Men want sex, women want love. Men have an endlessly roving eye, while women do not. And men who have affairs are cooler, calmer – and more likely to get away with it. Countless books and articles about relationships repeat statements like these again and again. Yet the story of my now 30-year marriage proves these credos utterly false. For when my head was turned by a hot, younger colleague at work and we embarked on a scorching three-month affair – driven entirely by sexual desire, not love – my husband didn’t have a clue. And he still doesn’t.
Yet when he later had a fling, it took me mere weeks to find him out. Why? Because I kept my cool, while he went to pieces. I believe this dynamic is increasingly common, for a few simple reasons. First, like so many women my age – I was 45 when I had my affair – I am a supremely talented multi-tasker, unlike my husband, Matt, who quails if you ask him to do more than one job at a time. On a day-to-day basis, I manage every single thing in our household for Matt and our three children, as well as working full-time. So the admin and mental juggling involved in concealing an affair – from creating alibis to hiding steamy text messages – took no effort for me at all. I was already flipping between so many roles; wife, mother, daughter, employee and homemaker. Adding ‘lover’ wasn’t that much of a stretch.
The fact that I am already the emotional support for so many people also made it easier for me to compartmentalise the feelings affairs so often expose. The attention Simon paid to me, to my body, made me feel sexually awake again (picture posed by models). Simultaneously dealing with my children’s worries, my husband’s low self-esteem and the vulnerabilities of ageing parents means that, mentally, I’ve long had to box away my own feelings. So hiding the roar of lust, excitement and fear that I felt wasn’t actually that difficult.
My husband, though, just didn’t have the emotional sophistication to manage the complexities of deceit. He fell head-over-heels for his younger lover like some sort of soppy teenager – a cringeworthy error. And there’s another reason why I believe middle-aged mothers like me are adept at coping with the emotional demands of an affair – and it’s hard-wired into our biology. In your mid-40s, of course, oestrogen levels begin to drop. Oestrogen is commonly known as the ‘nurturing hormone’ – but some women I know refer to it instead as the ‘door mat hormone’. Oestrogen creates feelings of devotion to your family and husband.
It was only once my own levels naturally began to lessen that I started to put myself first again after the relentless grind of the baby years. It was surprisingly few steps from that moment of asking ‘what about me?’ to my eye starting to wander – and soon after that I dived into an affair. All this might make any man married to a 40-something think twice about his wife’s fidelity. And he’d be right to.
Because if anyone wasn’t the kind of girl to have an affair, it was me. I had been a one-man woman since I met Matt when we were both 23, and were introduced by a mutual friend. The sparks flew instantly – at first, a day rarely passed when we didn’t have sex. After six months, we bought a house together. I vividly remember us packing up our things from our tiny rented flat and wrapping up Matt’s first gift to me, a ‘world’s best girlfriend’ mug in bubble wrap. We married two years later, aged 25. I was ecstatic.
Twenty years on, though, I broke our wedding vows. I’m certainly not alone. Survey after survey shows that around one in two women will have an affair during the course of a marriage. It didn’t matter how devoted I was for the first two decades of our marriage, Matt was an insecure man. Jealous of the men in my friendship group – despite our relationships being entirely innocent – he always seemed to worry I might leave him.
Our son was born when I was 30 and he was followed by two daughters, one when I was 35 and another when I was 39. Each time Matt and I celebrated another arrival, our sex life would hit the snooze button for a year or so, but then things would be back to normal. That, for us, was making love twice a week. It was notable that Matt appeared happier in himself after I became a mother – when I went from a size 10 to more of a matronly size 16. Indeed, the better shape I was in, the more apparent his ¬insecurities were likely to be.
But as he became more secure in our marriage and we celebrated our 40th birthdays, my own mind started to wander. I felt frumpy and unattractive. We were a team when it came to the kids, but no longer that couple with a sparky sex life. I began to daydream about sex, my eye lingering on attractive men I saw in shops or on the street. Looking back, I can clearly see that I had entered the affair danger zone. Perimenopausal and bored, I did everything around the house as well as working. And as much as I loved them, I felt like my children owned me.
.jpeg?trim=361,733,76,736&quality=75&auto=webp&width=960)
