of those interviewed, men and women, invariably admit to having strayed at some point in their lives. What the polls fail to reveal, because it is one of domestic life's more unsettling secrets, is that among the virtuous non-strayers, only the dullest and least imaginative will not have dreamed of infidelity at some point in their marriages or relationships. Many, reaching an age when the possibility of illicit romantic adventure seems to have passed, will look back with regret not at opportunities rashly taken, but at those missed. Fidelity causes as many restless and sleepless nights as its more daring polar opposite.

The reason why society is so disrespectful of adultery is fear; its power makes the faithful world tremble and feel insecure. Sexual infidelity stands for everything which undermines and disrupts an ordered domestic life – desire, selfishness, romance, a childish, amoral longing to escape from the world of bills, washing up and responsibility.

So let us try this: infidelity, when it is the real thing, can be a beautiful transgression. It has given meaning to empty lives, made the weak strong, the thick-skinned vulnerable, the stupid wise. It can provide almost the only adventure which modern can life can offer. Our ancestors fought in wars, discovered uncharted parts of the world; we cheat on our spouses.

Novelists and playwrights, who see the world more clearly than journalists, have recognised the power of the affair. In fiction and drama, there is nothing small and sleazy about infidelity; it one of the great tragedies that life has in store for humanity. For the great modern celebrants of sexual betrayal – Graham Greene, Harold Pinter, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, John Updike – guilt and jealousy are what make desire interesting.

In the real world, the power of infidelity is a more clandestine thing. Those who behave well, or pretend they do, anxiously disapprove; those who do not are sensible enough to keep quiet. Only prats and slappers boast about sexual betrayal. The rest, a mighty army of secret lovers, remain silent and not only for the obvious, practical reason. An affair is not social. The only reality which matters is that which exists between two people: the dinner in a suitably unfashionable restaurant, the parked car in a dark street, the glass of wine on the bedside table.

There is something oddly pure about this kind of love. It cares nothing for the way it looks to the outside world. It exists in its own bubble, beyond the pressures and compromises of everyday existence. It allows its star performers to step out of the cheap soap opera of real life, with its longueurs, crap production values and predictable dialogue, into a sparkling two-hander where the only plot is about them, their desires, their romantic, tragic plight.

In the perfect affair, desire is never far away, conversation is always interesting and poignant, and jokes – even bad ones – are irresistibly funny. During those snatched hours of the afternoon or evening, there is no time for boredom or over-familiarity to dull its sharp, bright colours into domestic pastel. Differences and incompatibilities, which would irritate in the faithful world, are yet another fascinating topic to explore.
Everything is startlingly new. "With you it was fresh – so fresh I was hypnotized by me," says the female character in Philip Roth's Deception, a novel which consists entirely of the conversations between two adulterous lovers. "There I was, on weekends, still snuggling... under the covers in my bedroom in Bedford, with my ballet shoes in the closet from when I was 10, and then, Monday afternoons, total abandon in some anonymous bed in some anonymous room on some anonymous floor in some anonymous Hilton. And so intimate, it made my head spin – the only familiar thing in that entire hotel was our flesh. I suppose you could call it basic training... Somebody who is disillusioned involved with somebody who is innocent – educational all around."

Lovers caught up in an affair are playing a delicious trick on the outside world. If only X or Y could see them now, they think; how amazed, how shocked they would be at what was going on. In their happiness, they believe that their adulterous selves, living in this parallel world, are more real than the people their family, friends and colleagues see every day.

Yet it suits our ordered, sanctimonious society to re-write the script so that adulterous desire becomes an undignified itch, like something out of a bad Carry On film. Exposed to the light of gossip or news coverage, every affair is trivialised, each act of betrayal is portrayed as the same seedy shuffle down a path made familiar by cliché. When Edwina Currie and John Major, to take an admittedly unglamorous example, were revealed to have had a four-year affair during the Eighties, media commentators pronounced confidently about what had happened. There had been an amoral seductress of a mistress, a weak and befuddled husband, a virtuous betrayed wife. It was pathetic and utterly predictable. To his shame, Major played along with this line.

Perhaps it was true, but it is also true that no one really knows what goes on within a marriage, much less an affair. In this case, it seems at least possible that, without an energising affair between 1984 and 1988, Major might never have even reached Downing Street. For all anyone knows, it could have been the making of him. Who has the right to decide that one kind of love is acceptable while the other is, by its nature, trivial and contemptible?

I wrote a column along these lines at the time and the e-mails in response surprised me. Several were from people who themselves were having, or had had, an affair. One of these secret lovers argued that, as the loving mistress of a married man for several years, she had denied herself the normal rewards of a relationship: children, company, comfort, shared holidays. All that mattered to her was to see her man now and then. In its way, her love was more selfless, less morally compromised, than many marriages are.

The truth is that affairs are never happy. Disappointment is hard-wired into the arrangement from the very first breathless meeting. Guilt plays its damaging part – only a heel or a fool actually enjoys betraying someone else – but, beyond that, an unfaithful relationship of any depth is by its nature tragic. It depends on desire, and desire dies. Once an affair becomes tamed and domesticated, passion making way to friendship and shared interests, it loses its point. It might as well be – and sometimes, in the end, is – marriage.

The alternative to this decline into cosiness is that the fantasy is ratcheted up, rendered more extreme and dangerous through jealousy, perversity – anything to retain that important edge of desire. The enemy of the adulterer is boredom, the banal business of getting from one day to the next. The narrator of Howard Jacobson's new novel The Act of Love, a daring and funny exploration of marital voyeurism, explains his unusual form of infidelity (he is desperate for his wife to be unfaithful to him) by saying that "there is no continuum of aberration, except in the sense that every act of sex sits at a crossroads which leads to every other. We would all perish ecstatically in sex at last if we had the courage to go on travelling."
Some, out of the pages of fiction, do go on travelling. Martin Amis, speaking of his father Kingsley, said "he lived for adultery". The writer Willie Donaldson, who went to unimaginable extremes of erotic betrayal throughout his life, claimed that the problem had begun when he was at Cambridge where he had discovered that sex was the ultimate distraction from responsibility and duty. "I made this disastrous discovery at the age of 21," he wrote later. "We can't organise happiness but we can organise unboredom. It was downhill all the way since then."

The affair has to end. Lying in bed together, the lovers know that already the clock is ticking. Adultery time moves faster than that in the faithful world. The more they talk about what might have been had they met at a different time and under different circumstances, the more aware they become that their fantasy à deux will soon fade.

That is, if they are lucky. Adultery is not famous for its happy endings. In the great novels, it is rewarded with death and shame. For the modern adulterer, things merely decline into murk and misery. Lies are built upon lies, spreading outwards from spouse to children to family to friends to colleagues. The technical aspects of running the affair – so complex that it sometimes seems that organising a small war would be easier – begin to take their toll. The balance between present pleasure and future pain shifts towards guilt-free domestic comfort. Meetings, once so eagerly anticipated, become matters of duty. Adultery fatigue sets in.

It is cruel. It is a mess. The collateral damage to innocent bystanders is considerable. Yet, there is something spirited and alive about those who refuse to play by the conventional rules of love. Adultery does not lend itself to the end-of-term prize-giving which has become part of our lives – the Pride of Britain Awards are unlikely to have a Love Rat of the Year category – but the next time you read a sneering gossip item or hear the scolding tones of a rent-a-gob media moralist, it is worth remembering the words John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Maddox Ford's great novel of betrayal The Good Soldier, "I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness."

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In praise of perversion

Few instincts are so strong or so widely shared as the urge to condemn other people for their sexual idiosyncrasies. And yet, argues Howard Jacobson, it is when we explore the outer boundaries of our sexual desires that we become most fully human

Wednesday, 17 September 2008


"We are all sick in our own way," Felix Quinn declares. Felix Quinn is the hero of my new novel, The Act of Love, and he, admittedly, has an axe to grind. He is a cuckold and he likes it. His idea of a good time is lying lonely in his bed, knowing that his wife is out on the night, enjoying the embraces of her lover. This will be incomprehensible to some men, and not to others. But we shouldn't, where the daemon of sex is concerned, be surprised by anything. I don't always agree with the heroes of my novels but I agree with Felix: we are all sick in our way. In the erotic life of men and women there is no such thing as health.


A new book about Franz Kafka discloses that he was more than casually interested in hard pornography. Lovers of literature shudder inwardly, as they did when they discovered something similar about Philip Larkin, and as an earlier generation shook their heads in disbelief over Charles Dickens's indiscretions with women young enough to be his daughters. Though we want our writing muddied, we like our writers clean. But what else should we have expected of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, those bleakly comic unforgiving tales of ignominy, guilt and shame? This is not to say that pornography is the only explanation for his temperament or the only route he might have taken to explore it, but it makes sense to me that such a man would have found something congenial to him I don't say pleasant or even satisfying in the act of perusing it. "The sense of the tragic increases and diminishes with sensuality," Nietzsche wrote. Meaning that the more the senses engross us, the more philosophically serious we become. It is an important formulation: we are philosophers by virtue of our sexual appetites, not despite them.

Pornography is not, of course, the only expression of sensuality, but some extreme sorts of sensuality tend inexorably in its direction. In its written form, pornography's only convincing conclusion is death, for ecstasy without restraint wants nothing less. Pictorially, too, in the mortuary fixity of its imagery it is essentially morbid, refusing change of mood or flux of feeling. Either way, pornography is a trance, demeaning all parties to it, those looked at and those looking, locking them into a perpetuity of shame. There is nowhere to run to in pornography as there is nowhere to run to in the novels of Kafka. On the last page of The Trial, Joseph K watches impassively as the mysterious "partners" thrust a knife into his heart. "Like a dog!" he says. "It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him." That could be pornography he is describing..........

It is not, I hope, perverse of me to cite the above as prime among the reasons along with what we owe to curiosity why we should acquaint ourselves with pornography, in whatever form it takes. In its ominous nothingness, pornography familiarises us with humiliation and humiliation with despair and loss. And loss stimulates the imagination. Winning is a dead end, in sex as in everything else. It is only out of a keen sense of loss that we tell stories, write poems, and learn to liberate ourselves from damagingly misleading optimistic fantasies of sex as purposeful and joyous, whether purposeful in God's sense of procreation in the divine image, or in Darwin's sense of selecting what's best of us for futurity. Sex is for nothing, pornography teaches. Unless you call ignominy something.

When he wasn't looking at pornography or writing The Trial Kafka visited brothels, which if you like is just putting pornography into action. I am glad for his sake and for literature's that he did. I feel about prostitution as I do about pornography that a man ought to avail himself of whatever is on offer. Paid-for sex, in all its varieties sex stripped of responsibility and sentimentality (though even with a prostitute it will not always be so simple) answers to imperatives which respectable courtship and marriage prefer to ignore. Whenever I encounter a man who says he has never visited a prostitute, either because the thought appals him or, as is more commonly asserted, because he doesn't need to pay for sex, thank you very much, I believe that he is lying, or, worse, that he is a fool. Among the many reasons for paying for sex the most salient is the wanting to pay for sex; and that "want" is not to be confused with need. We know that from the examples of famously glamorous men who have all the women their hearts' desire but still routinely get caught and who is to say don't hope to get caught? with a hooker in the back seat of their automobiles. All the women one needs do not satisfy the desire to pay for a woman one does not need.

So what does drive a man to pay for sex, when paying must negate so much of the romantic baggage and vanity with which sex is laden? Loneliness explains some of it, but the lonely are obviously needy, and we are addressing needs which are less apparent. Feminist opponents of the institution of prostitution see paying for sex as an expression, pure and simply, of male aggression. The man shells out to subject a woman to his will. I don't doubt that some men pay to feel in charge, though it's a paltry authority that must be bought and men of this sort will soon discover they can impose themselves more effectively (in their own eyes at least) through violence that doesn't cost a penny. Those who go on paying do so not to assert their masculinity but to demean it. It is an ironic or self-defeating transaction, an act of mockery and submission, a species of masochism whether the man asks the prostitute to beat and degrade him or not. Catherine Millett, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, says she took on promiscuity to show that sex is separable from feeling. This is nonsense. The attempt to find feelinglessness in sex is an ambition loaded with feeling. To those who aspire not to feel in the course of a sexual encounter, the attainment of the illusion of feelinglessness is exquisite.

Thus the nothingness one goes in search of in a brothel is, by the wonderful inverse law of eroticism, not a nothingness at all. Beyond a certain stage the stage at which many of us call time on eroticism and pour what's left of our desires into work or an allotment sex functions as an exchange of shame and power: merely functional procreation giving way to the longing to pass from person into thing, to be the instrument (or controller) of another's will, to be less (or more) than human.

"In the end," the great French philosopher of eroticism Georges Bataille wrote, "we resolutely desire that which imperils our life." Not accidentally, not half-heartedly, but resolutely. I do not say we want to die (though on occasions we think we do) but we want sex to take us as close to death as life allows, the paradox being and this is a paradox which most sexual perversions celebrate, whereas love, sweet love does not that we are never more alive than when we are staring into loss..........

Not quite true that love, sweet love does not. Allow love to be its own perversion and it too can take one to the precipice. This is the principle by which my hero Felix lives his life. Imperilled by love and the hold it exerts on him, he embraces the very thing he dreads - embraces it because he dreads it - which is his wife Marisa's infidelity. He is never more alive than when she is in the arms of another man. Othello is, of course, the same: a man energised by jealousy. The difference being that Othello doesn't know that jealousy energises him whereas Felix does. And here's a question: could it be that what appals us most when we descend to jealous rage is not the thought that we have been betrayed, but the kernel of sickly pleasure we discover in it? Is Othello, in other words, more disgusted by himself than he is by Desdemona? The question isn't only academic. Had Othello taken the Leopold Bloom route, or indeed Felix's, and fetishised his fears, might not things have turned out differently for all parties? I don't say happily, I simply say otherwise. Better, anyway, to be familiar with one's nature and accepting of its shameful depths, than to flounder hopelessly as Othello does. Though I accept that tragedy might still await the complaisant husband whose taste for cuckoldom demands ever more extravagant betrayal - a spiral from which the hero of my novel is unable, or unwilling, to break free.

Or is that the moralist in me talking? The masochism into which Felix hurls himself is without doubt self-destructive and tyrannical, but what is not. Perverted or obsessive sex lands up in an emotional cul-de-sac, rubbing at its single itch, finding pleasure only in the one thing endlessly repeated or exacerbated - more and more pain, more and more pornography, more and more visits to houses of ill repute - but that which we call respectability fares no better. When I was growing up it was common to hear husbands call their wives "mother". Whether this was an allusion to their own mother or the mothers of their children their wives had become I doubt they knew. Either way, the wife was locked into her role and the husband into his script. The endearments of the long happily married fulfil the same function, and in the narratives of their cheerful longevity one always detects the cruelty of opportunities foregone, disappointment, equivocation, compromise, and a haunted curiosity as though they know they will go to their graves with the majority of their questions unanswered. You cannot enjoy the consolations of calm if you are an obsessive: but nor can you attain the poisoned bliss vouchsafed to the dissolute and the deranged if you are cautious and well-adjusted. Sex lets no one off.

It is for this reason that we are fools ever to be censorious about the sexual lives of others. It is fair enough that a Catholic bishop should castigate Max Mosley for his romps with prostitutes dressed in pantomime military uniforms. Churchmen exist to excoriate the fleshly. But the rest of us have no business being superior. And no business laughing either. It's true that the banalities of life the cups of tea, the prattle of the whores, our own sad bodies unflattered by the uniforms of fantasy will always compromise our frenzied worship of the god Dionysus. But in desire tomorrow is another day; we wake to find Dionysus every bit as demanding as he was the night before. What's odd is not how Max Mosley passes his time away from motor racing administration but why more of us don't turn our hands to something similar, given the agitation of our curiosity. Which raises the question of where we draw the line between fantasy and fact. Felix acknowledges no such distinction - for him, to want is to do - but then a cuckold is the least dangerous of men. Other sexual preferences are more menacing. That Max Mosley, whatever he intended, was in some measure exorcising his family's ghosts, parodying (to erotic end) their ideology, it is reasonable to surmise; but how would we have felt about such exorcisms had they spilled into actual, un-negotiated violence? It is tempting to take the safety-valve view of pornography and fantasy and see them as licensed liberty, sex's version of carnival. But that consigns the erotic life to an eternity of pretence. And we cannot live forever in pretence. Some doing, outside the mind, is necessary. Thereafter, it is up to society to decide what it can and cannot allow to happen. The best eroticism can do against the law, in so fas as it has a choice in the matter, is to keep pushing the boundaries of the imaginable. We grow a little freer when we read De Sade's One Thousand Days of Sodom, though we know we cannot live up to its lawlessness. The imagination is an unbordered continent. In art, which is the province of the imagination, we do not judge as we judge municipally, as magistrates or policemen. Which is why, whatever our education and our civic institutions try to lull us into believing about the nature of desire, we must find the space to think, and where possible to act, rebelliously, refusing all attempts to confine us to the hell of the normative.

We are strange creatures, part angels of reflection, part beasts that claw the earth. It is too cruel that an accidental species as peculiar as we are should ever have been made to think there is a right way and a wrong way of conducting ourselves sexually, as though there were some divine pattern we were framed to follow. I don't say that giving ourselves over to the demoniacal, or just the deviant, will necessarily make us happy - why should it when it is so rarely happiness we seek in sex? - but the straight and narrow has never yet made anyone anything but miserable.


Howard Jacobson's new novel, 'The Act of Love' is published by Jonathan Cape (17.99)

Why adultery can help save a marriage

Therapist is under fire for saying that cheating on your spouse can be more of a blessing than a sin

Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent
Sunday June 8, 2008

Observer

A controversial self-help book for married philanderers claims most adulterers are good, kind people. It says affairs can help a marriage and that those who stray should never admit it because the truth can cause even more damage.
'Cheating on your spouse isn't a moral act, but most men and woman who have affairs are good people who made a mistake,' said Mira Kirshenbaum, author of When Good People Have Affairs, published this week. 'They never thought it would happen to them but, suddenly, they're in this complicated, dangerous situation. We all agree that infidelity is a mistake. But once you've crossed the line, what then?'

Kirshenbaum has been criticised by her peers for saying cheats deserve sympathy and understanding. 'Adulterers are neither kind nor good people, so what sort of sympathy are we supposed to give them?', said Leila Collins, a psychologist who has given relationship counselling for 15 years. 'A good person doesn't betray their loved ones. A good person who is unsatisfied in their relationship ends it before starting a new one.'

Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute, a centre for relationship therapy and research in Boston, Massachusetts, admits that infidelity is a controversial topic to address sympathetically. 'But these people are suffering terribly and need to be relieved of their sense of guilt and shame because those emotions are paralysing,' she said.

Those who have affairs are seeking real happiness and love in their lives, believes Kirshenbaum, who has been treating couples and individuals for 30 years and has written 10 books on relationships. 'Until now, the story of these men and women has never been told,' she said. 'Shame and fear have kept it in the closet and so they haven't had the understanding that might save them from ruining the lives of everyone involved.'

She believes that society's refusal to have a sympathetic discussion of infidelity has meant that the positive sides of betraying a spouse have been ignored. 'Sometimes an affair can be the best way for the person who has been unfaithful to get the information and impetus to change,' she said. 'I'm not encouraging affairs, but underlying the complicated mess is a kind of deep and delicate wisdom. It's an insight that something isn't working and needs to change.'

Her views reflect the plotline of Adrian Lyne's 2002 film, Unfaithful, in which Richard Gere's love for his wife, Diane Lane, is rekindled by her affair with a younger man, Olivier Martinez. 'If handled right, an affair can be therapeutic, give clarity and jolt people from their inertia,' she said. 'You could think of it as a radical but necessary medical procedure. If your marriage is in cardiac arrest, an affair can be a defibrillator.'

Kirshenbaum believes there are 17 reasons why people have affairs, including the see-if affair, the distraction affair and the sexual-panic affair. To help people decide whether their infidelity should spell the end of their marriage, she lists a few that she believes do indicate the relationship is over - and those that do not. 'You should stay with your partner if your affair is a heating-up-your-marriage affair, let's-kill-this-relationship-and-see-if-it-comes-back-to-life affair, do-I-still-have-it affair, accidental affair, revenge affair or midlife-crisis affair,' said Kirshenbaum.

'But you need to think carefully about whether to stay with your primary partner if your affair is of the following kinds: the break-out-into-selfhood affair, unmet-need affair, having-experiences-I-missed-out-on affair, surrogate-therapy affair, ejector-seat affair,' she said.

Kirshenbaum is adamant that an adulterer must never confess - not even if their partner asks directly. 'This is the one area in which the truth usually creates far more damage in the long run,' she said. 'A lot of people confess because they feel they just have to be honest. Well, honesty is great. But it's a very abstract moral principle. A much more concrete, and much higher, moral principle is not hurting people. And when you confess to having an affair, you are hurting someone. If you care that much about honesty, figure out who you want to be with, commit to that relationship and devote the rest of your life to making it the most honest relationship you can,' she said.

There are two huge exceptions to not telling. 'If you're having an affair and you haven't practised safe sex, you have to tell,' she said. 'You also have to tell if discovery is imminent or likely. If it's clear that you're going to be found out, it's better for you to make the confession first.'

Another reason for not telling is that it makes it far more difficult for a remorseful adulterer to return to the fold. 'If your partner will find out about your affair, your whole future happiness together depends on whether he's basically vengeful or basically merciful,' she said.

Kirshenbaum's opinion on what constitutes a happy ending is also controversial. Divorce, she believes, can be the path to a bright future. 'Sometimes - many times, in fact - divorce is worth it,' she said. 'It plays an important function. It gets us out of misery-making marriages and we have a chance of finding happiness somewhere else.'

Infidelity : 'Being unfaithful keeps me happy'

Infidelity : 'Being unfaithful keeps me happy'

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 22/01/2008

Continuing her investigation into Britain's adultery epidemic, Angela Levin talks to professional women who have affairs to bolster their marriages - and revitalise flagging sex lives
# The Infidelity files: Day 1 - Desperately seeking someone

Sylvia, 43, has a highly paid job in the City. Her husband is supportive and they have two children. She entertains at weekends, enjoys luxury holidays twice a year and has time for her friends.

Get some spice in you life: Many women turn to affairs to cope with a loveless marriage
Get some spice in you life: Many women turn to affairs to cope with a loveless marriage

To those in her circle, she seems to have an enviable life and to have mastered the difficult art of balancing work with home and family. What they don't know is that she has a higher libido than her husband and regularly takes a lover.

Sylvia belongs to a small but growing group of alpha woman - financially independent, confident and uninhibited - who, like men, have developed a similar pro-active, almost cynical approach to sex.

For them, it is no big deal to seek sexual fulfilment outside marriage and they claim to be able to separate lust from love.

"I am one of those women who want it all," she laughs. "My life is very hectic and I thrive on adrenaline. I really enjoy sex, but I don't want any complications. So I am only interested in men, preferably married, who want the same."
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Just how many women today are having sex with men who are not their husband is hard to pin down, but some sex researchers are claiming it is as high as 60 per cent.

Whatever the numbers, much has changed since Emma Bovary decided she couldn't take the humiliation of living life being branded an adulteress and committed suicide by taking arsenic.

The hard-nosed, predatory female of today is perhaps the evolutionary reality of a phrase originally coined by author Erica Jong in her taboo-busting 1973 bestseller, Fear of Flying.

She described a sexual encounter for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment and between two previously unacquainted persons, as a "zipless f***"; she also said it was "rarer than the unicorn".

Nearly 35 years on, these encounters are available with a click of the mouse.

Over a five-month period, I talked to almost 100 middle-class professionals, both male and female, who confessed to being unfaithful.

What was remarkable was that not one of the women said they felt guilty. And those who believed they might get emotionally involved tried to work out hard-headed strategies of dealing with it.

Although it would seem that no-strings-attached sex is the emotional equivalent of McDonald's - in that it can satisfy a certain hunger but is quickly forgotten and doesn't do you much good - many of the women I spoke to saw it as a better option than having an affair with someone they work with, which could put their career at risk.

Nor did they want to get involved with a family friend.

Lynne, a 45-year-old married administrator, thinks the growing popularity among women of no-strings relationships is a result of their success in the workplace. "Now we are as successful as men at work and other areas of life, women like me think, 'Why the hell not?' My lover won't jeopardise my work or family life. I am doing something that makes me happy, which, in turn, makes home happier, too.

"Women have come a long way in the last 20 or 30 years, so why should taking a lover without commitment be a male preserve? I just think, 'Lucky me.'?"

Jenny, 48, who runs her own business, thinks the trend for uninvolved sex is part of today's have-it-all society.

"In the past," she says, "a wife would think, 'I've got a decent husband and live in a presentable house, so I can't expect too much.' But now our expectations are much higher and we don't want to compromise. I've done it and don't feel guilty at all.

"I spend a lot of time caring for my husband and child and running my business, and I think of this as something for me. Women have always had sexual needs, but culturally we've not been encouraged to attend to them. Now we are more willing and able to make decisions about what happens to us. Some of us might choose to go to the cinema for a night out. Others might prefer to have sex."

So while more men are in tune with their feelings and want more from an extra-marital relationship - emotional companionship as well as physical contact - some women want less. Less involvement, less friendship, and more sex.

But can women really be quite so matter-of-fact and unemotional about infidelity? Can evolution be gradually turning women, whose priority was once to build nests and care and be cared for, into hunter-gatherers?

Are Byron's words: "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'tis woman's whole existence" really no longer valid?

Possibly. Most women are sexually experienced before marriage. They are financially independent. Nor is there a stigma attached to the adulterous woman.

As recently as 1970, if a woman was found to have had an extra-marital affair, she not only forfeited her right to maintenance but also risked losing her children.

It was a penalty Diana, Princess of Wales's mother, Frances, discovered to her cost. After years of an unhappy marriage to Earl Spencer, in the late 1960s she had an affair with wallpaper merchant Peter Shand Kydd.

She left her husband, taking their four children with her. He felt so humiliated by her adultery that although, at the time, women were routinely given custody of the children, he fought her in the courts and won.

The judge made much of branding her as an adulteress and seemed to take no account of her cross-petition on the grounds of cruelty. Now, when couples divorce, any sexual misdemeanours by the woman are considered on a par with a man's.

We do not yet, however, have a no-fault-based divorce system like Spain or Canada.

Nor are women who have extra-marital relationships confined to a particular age group.

While today's women of 40 and younger see having great sex as their right (some studies show that the more sexual partners a person has before marriage, the more likely she or he is to cheat on a spouse), many fifty- or even sixtysomething women, in common with their male counterparts, don't want to be left out.

These are the generation of women whose children have left home. They are fitter and better looking than their predecessors, thanks to HRT, Botox and plastic surgery, and seek new challenges.

While some choose physical challenges, a recent report from Germany cited that one in three fiftysomething women are looking for a sexual adventure. Perhaps they are catching up on all they missed during those sleep-deprived times when their children were small.

Teresa, who is 52, is one example. She has been married 27 years and, when her youngest left home she decided she wanted more excitement in her life.

"I have a good husband, but I have spent my life lying on my back thinking of England when we have sex. He's never been any good in the bedroom. He has a low libido and little interest. I knew that when I married him and he is a good man in every other respect.

"For years, I kept wondering what it would be like to meet someone who was really exciting in bed. Then about nine months ago I placed an ad on the internet just for the fun of it. I was inundated with replies, but mostly from losers. There was only one man who stood out. We met and there was instant chemistry between us. We met again on an occasional basis, but then I realised that psychologically I wasn't the type to be unfaithful. I would hate my husband to find out, so I stopped. But I don't regret it."

Julie, 49, who is married with one son and has a senior position in a health authority, knew she wanted more out of an extra-marital relationship than just sex.

"My husband and I haven't had sex for years," she explained. "He is 15 years older than me and although it wasn't a problem when we first got married 20 years ago, his approach to life now is that of an old man. We sleep in separate bedrooms and I don't think he sees me when he looks at me.

"For much of our marriage, I put my needs to one side and concentrated on my work and looking after my family. But about five years ago, I began to feel increasingly unhappy and unsettled. I wanted to do something about it, but didn't know how to go about it. The only men I met were my husband's colleagues or fathers of my children's friends. So I contacted a dating agency for married people. I was a little nervous of the interview, so I took along a close girlfriend.

"I only wanted to meet married men who wanted to stay married. I want to be happier, but not wreck my marriage. Although I'm not in love with my husband any more, he's becoming elderly and I wouldn't want him to be a lonely old man. I wanted to take a lover to keep me happy.

"I was offered a choice of three men. I contacted each one, we met for a drink, and I then spent about five months getting to know the man I most liked. It was important for me to develop a friendship and trust before we had sex. If I had just wanted sex, I could have tried to pick up someone in the local pub."

The relationship wasn't, however, as manageable as she hoped. "I broke off with him after a year because I found myself getting too emotionally involved and realised I would get more so if I continued. Although my partner, who is also married, enjoyed being with me very much, he didn't feel involved with me in the same way."

Other women, like Mary, 55, claim to have affairs to help them stay with their husbands until the children leave home. "I know that eventually I will leave my husband, but I don't want to while our children are still at home," she explained.

"I have a lover, our relationship has lasted two years, and I hope I don't have to have another one. Although it has made me slightly distant with my husband, I am also less irritable and if something happens in the relationship I don't like, I tell myself that I have different pleasures."

Others, like Anne, who is 54, chose to have an affair because she wanted to be indulged and spoilt. "I entered into a relationship because I wanted to be adored, desired and given lots of attention - all things I don't get at home. And that is what I have found.

"I meet my lover every two or three weeks in a hotel. He always pays and nearly every time buys me presents - nothing that would be awkward to explain, but perfume, chocolates and flowers. Of course, I can never take the flowers home and after our couple of hours together they end up in the bin in the hotel room, but he understands that."

Getting caught is not a pressing worry. "I hope I don't live to regret this," she continued. "But I honestly don't think it would occur to my husband that anything could be going on. If he did discover I've been unfaithful, he would probably be crushed. It makes me feel uncomfortable but not guilty. Guilt is a pointless feeling. Nor do I feel guilty about my lover's wife. His relationship with her is quite poor. He hadn't had sex with her for years, not just for a month or two.

"My daughter is a different kettle of fish. A short while ago, she commented that I seemed much happier than I had been. I fobbed it off. She once picked up my mobile and started playing with it. It gave me a fright as my lover regularly sends me sexy texts. I've since changed the pin number. I would hate to go down in her estimation."

She admits she doesn't always practise safe sex. "At the beginning of our relationship, I made sure he used a condom but when it looked as if it would work out, we both went to a clinic and got ourselves checked, showed each other the results, and then stopped using protection."

Several women, including Mary, mentioned how much they enjoyed the feel-good factor that comes from a fulfilling sexual relationship. "I've relearnt how to be a sexually confident woman, which is a good thing," she said. "I also take much more care of my appearance."

If a woman starts to feel vulnerable, Anne, 45, believes in handling it rationally. "Women are naturally more emotionally vulnerable than men," she conceded, "so we have to exercise self-discipline. Everything in life has its disadvantages and we have to learn to cope. It is easy to get too involved but we just have to stop ourselves and know where to draw the line.

"There's no reason why a multitasking woman can't handle extra-marital relationships in a similar way to a man. I multitask to an astonishing degree in my business life, and all I am doing is taking that ability into my personal life. It isn't a big deal.

"The point is, I don't believe one person, man or woman, can meet all your needs for the duration of your life. And having a discreet affair is one way of handling that."

Infidelity: Desperately seeking someone

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 21/01/2008

In the digital age, having an affair has never been easier. Author Angela Levin spent five months interviewing middle-class professionals for an extensive study that charts the rise of the no-strings-attached* relationship. In the first of a three-part investigation, she reveals why the UK is in the grip of an infidelity epidemic.

'Been left parked in the garage of marriage too long, battery getting flat and needs somebody to give it a spark of life, full tank and ready to go.

Infidelity
Clincher: many unfaithful men blame their wives

"Present owner does not like going for a ride any more but am not up for sale. Seeking discreet lady mechanic, preferably married, to enjoy some NSA run-outs together."

This advert was posted by John, a 44-year-old married IT manager on a popular dating website favoured by men like him who want no-strings-attached (NSA) relationships.

"I try to make my adverts witty because I don't want sex with someone who doesn't have a sense of humour," the father-of-two explained. "At the same time, I want whoever she is to know from the start that if she is after a relationship, she can forget it.

"I have no intention of leaving my wife. I realise it sounds funny to say I care about her, but I do. I am just a bit bored."
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Quite how many married men and a smaller, but increasing, number of women are risking their emotional and physical health in this way is difficult to know, as few people ever tell the truth about their sex lives. However, a survey last week claimed that more than half of married people admit they are not completely happy in their relationship, and that 59 per cent of wives would leave their marriage if they could afford to do so. Seemingly trapped by their unhappy domestic situation, eight out of 10 couples will, at some time, be unfaithful to each other.

Of course, men have sought mistresses since time began. The difference is that we now seem to be in the middle of an infidelity epidemic. The dilemma seems less about whether to have an affair and more about finding the most convenient way of doing so. As a result, no-strings-attached relationships have become something of a cultural phenomenon.

In spite of a recent survey revealing that 70 per cent of married women and 54 per cent of married men don't know about the extra-marital affairs of their spouses, infidelity remains the most common reason for divorce - a situation that is currently affecting 40 per cent of all UK marriages.

But is it realistic in this day and age to expect decades of fidelity? And should society come to a new accommodation of marriage and long-term relationships? "An awful lot of both men and women commit adultery but don't want their marriage to end," says James Stewart, a divorce lawyer at leading London solicitors Manches. "They can be quite shocked when their spouse considers it a deal-breaker."

There are many reasons why more people than ever are having extra-marital affairs. We are all healthier and living longer, which means marriages can last decades more than they used to and there is an increasing chance of people growing apart or getting bored of each other. We also live in a me-generation, and fewer of us are prepared to compromise on the kind of life we want. Women today are more financially and psychologically independent than ever before, and more sexually active. They are far less likely to stick with a marriage if they are unhappy than ever before in history.

Viagra and other drugs help men stay sexually active for longer, while women have access to HRT, Botox and cosmetic surgery to keep themselves looking good. And - thanks to modern methods of communication, such as email, mobiles and text messages - affairs are far easier to run than ever before, at least in practical, if not emotional terms.

Over a five-month period, I spoke to nearly 100 men and women - all middle-class professionals with good homes, decent jobs and, on the surface, happy families - who have had extra-marital relationships. It was a random rather than scientific study but it confirmed that there seems to be a seismic shift in people's attitude to adultery.

What used to happen (and still does to some extent) is that an individual met someone, perhaps a colleague or their spouse's best friend, fell for them and as a result had an affair. Nowadays it is often the other way round and almost brutally clinical. Individuals decide objectively and in advance that they want an affair and then set out to find someone suitable. It's almost as if he or she is a commodity to be taken off a supermarket shelf. As it has never been easier to find illicit sex, the adulterous shopper is often spoiled for choice.

Type "discreet relationships" into Google and an astonishing 1,670,000 websites come up. These include marriedsecrets.com, illicitencounters.co.uk, rekonnect.com, meet2cheat.co.uk, askmen.com, philanderers.com, and the sizeable personals sections on sites such as gumtree.com and craigslist.org. They cater for people of all ages who want to advertise for sexual partners.

But a glance at the type of advert placed reveals the age old differences between the sexes. While the men are self-promoters and boast about their sexual prowess, the women tend to undersell themselves. "I am not a stunner, just average," begins one modest female. "I have no wish to lie about my circumstances. I am at the end of a long marriage but can't leave just yet because of the children," writes another.

John has been advertising on two sites with some success over the last nine months. "I'm doing it because my life has become dull and predictable," he says.

"My job's OK. I can pay my mortgage and go on holiday. My children are doing reasonably well at school. My wife works part-time and runs the home. But I want to feel adrenaline running through my body again and only great sex can give me that. I feel really excited when I place my advert. I have opened up a separate email account so it is unlikely that anyone at work or home can discover it. I've had a few short-term flings and haven't got it right yet. But it is addictive, so I shall keep trying. You don't know who is going to be out there."

Some older men admitted that they have advertised for a sexual playmate to relieve the boredom of early retirement. "I had a busy career but now that I am at home all the time, I find life very dull," one 60-year-old confessed. "I want what everyone else is getting. I can always get some Viagra if I find a much younger woman. I'm still very interested but my wife lost interest in sex long ago."

Blaming their wanderings on their wives' sexual rejection of them is a common way for men to justify their behaviour. Richard, who runs his own marketing business, shows unwavering confidence in his sexual prowess and has successfully found several casual encounters. His advert - "Another married guy, 54, looking for NSA married fun with married woman" - is pragmatic and to the point, but hardly enticing.

He insists his unemotional affairs are saving his marriage rather than putting it at risk. Like many men he doesn't want a divorce, partly to avoid the financial wrangling and also because he wants to stay close to his children.

"I've been married a long time and have a high sex drive. My wife doesn't. I've tried to talk to her about it, but she either gets angry, withdraws or cries and the atmosphere between us can be awful for days.

"But I don't want to leave her. We are good friends. We have a lot in common, including our children. So having an NSA arrangement suits me fine. I love the excitement of a different body and know for certain that without it my marriage would be over by now.

"I have sex with a woman, rather like casual friends might meet for a drink. I don't get emotionally involved. I enjoy the chase and can get very intense when I am after someone new. I send lots of flirty texts, and emails. Women are very susceptible to flattery. Most feel self-conscious about some part of their body and reassurance soon makes her mine.

"When the sex is good I feel 50 feet tall, confident and relaxed. Otherwise, I'm climbing up the wall, am bad tempered, difficult to be with and very critical of my wife. It's as simple as that." He believes men have been genetically programmed to stray: "Men can't resist temptation. I get a thrill from chasing new women. I prefer older married women, because they know what they want and have fewer hang ups."

The most likely times for a man to stray are after the first year of marriage, when the emotional high of finding the right partner subsides; after his first child is born, when he suddenly sees his partner as a mother figure rather than a lover; after between five and seven years of togetherness, when he's bored, doesn't want to settle into a cosy routine and yearns for excitement; and then at intermittent intervals.

Tony, 53, believes he could never be faithful, whoever he married and in whichever century he had been born. "If I wasn't involved in NSA relationships I might have had more complicated affairs or even used prostitutes. Most prostitutes today are drug addicts whereas most of the women I've been with have been quite respectable.

"I like the fact that I don't get involved in talking about mundane stuff like problems with the washing machine or little Billy's latest upset at school. I get those passion-killers at home. Instead, I wipe out everything that is going on in my life for a couple of hours.

"I've met some attractive women who are fed up with their husbands because they have gone to seed and lost interest in sex. All they have to do is understand the deal.

I am straightforward about it, always use contraception, and if they show signs of getting involved I move on."

All the men I spoke to were careful to take precautions and tried to ensure their wives didn't find out what they were up to. But they all persisted in the belief that if she did catch them out, she shouldn't take their behaviour seriously. "Although in some people's book what I am doing is immoral," said John, "I think it's pretty harmless. No man wants to swap a meaningless relationship for a marriage. Particularly if it's lasted a long time and you are good friends."

It is perhaps the only saving grace of an NSA relationship. If there is a scale of adultery, NSA liaisons surely come nearer the bottom than the top. They are essentially top-ups, a desire for variety and sexual thrill and not intended to break up an established relationship. "It's a bit like not wanting the same sauce on your pasta every single mealtime," one man told me.

An alternative, that simplifies the process for both sexes and saves time, is offered by David Miller, a self-styled businessman turned adulterers' guru. David, 53, runs lovinglinks.com, a London-based internet dating site that has 23,000 members all, in theory at least, married men and women who want to stray. He also runs "a bespoke one-to-one service" for a select few, where women pay £350 and men £1,500 every eight weeks for his services. ("Men pay more," he explains, "because the type of men I deal with are usually high earners. It also helps ensure they are respectable.")

David, who is twice divorced and now "extremely happy and faithful" in a long-term relationship, likes to think of himself as a cross between a service provider and a social worker. "I am not in the sex industry," he insists. "I am just a realist. People have these situations and want to deal with them elegantly."

He used to produce TV commercials but 13 years ago decided he wanted a change. "I toyed with the idea of opening a specialist dating agency but realised married people don't really want to get involved with singles. So I ran an ad in a Sunday newspaper with a PO box number that read, 'Attached? Married? Bored?'. I was inundated and it went on from there."

He meets each applicant personally and over a drink or two finds out his or her needs and desires. He then provides three carefully chosen individuals at a time for them to chose from.

His clients are wide-ranging. "I have all sorts of high-ranking professionals come to me and, recently, far more women. Many of my female clients are psychotherapists. I haven't a clue why.

"All the women tell me they feel safer if I vet men for them before they meet - while the men are often so busy they rely on me to find them someone discreet and personable. I've even had a woman bring her son-in-law to meet me. She could see that there were things going wrong in [her daughter's] marriage and thought a discreet affair might prevent a break-up.

"Nor are most of my clients only interested in the sex aspect. They also want to be able to talk intelligently with whoever they are with and even go out to dinner. They don't want something dirty, nasty or sleazy. They want fun and quality in their life and I try to find it for them. I am a romantic and I want people to be happy."

Isn't their happiness at the expense of their married partner? "People can get hurt," he agrees, "but they can get hurt anyway, and sometimes these type of relationships, if they are handled discreetly, are the Band-Aid a long-term marriage needs.

"Women have usually thought about it very carefully often for years before they approach me, and by the time they do they have already bought a separate mobile and set up an email account - whereas most of the men haven't even thought about how they will manage it. Women also can handle a portfolio of relationships, men can usually only handle one. And not just because they are so busy."

His liaisons are not for the emotionally vulnerable or faint-hearted and should come with a health warning. "Once people get involved in the type of situation I provide, it's hard for them to stop," he says. "They are the crack cocaine of relationships. People get addicted to the buzz and adrenaline rush of new encounters."

Anyone who seeks a casual fling needs to have a cast-iron emotional constitution.

Re-assurance or tenderness isn't part of the deal. It's a take it or leave it situation, although it's not always expressed in such basic terms. He, and particularly she, also needs to understand the difference between lust and love and try to protect their heart as well as their health - and that of their spouse. The health risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are well-known, but the risk of psychological damage, particularly for the vulnerable and needy, can be underestimated.