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.
Enter Simon. Well-built, tall, with twinkling blue eyes and seven years younger than me at 38. We met in 2014 when he joined the marketing firm where I worked. At the end of his first week, a colleague organised drinks. Sitting next to me, Simon firmly pressed his thigh against mine under the table. The spark of electricity that ricocheted through my body!
This was the moment I should have pulled back. But I didn’t. And as more drinks were consumed, his leg kept brushing mine.
Two months passed and Simon kept finding legitimate reasons to have lunch with me, asking me how to handle a client or our mercurial boss. Each time we spoke, he’d slip in a comment about how gorgeous he found me.
I didn’t brush the compliments away. It boosted my confidence.
The line was crossed when one night, Simon called ‘just to talk’. Matt had gone out with friends and I’d gone to bed early. Slowly, our conversation became flirty, then heated. We moved onto FaceTime and we had phone sex. The guilt I felt was erased by the incredible orgasm I had.
A week later, we met up in a pub before going back to his house. While the sex was actually a bit so-so, the turn-on for me came from being appreciated for the woman I was. Not the wife. Not the cook or cleaner or homemaker. A woman, with needs and desires that boiled within me.
The attention Simon paid to me, to my body, made me feel sexually awake again – and special. Surely, you’ll think, a tsunami of guilt must have swept over me the minute I got home and back into bed with my husband, just hours after sleeping with another man.
Not at all. I felt alive – a better version of myself. At home, I was more tolerant and patient with the kids. Dealing with a teen, tween and primary school child can try the patience of a saint – yet suddenly I was no longer grumpy.
I slept well at night and never stumbled when I lied about where I was going when I was actually meeting Simon. There was no evidence of our contact – I saved his name under a pseudonym in my phone and I’d carefully mention his name in passing at home, alongside other colleagues too.
After three months, though, our affair fizzled out. It was bittersweet when Simon told me he’d met someone online and he wanted to make a go of things with her.
Yet I was clear-eyed about it. I’d never asked him to be faithful. I had been careful to keep my head, seeing our relationship as a wonderful physical connection, not love. It was as clean and tidy an ending as we could possibly make it. Yes, I grieved the affair ending, but I did it quietly.
I was also well aware that, in the end, my family was more important to me than any lover. I carefully brought my focus back to the house and, invigorated by my fling, felt happier.
My sex life with Matt actually improved. Those lusty hormones that had been zooming around my body because of my affair made me a better wife, more considerate and loving.
So confident was I about having not been discovered, that a month after the affair ended, when Matt mentioned I seemed ‘different’, I laughed and said: ‘Oh yes, I’ve been frolicking with the stud in the office!’
I suppose it was a bit of reverse psychology at play, a little joke to which only I knew the punchline. He could have seized the moment to ask me more, to probe if he did have any suspicions. But he didn’t.
In part, this was because I had been so discreet. There was no suspicion, because there had been no suspicious behaviour on my part. But I also put this lack of curiosity down to a characteristic shown by many men: faced with a situation like this, they bury their heads in the sand.
They won’t ask, because they simply don’t want to know. Our marriage returned to some sort of normality – although I didn’t stop appreciating handsome men I met and feeling a frisson of excitement and interest.
Then, a year ago, Matt ¬suddenly started spending time with a woman ten years younger whom he’d met at his running club. It was all ‘Evie recommends these trainers’ or ‘Evie uses this app to record her personal bests’. Even the kids soon rolled their eyes whenever her name popped up.
Thanks to his emotional naivety, it took me just four weeks to uncover the fact that their friendship had crossed a line. My goodness, he was so obvious, the whole world knew about it.
First I noticed she’d repeatedly liked his posts on Instagram. And when I saw her profile, I noticed he’d written whole paragraphs under most of her images, saying how well framed they were, how she’d captured the moment. Each time she’d thank him and like his comment.
Perhaps it was attention-seeking, perhaps he got carried away – I simply don’t know. Then, our eldest mentioned he’d seen some of these comments.
Matt was also paying a significant amount of attention to his appearance and going out more. He was all lightness, when normally he’s all ‘doom and gloom’. You didn’t need to be a detective to figure out what was going on.
I couldn’t tolerate our children learning what was happening from a careless Instagram comment, so one morning when just the two of us were up, I asked Matt if he had something to tell me. He didn’t say anything, but looked so guilty that I instantly knew it was true.
In that moment I was so hurt – hypocritical you might say, considering my own infidelity, but there you are. And yet my pride prevented me from showing it.
I was blunt: he had to stop it, our child was on to him. I laid the guilt on thick and I honestly thought he was going to cry when I told him how blatant he’d been. He agreed to end things and I’m confident that he did. Why? Because he was so mournful for months afterwards that it disrupted our whole family life.
There was no hiding his grief as I had and zero appreciation for the family he still had. Indeed, I thought about telling him to leave because he was so unable to control his feelings.
He’d been such a fool, in a way I realise I never could have been. He couldn’t just see the affair as a fun ego boost. No, he had to fall in love.
I’ve forgiven Matt’s stupidity – although I’m not sure he would be as understanding if he knew about my indiscretion.
We’re still married, although I’d say we’re struggling on rather than really enjoying each other’s companionship.
So yes, I’m proof women can and do handle an affair more elegantly and professionally, for want of better words, than their husbands. And while it might be taboo for women to admit a dalliance can perk up one’s marital life, the reality is they do – as long as you handle them properly.
Matt, I know, would never have another affair; he’s too frightened of being caught again. As for me, I’ve always got my eye open in case another Simon walks into my life.
I have no hesitation in admitting that I’d have another affair. After all, I got away with the last one . . .
- As told to Samantha Brick. Amelia Walton is a pseudonym. Names and identifying details have been changed.
