It used to be men who had the monopoly on affairs. But the latest research shows that women are just as likely to be unfaithful – and the reasons may surprise you, says Anna Moore
The number of women who admit to being unfaithful has risen by 40 per cent since 1990
Quite what has been going on between Colin Firth and his wife Livia – whose 20-year marriage seemed to be one of the strongest in showbusiness – and the man they say has been stalking her is hard to fathom.
According to their official statement, Livia became ‘romantically involved’ with childhood friend Marco Brancaccia two years ago, during a ‘period of separation’ from her husband, and he has ‘stalked’ the couple ever since.
However, some newspapers have questioned this version of events, pointing to photographs of the Firths looking very much together throughout this ‘period of separation’ when Livia was involved with Brancaccia.
The number of women who admit to being unfaithful has risen by 40 per cent since 1990
Meanwhile, Brancaccia strongly denies the stalking allegations (he says he sent two WhatsApp messages and an email) and insists he was deeply in love with Livia. The real story, he says, is a famous couple trying to cover up an affair.
The case is now in the hands of lawyers, but whatever the truth, the tale leaves one big question unanswered: why, when you’re married to Mr Darcy, with two sons, dream homes in Umbria and West London and a red-carpet lifestyle, would any woman look elsewhere?
Yet more and more of us are doing so. Reliable statistics are hard to find – after all, infidelity takes place under the radar – but the evidence points one way. Where once the research found more men admitting to affairs than women, this has changed.
According to a YouGov survey, the male/female split is now fairly even, with one in five British adults having had an affair – 20 per cent of men and 19 per cent of women. Studies by the Kinsey Institute have found that the number of women who admit to being unfaithful has risen by 40 per cent since 1990 while the rate for men has stayed the same.
‘I go online… each encounter leaves me feeling happier, more alive’
Kathryn, 42, has been with her husband for 16 years. They have a son, who is three.
‘My husband and I had a good sex life in the past but the spark died. Like a lot of women, after years together, I went off sex with my partner.
‘A close friend was using the website illicitencounters.com and for years I watched her having this adventurous, secret life while mine seemed dull and predictable. After our son was born, the focus was the baby, the home, the family. I didn’t feel sexy or desirable. I probably wouldn’t have joined the site if my friend hadn’t already been on it. I was instantly inundated with offers. As a new mum, that was a massive confidence boost.
‘I’ve been very selective – I go on about three dates before there’s any sex. Each one leaves me feeling happier, more alive. It’s invigorating. My husband and I have built a life together. We’ve got our son, a lovely house, our families are close, we have big get-togethers. I love him and I’m generally an honest person. I’d prefer an open relationship but he believes you stay faithful to one person and that’s it. If I thought his attitude was changing, maybe it would be something I could raise. Until then, we only live once. Sex is important. Adventure’s great. There’s no guilt.’
Dr Alicia Walker, US sociologist and author of the book The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife, spent a year interviewing 40 women who were unfaithful to their husbands. She expected to find the old cliché to be true: that men cheat for sex whereas women, stuck in unhappy marriages and seeking a way out, cheat for emotional connection.
‘What I found challenged that idea,’ she says. ‘Most of the women described marriages that were good – their husbands were good people, good parents, best friends. The women weren’t cheating because they wanted to get out of the marriage, they were cheating to stay in it – while also getting their needs met.’
The most common of these ‘needs’ was fulfilling sex. ‘Their marriages were either sexless or not sexually satisfying,’ says Dr Walker. ‘For many, this had been a problem for years or decades. They had approached their husbands numerous times, begged, pleaded, cajoled, suggested therapy, but the men didn’t see it as a problem. Instead of wandering through this sexual desert, having an affair met the women’s sexual needs without breaking up their families.’
‘Why do I cheat? I didn’t marry the right man’
Nicola, 54, has been married for 20 years and having affairs for the past two. She has a teenage daughter.
‘I was in my 30s when my husband proposed and even then half of me was saying, “Yes! You’ve got someone to marry you – you can have children.” The other half was saying, “He’s not the right one.” Stupidly, I listened to the wrong half.
‘We don’t have a friendship: my husband is not sociable, he doesn’t like going out, he’s always miserable and I don’t find him sexually attractive. The last time we had sex was a year or two ago.
‘When our daughter was young I had more to distract myself with. But she’s 16 now and I only work part-time so I’ve got time on my hands. I don’t have hobbies; I don’t work out at the gym. I want to find someone I can kiss, to have that spark, that fun with.
‘Two years ago I was really low and lonely. I found myself Googling a guy I had a relationship with 30 years ago and have never forgotten. He lives in Australia but I sent a Christmas card with my email address and before long we were emailing every day, phoning each other, getting more intense. I cheered up no end – I’d found someone to talk to, I was on a high and I lost a stone in weight. It ended when his wife found our emails.
‘My friend had signed up to a dating site and met someone so she said I should try it. Since then, I’ve been on more dates than I can count and probably slept with about 20 of them. Sometimes it’s a bit disappointing but there’s one guy, who is also married, that I’ve been seeing for over a year. The sex is fantastic, although we only see each other once a week.
‘Yes, I should leave my husband, but where would I go? Could I afford it? If I had someone waiting for me, holding their hand out, that would make it so much easier. On my own it would be like stepping into the darkness.
‘I don’t know if I’ll ever end my marriage. Some of the men I’ve met have been great but do we have enough in common outside our little bubble? Would I trust them? At least now I’m happier – I’m having sex, I’m connected with people and having conversations I’ve not had with my husband in 20 years. Life’s not boring!’
Women also talked about wanting to be ‘someone else’ as a driving force for having an affair. ‘They felt the roles of wife and mother didn’t leave much space to be anything else,’ says Walker. ‘At home, some found it difficult to be the person they used to be, or to try out different versions of themselves.’ An affair allowed them to escape from that – to be wild, free, dangerous or spontaneous – but they didn’t want to behave like that all the time.
Relationship therapist Esther Perel, author of bestseller Mating in Captivity, has noted similar feelings among her clients. Marriage meets our need for safety and dependability, but we also thrive on mystery and adventure. Although it’s often assumed that men are the first to tire of their partners and to lose sexual attraction, research shows that it’s women who lose sexual interest in their partners first – and more suddenly (for men, it tends to be gradual; for women, it can free fall). Women also tend to cheat sooner – typically within six to ten years. (For men, there’s no clear window but it’s commonly later than this.)
‘Working away from home was my year of living dangerously’
Louise, 39, has been married for nine years and has two children.
‘If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d never have believed I’d be unfaithful. My husband is a good man – he’s popular, very successful; we’re a good team, very committed.
‘Three years ago I was given an amazing opportunity to work abroad for a year. It wasn’t practical to uproot the family, so we decided I should go alone – with a lot of FaceTime and visits in the school holidays.
‘It was daunting but thrilling. I loved the job and I had a beautiful, minimalist apartment – very different to our home, stuffed with family paraphernalia. There were networking events to help me settle in and I noticed that I was getting far more attention from men. At home, I was a fraught married mum. Here, I was a mysterious English woman on her own.
‘What began as company for lunch or dinner turned into harmless flirting, then more as I had no family to come home to at the end of each day. My first “affair” was with someone at work – very senior and also married. It lasted two months. I also had a few other intense relationships – some just kissing, some went further.
‘Since I returned home more than two years ago I have been utterly faithful. It’s as if I’ve never been away. What happened had nothing to do with my husband – I see it as my year of living dangerously! Weirdly, I don’t feel guilty. No one got hurt. I don’t think my husband was unfaithful while I was gone, but in a way I hope he was.’
Marital therapist Andrew G Marshall, author of How Can I Ever Trust You Again?, says the desire to ‘escape’, to be someone new is something he hears a lot in therapy. ‘Women who have been unfaithful often say, “I just wanted to have something for myself.” Women are very good at looking after everyone else, at making everyone else happy as they’ve been raised to believe that this will make them happy, too. Instead, they end up feeling empty and taken for granted – and that can lead them to look elsewhere.’
For women – unlike men – cheating tends to be deliberate. It doesn’t sneak up on them. ‘Men can fall into it,’ Marshall says. ‘One pattern is that when men have problems, they tend to confide in one person only – their wives. When their marriage is the problem, they can’t confide in their wife so instead they start talking to a female colleague, an old friend or another woman. They become closer and closer – and that’s how it starts.
Having an affair makes a bad situation 100 times worse
‘I don’t see that with women,’ he continues. ‘When they have problems with their marriages, they have lots of girlfriends to confide in. They’re not drawn into intense relationships unknowingly.’
Marshall has also found that women tend to crack from the guilt of having an affair more than men. ‘Women are more likely to confess. Men get found out,’ he says. And the result when they do confess or are caught out is the same as it is for cheating men: shattered lives, anger, feelings of betrayal and a lot of mess.
‘Having an affair makes a bad situation 100 times worse,’ warns Marshall. ‘If you believe you’re improving your marriage by doing it, then you’re lying to your husband, to your children, to your lover and to yourself.’
‘The sex was awful. It was a huge mistake’
Sophie, 35, has been with her partner for ten years and has a daughter.
‘I think, under certain circumstances, that everyone is capable of cheating, but I’d never do it again. Picturing my partner’s face when I told him will always be enough to stop me.
‘It was a girls’ weekend. Four of us rented a static caravan – it was loud and very raucous. Two of us were married, one divorced and one a single mum and we’d never been away together before. When we arrived, we clocked some guys camping in the next plot. We were yelling insults – jokes about their tent pitching and their cooking skills. They invited us over for drinks. They were all surfers. It was like being a teenager again.
‘We spent the next day with them and, on the second night, I got very drunk and ended up on the beach with one. He was very cool – long hair, young – and all I can say is that it was a million years from my real life and I felt happy and free, this big rush. That was ‘before’ – the actual sex was awful, over in seconds and felt so seedy. I felt sick with dread, as though I’d thrown everything away.
‘I knew I’d have to tell my partner. It took weeks to work up the courage and he was absolutely devastated – we both cried. He went to stay with his brother for a few days but we’re back together and have had counselling.
‘I put it down to lots of things: we had stopped having fun, our routine was work, home, sleep. But I was happy and I wasn’t looking for anything else. It was just one night where everything came together and tested my willpower.’
