Tiger Woods made headlines with his, and Iris Robinson's dominated newspages for weeks. What they have in common, though, is shared with large numbers of ordinary people, whose personal dramas will never make the papers. What's it like to have an affair? One man tells his story to FIONA McCANN
‘IT’S TERRIBLY cliched, but it started in the way most things do: you just meet somebody and five minutes after you’ve started talking to them you realise there’s something going on. It’s like a bolt of lightning thing, it happens very, very rarely. I’m sure there are people who go out and meet people in nightclubs and sleep with them, and that’s how they have their ‘affairs’. For me, I went out, I met somebody I’d never met before at a work party, and we spent the whole evening talking to each other. I was stone cold sober and she was stone cold sober but we clicked immediately. And because that happens so infrequently in most people’s lives, when it does happen, you take it very seriously.
“Was I aware of a sexual chemistry from the start? Yes. At least on my part.
“I found her incredibly attractive. Yet nothing sexual happened for months.
“We just became friends, very slowly. I was entirely kidding myself that this was just a friendship.
“The justification I gave myself in my head was that I’d been with my wife since we were teenagers and for a few years prior to the affair my wife and I were both just doggy paddling, just treading water. In fact, we were at each other’s throats, but we had kids. It makes no sense to anyone who’s outside these situations, but you say to yourself at such moments: I can’t leave my children. I don’t want to not be around my children. So what do I do? And then you make this terrible awful deal with the devil in your head that if some small amount of happiness comes along somewhere else, you’ll take it. And it’s stupid because in your own head you’re thinking ‘we’ll just have this small little thing’.
“But of course these things start out small, and then they become full-blown, huge, and you realise you’re in love with someone else. Then it becomes something entirely different. If you can keep these things on an entirely sexual level, then it’s fine. But it never works that way. And then you realise you’re in love with somebody who’s not your wife, and that’s when you have enormous decisions to make.
“The first time something physical happened between us, we were both stone cold sober. We were suddenly alone in a room together after a meeting. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and she leaned over and kissed me, and that was that. Neither of us had openly spoken about it, but we both knew it was going to happen, and it started from there.
“I had been lying for some time by then, because I certainly would never have told my wife I was friends with a woman from work. And given that our relationship was never solely based on sex, there was never that justification even in our heads, we were never able to go ‘it’s just a physical thing’. It was almost an emotional thing first. We’d dug ourselves into each other’s heads prior to actually kissing.
“Once the physical part started, we’d see each other in secret. We’d go out for lunch to places where people didn’t know who we were. We only saw each other for six months, but we only ever went to dinner properly, out in the real world, twice, and only to places where people didn’t know who we were.
“I remember she was quite conscious about not wearing perfume when she saw me because obviously the last thing you want to do is go home smelling of someone else.
“It was incredibly frustrating, six months of sneaking around. I was living at home with my wife, so I had nowhere to bring her, and she was living with her parents at that stage, so we spent a vast amount of time sitting in her car, looking out at the sea, just talking. Bizarrely, we only spent the night together once, when we went to London together for a night. So once over the course of six months, I woke up beside her. That was a big deal.
“Getting to wake up beside someone, if you’re in love with them, is a big deal. Simple things become the exotic in these situations.
“Yet it wasn’t thrilling. I hated all the sneaking around. We both hated it, but neither of us wanted to be discovered. Did I love her? Very much so. And she me.
“My wife never suspected, maybe because we didn’t see each other all the time.
“At one point, I was sleeping with both women. I was only having a sexual relationship with my wife because questions would have been asked at home if I wasn’t. I didn’t want to. I was going through the motions. Weirdly, I felt that I was cheating on the person I was seeing rather than on my wife. She became jealous, though, because I didn’t lie to her, and when questions were asked, I answered them honestly. And yes, in retrospect, it does seem like the most simple thing in the world, that of course she wouldn’t want me sleeping with my wife. But it became a point of argument, a sticking point for both of us.
“We talked about me leaving my wife on more than one occasion. I almost did.
“We discussed it at length, discussed what would happen, how we would figure all this out together. She wanted to. I wanted to. Eventually, I was the one who chickened out, because of the kids.
“I felt guilty all the way through, about my wife and my lover, without question. God, it was awful. Because you feel horrifically guilty going home to somebody knowing you have no emotional involvement with that person, because you are in love with someone else. And I felt worse for the woman I was seeing, because she disappeared into a pit immediately afterwards.
“I eventually left my wife anyway, because things just got so bad that I had to walk out. But I didn’t leave my wife for my lover, and that meant that my lover felt abandoned. Our relationship never recovered. It took a really, really long time to get over it, because I was so in love with her. I never stopped being in love with her. Yet I chose at the crucial moment to stay with my wife instead of going with her, and that was the end.
“I’m sure this story is universal. You’d love to think that we’re all different, and that every instance of this is entirely new, but the more I live, the more I realise how cookie-cutter a lot of these things are, simply because the nature of human experience is relatively simple in a lot of cases.
“People fall in love with each other, regardless of whether they’re in relationships with other people. It just happens. For a lot of people, it’s a question of how you deal with it after that happens, and some people deal with it badly. Some people who have affairs meet somebody then bring them to a hotel room, have sex and say thank you afterwards, and that’s the nature of an affair, just as you see in the movies. But for me it something entirely different and the only reason I saw her, the only reason we were together is because I was in love with her, and because she was in love with me.
“DO I HAVE REGRETS? I try not to. I made those choices, I have to live with them. I try to be an adult and put my hands up and acknowledge that this is what I did. I do regret not leaving to be with my lover at the time and giving our relationship a chance, because it may have worked. But I think it happened the way it happened for a reason. I’m kind of stoical about it.
“You have to balance it out. You never know what a relationship – a real adult relationship – between the two of you would have been like. What would it have been like when the two of you were living in the same space as each other, arguing about what to watch on TV, who makes what, who goes out where with who? Until you start to actually deal with the normality of a day-to-day relationship, you never know.
“I’m pretty sure if I’d been in any way happy in my marriage at the time,
there’s no way I’d have considered looking at someone else. But then someone comes along and completely bowls you over and you realise that maybe you’ve been settling for something less in your relationship than you should consciously be. You realise you’ve let your relationship slide, and the two of you have almost nothing left in common.
“You’re at each other’s throats, and that’s not sustainable for the rest of your life. And then you realise, hang on a second, there is the possibility of actual happiness . . . and you just jump.”
