‘He doesn’t suspect a thing,’ my friend Marylyn said gleefully as we sat over tapas in a restaurant.
The patatas bravas wasn’t the only thing with a kick. As the Rioja flowed, Marylyn revealed more about her eight-month affair with a man named Phil — and the elaborate ways she had been deceiving her husband, Sam.
‘I tell him I’m going to the gym, then have a shower when I get home. He stopped asking about my day ages ago.’
‘But wouldn’t he notice if you didn’t change into gym clothes?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I keep a pair of trackie bottoms in the car and pull them on over whatever I’m wearing. He hardly looks up when I walk through the door — he’s usually on his phone.’
I didn’t feel sorry for Sam. He had always seemed grumpy and difficult to me. Marylyn regularly described his unpredictable moods and the way he criticised her appearance.
So Sam wasn’t exactly someone who inspired my sympathy. The more interesting question was why Marylyn chose me whenever she wanted a supportive reaction.
Because increasingly, that seems to be my role: the friend people turn to when they need to confess an affair.
I’m sociable, a good listener and usually present at parties or events, which makes me an obvious person to confide in. But I suspect there’s another reason. My friends seem to believe my own marriage is completely secure. Because I’ve never experienced sexual betrayal myself, I simply nod, wince and laugh at the right moments — without expecting them to listen to my problems in return.
Jennifer Haldon says she is deeply empathetic, although privately she assesses and analyses the women who have found themselves in such complicated situations
There’s Marylyn, Becky, Laura and Rachel, and that’s only the group currently involved in ongoing affairs. Several other friends have had ‘other men’ in their lives in the past. I know because I’ve listened to every painful development as those relationships eventually unravelled.
In person, I’m unfailingly empathetic.
Privately, though, I’m also analysing how each of these women managed to land in such tangled circumstances.
I don’t consider myself judgemental, although I do silently roll my eyes. Every so often, I wonder whether I would remain their preferred confidante if they knew just how often I did it.
Take Marylyn. She is a 53-year-old events manager in the hospitality industry, yet nothing about her relationship with Phil sounds particularly enjoyable. The sex is supposedly unremarkable, while the complicated administration involved in keeping the affair secret sounds exhausting and pointless. At times, I suspect she is doing it because her children are no longer around as much and she needs something — anything — to organise.
Imagine Sam’s reaction if he ever found her current to-do list.
Sam’s one redeeming feature is that he is anything but a beige husband. If he were a colour, he would be puce red. Many of my other friends, however, say their affairs are an escape from painfully dull domestic lives.
Their husbands would rather come home from work and watch sport on television than do anything else. At parties, they gather together to discuss their new electric vehicles and pension pots. Some disappear down online rabbit holes and return with increasingly bizarre beliefs about raw milk or the supposed dangers of green vegetables. They don’t arrange holidays or day trips, leaving their wives to handle all the social planning.
I understand why my friends want to escape that kind of life, although I do blame them for refusing to be honest with themselves.
Jennifer says that anyone unhappy or bored enough to have an affair should do the honest thing and consult a divorce lawyer
They have emotionally left their marriages but lack the courage to end them. The house, the shared bank account, his substantial pension and the children all weigh heavily. Life is short, yet apparently there is still too much at stake for them to face it alone.
I sit through endless dissections of the sex too, though sometimes I tune it all out. Becky was only sleeping with her husband Pete on anniversaries and birthdays, and even then it was ‘the most vanilla sex you can possibly imagine’. Rachel hadn’t had sex with her husband for two years. Naturally their new lovers were far more enthusiastic and proficient.
DISCOVER MORE: Bruno Mars Concert at Levi’s Stadium Sparks Chaos in Santa Clara
I wondered if these men had wives at home who were also bored in bed. Is novelty all we’re looking for?
Becky’s chap David was ‘trying out every position in the kama sutra, like he might run out of time’, she giggled. She met him at a Bikram yoga class in Chiswick, west London, and they got talking afterwards.
‘I suspect I’m not the first woman he’s had an affair with,’ she told me. ‘He’s in his early 40s and very good looking, but I don’t care if he’s seeing other women. It’s just fun.’ And yet I know she’ll call me in a few weeks or months’ time to share a bottle of wine and pour out her heart because he’s dumped her.
Laura, 49, works in an art gallery in London’s Chelsea, and has been married for 17 years. She only communicates with her lover Dan on Instagram, then quickly deletes their message history.
She texts him more than she texts her two children, friends and husband Michael combined.
‘When we meet it’s like fireworks. It’s such an amazing connection,’ she tells me.
But is it? Why doesn’t she just leave beige Michael and start again as a single woman, I think to myself. She suspects Dan is playing the field a bit and doesn’t want to settle down. ‘I’m so attracted to his enthusiasm about everything. He’s a journalist and I’d never met a writer before. He’s always interested in everything I say, which is so different to Michael.’
Many of Jennifer’s friends who are having affairs refuse to leave their husbands even if they have checked out of their marriages
Even so, they’ve only had sex a handful of times since meeting a year ago, usually in a local hotel.
‘It’s the messaging that feels most addictive,’ she told me. ‘Michael doesn’t talk to me about anything meaningful anymore and I don’t know the minutiae of his life like I know Dan’s.’
Sometimes she’s messaging Dan in the passenger seat while Michael drives her to work. ‘At first I set myself a rule not to text Dan when my husband was around. Then after six months I realised I enjoyed doing it with him there. It made things feel more exciting. Is that wrong?’
Well, yes.
‘I guess we’re trapped in a Mexican standoff,’ she once told me of her relationship with Michael. They have stopped communicating their feelings to each other and bicker more than talk.
But she doesn’t think he’d ever have the guts or the chutzpah to have an affair himself.
And yet I happen to know that he did, a few years back. Laura was going through a cancer scare at the time, and of course it wasn’t his finest hour. How do I know? Because the woman he was sleeping with was another friend of ours, and she told me.
None of it is very edifying and almost everyone, it seems to me, is lying to someone else. I admit the details are often juicy and some of the sexual techniques rather eye-opening.
But if my now-extensive knowledge of the midlife woman having an affair has taught me anything, it’s that they’re fooling themselves just as much as their husbands. They think they’re getting back in touch with their feelings when in fact they’re blocking them off.
If you’re unhappy or bored enough in your marriage to have an affair, the honest thing to do is see a divorce lawyer.
But I never say that to them. Sometimes friendships, too, are built on deceit.
Jennifer Haldon is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed.
