The two women first met in a lift at work. Kate, a senior auditor, had been poking her phone screen in an agitated manner. Linda, a high-flying management consultant who had recently been seconded to the firm, spoke first.
‘Day not even started,’ she smiled. ‘But it’s all going on – right?’ Kate had looked at her, unfocused and irritated. But she nodded and said, ‘Right’.
Then she smiled back before stepping out as the lift reached the sixth floor.
A mother to two teenagers and married for 25 years to her university boyfriend, Kate would later say that, at that very first sight of Linda, she felt as if an electric current had been switched on in her. She was immediately completely and utterly in love.
Her choice of object was, she told me, as surprising to her as it later was to her husband. ‘I fell in love, as simple and as sudden as that, with a person,’ she said.
Four years ago, I set out to write a book about affairs, placing adverts in magazines and newspapers asking for volunteers to tell me their stories.
As a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I was fascinated to know what makes people begin an affair. What makes otherwise reliable, sensible, kind, loving and thoughtful people become selfish, sexually-obsessed risk-takers?
Kate and Linda were two of the many who responded. Their story is fascinating.
Kate and Linda were both married when they met in the lift at work. Kate immediately felt a connection with Linda
The relationship had unfolded at speed, they told me, after that first encounter in the lift. Their next meeting had been by chance, in their work canteen. Linda was queuing at the salad bar when Kate came up behind her holding a tray with soup and bread on it. ‘Can you pass me one of those so I don’t have to put my tray down?’ Kate had asked, nodding at a mozzarella and tomato salad.
At this point, Kate was still having sex with her husband, Simon, mostly on a Saturday morning. After almost 30 years, they knew what worked for them both.
The day after she met Linda at the salad bar, Simon lay in bed, his arms clasped behind his neck and sighed. ‘I’m going to play football. What plans do you have?’ She felt a familiar sensation. How had he not noticed that the house was in a state after having eight people over for supper the night before? ‘Who do you think is clearing up the kitchen?’ she asked.
She also realised how neither of them wanted to lie together anymore. Any post-coital unity between them had disappeared. Sex had become functional, rather than a warm, loving connection.
Linda, too, was not happy at home. Married for several years to her wife, Jas, she had hoped that the arrival of a daughter, Mabel, would bring a new dimension to their relationship.
But Mabel had been diagnosed with severe autism, and Linda felt she had become the vessel for Jas’s intense rage and disappointment about the little girl’s disability. They had not had sex for 18 months.
‘Coffee?’ Linda had asked Kate when they bumped into each other again a week later.
The conversation began, restrained at first. They smiled easily at each other. Kate had always found friendships with men easier than with women, but this was different.
Kate said she knew from the beginning, before anything happened, that she would leave Simon for Linda
Kate told Linda about her teenage boys. Linda told Kate about Mabel, now two. But neither mentioned their spouses.
Both were beginning to feel something that was quite unprecedented; something special and so powerful that they told me it was the first time they had ever fallen in love.
One day, Linda, after seeing Kate in a corridor, dared to text her: ‘I thought you looked gorgeous today.’ She hesitated and put her phone back in her pocket. But something made her press send.
Kate read the text a minute later and felt her heart racing and her stomach churning.
As their bond developed, the two women talked about their backgrounds. Both had felt under tremendous pressure from their families to do well academically and at sport.
Kate was the youngest of four sisters and had been always bored at home, where there had been an absence of closeness.
She believed that her parents had really wanted a son, especially her father, and that she had been a disappointment to them. And she also felt excluded from her parents’ relationship.
Linda had been brought up in Spain, the only child of a Spanish father and a Chinese mother.
She had played the violin and dreamed of going to music college, but her parents had insisted on a vocational degree and she ended up as an accountant.
Linda had always felt suffocated by her mother’s aspirations for her.
The family spoke Spanish at home, although her mother really didn’t speak it well, and Linda’s Chinese was poor.
Kate and Linda found an understanding about how hard it was to live a good life and that opportunities had been denied them.
By now, the two women were meeting regularly for coffee. Then one day, Linda rang Kate and asked to meet her in the office car park. ‘So what’s going on?’ asked Kate as she got into Linda’s car.
Linda immediately reached to touch Kate’s thigh, then her chin. ‘I don’t think I know what’s going on,’ said Linda. ‘But, I mean, I really like you a lot.’ Kate knew she felt the same way. She said to Linda: ‘You’ve got a little girl. I’ve got two big boys. We didn’t have them alone – or did you?’
Linda hesitated for a moment. ‘No, I have a wife.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Kate nodded, looking ahead as she did so.
‘And your boys’ dad is a man, I’m guessing,’ said Linda.
Later, they would both tell me how important that moment had been. Kate shut her eyes, leaned towards Linda and kissed her. Linda kissed her back, hard on the lips, putting her hand behind Kate’s neck.
It was the first time that Kate had ever kissed a woman. Both were feeling unstable, excited and guilty.
The next time they met in the car, Linda had news. She had been posted to Sao Paulo, Brazil, on a four-month placement.
But before they said anything, they kissed again. Kate at one point touched Linda’s nipple – ‘My God, breasts, same as me, but in between us!’ – and laughed.
Kate was shocked when Linda told her about Brazil. ‘Well, if you’re going to be away for four months, I’ll just have to come and find you,’ she said.
By the time Kate arrived in Sao Paulo, having told Simon she was on a work trip, it had been six weeks since she and Linda had seen each other.
As a beginner, Kate was worried that the sex would be terrible – or even that she might find it repulsive being with another woman. ‘But, of course, I knew exactly what to do, and so did she. We are both women,’ Kate told me. ‘Sex with a man suddenly seemed so foreign and strange to me.’
They did not leave the bed much that week, other than to eat or go down to the gym in the complex where Linda lived.
Returning from Brazil, Kate worried: ‘How do I find the moment to tell my husband of decades that I had fallen in love with a woman?’
Kate said she knew from the beginning, before anything happened, that she would leave Simon for Linda. ‘What was strange was how it felt OK to leave a man for a woman.’
She knew it would not have been the same if she had been leaving him for another man.
She not only knew that her marriage would end, but she also believed it was for the right reason. She felt that, by falling into a marriage and quickly having children, she had denied the feeling that something had never felt quite right.
Now, with Linda, she was finally in a relationship for all the right reasons. Because of this, she rarely felt guilt. She had found her real self.
A few weeks later, as he drove her to an appointment, Kate told Simon she was leaving him.
She explained that her unhappiness was not just to do with him, the menopause or how stressful she found her life as both the main breadwinner and the most involved parent.
She had met someone else and wanted to take a break. Simon did not look at her, but just said, ‘Get out, now. Do not f***ing bother coming home.’
However, she had not told him about Linda. She desperately wanted to protect her, but she told me she was also strangely excited by holding on to this secret.
The secrecy of an affair can be what appears to cause most pain, the aspect that becomes unforgivable. Yet lovers are also trapped by this. On the one hand, the secrecy becomes wondrous, insulating and exciting. But on the other, it makes it dangerous and frightening.
Simon spoke to their sons immediately without telling Kate. Their mother was having an affair, he told them, and he had asked her to leave. She had betrayed them all and he was devastated. He also announced Kate’s affair to all their friends in an email.
What Simon didn’t know for some months was that Kate had left him for a woman. Kate thought his anger was so inflamed that it would only make a terrible situation much, much worse.
Linda’s wife, Jas, was similarly furious. Linda told her on the morning of her return from Brazil that there was someone else.
Jas smiled sarcastically. ‘You think that’s a surprise to me? Jesus, you must think I am really so, so stupid Linda.’ Jas told Linda to move out and that she would be changing the locks and consulting a lawyer.
Linda and Kate moved into a flat together outside York. It was modest and characterless, but they did not care. For several months they simply revolved in a passionate, erotic orbit around each other.
It is important to stress here that Kate had been the parent who did everything for her children; from vaccinations and uniforms to dentist appointments and school trips – all of it despite Simon, a teacher, being at home more than her.
But he had not been at home; he had been out, playing football and bridge, learning Italian, enjoying a life she paid for. He had been the chef, but she was the one who cleaned up. He had pointed out that the gutters were blocked, but she had organised somebody to come and clean them out.
What she had not realised until now was how very unfair it all was. It was only with Linda that she understood what sharing was like.
Linda never presumed Kate would do the shopping, and vice versa. Kate never left towels on the floor or hanging on doors to fall on to the next occupant of the bathroom, and nor did Linda.
She flushed the loo and left the seat down. Small insignificant acts which resonated with Kate. They shared eye make-up remover, moisturisers and body lotions. There was a mutuality and understanding that was new and yet familiar to Kate.
When I last spoke to Linda and Kate, they were living in a rented cottage outside York. One of Kate’s sons was doing his A-levels and the other was in his first year at university.
The boys did not speak to their mother for a year, but eventually, Kate had been able to suggest family therapy to them, which they had agreed to.
The three of them, and finally Simon, had found a therapist they liked and they met weekly for over a year.
The breakdown of the family had been extremely painful for them all. I was struck, however, by how everyone involved had been able, in some ways, to regroup.
Simon had a girlfriend, a colleague, while Jas had moved to London to live near her pre-Linda friendship group and taken Mabel with her. She did not allow Mabel to stay with Linda, but she visited her every week.
When a same-sex relationship begins between someone previously assumed to be heterosexual, onlookers are both fascinated as well as shocked. Is it worse or better to be left for a man or a woman, or vice versa? Is it more or less humiliating?
The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was passed in the UK in 2013 and much has changed in the last decade. But a woman who leaves a man for a woman still carries a stigma.
One of the cornerstones of my research into affairs is the ‘Oedipus complex’. Although a familiar term, it is little understood.
It takes its name from the Greek tale of Oedipus Rex, who killed his father to marry his mother. Young children experience intense love for both their parents, though often in different ways. Most of us will have seen instances of a little boy who wants to ‘marry Mummy’ or the ‘Daddy’s Girl’ who will only be carried by her father.
From birth, we teach our children to move (gently and appropriately) away from us. We have to let our parents go, and they must let us go.
But, before this happens, being adored by our parents as infants and believing that we are the apple of their eye is critical. Our future experience of loving others, and returning love, depends on it.
Through my research, I have discovered that a central motivation for affairs comes from our infantile, forgotten selves. Without adequate care-giving and interest early on, we try to seek emotional and physical reassurance and stimulation in a myriad of ways throughout life. Having an affair is one way.
Kate turning from Simon to Linda can be understood in terms of her Oedipal experience; for example, how she was excluded from her parents’ relationship. She was under pressure to be the son they longed for. Her mother was disappointed she could not produce a male baby for the man she loved.
Kate became a tomboy, the son her father wanted. But she felt his adoration was dependent on that. Kate’s relationship with Linda could be seen as an attempt to compensate for the cold parenting she had experienced.
Linda was an only child with ambitious parents, who did not speak the same language, both literally and symbolically. Her mother ‘smothered’ her with her own unmet desires.
Unable to really communicate with her mother, Linda had ‘sided’ with her father, choosing his language and, to an extent, European culture over her mother’s. Finding Kate allowed her to be with her ‘mother’ in a more positive, non-suffocating way.
For the final interview, Kate and Linda spoke to me together. I told them I wondered whether they must have agreed in advance on what to say to me as their answers were so similar.
They laughed, and it was clear they had not needed to sync anything – they were simply in tune with each other. As I said goodbye, I felt I knew they would still be together in 30 years.
Names and identifying details have been changed.
Adapted from Affairs by Juliet Rosenfeld (Bluebird, £20), to be published on March 27. © Juliet Rosenfeld 2025. To order a copy for £17 (offer valid to 7/4/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
