It’s never been easier for your husband to cheat

When the world is full of potential lovers, why restrict yourself to just one?’ I wrote those words in an article on monogamy in 2007 — and how bitterly they have come back to haunt me.

The piece affirmed what I then believed — that pleasurable sex between consenting adults was simply not that big a deal — and described all the boyfriends I had cheated on with a brash, careless arrogance that now makes me squirm.

At 28, I believed I had found someone whose pain mattered more to me than my own selfish pleasure and I was truly convinced it would never happen again.

And yet, after 12 years of marriage, I once again had an affair and the relationship in which I had invested so much hope and love ended in divorce.

I have still not fully come to terms with the anguish my behaviour caused and I don’t believe I may ever do so. The divorce remains a fissure of pain across my life, dividing it irrevocably into before and after.

Yet, while I will never stop regretting that failure, I don’t believe the affair was its root cause. There were many other reasons for the unhappiness my husband and I lived through, but somehow, we were, I think, both trapped by our expectations and by a culture in which infidelity still remains the ultimate taboo.

There are many more ways to betray a person than infidelity but, as crimes against marriage go, it is still the trump card — the sin that cancels out all others.

And, for men and women alike, it has never been so easy to find a willing partner for sex outside our marriages. Indeed, recent statistics suggest a 40 per cent increase in the number of women conducting affairs, while the figure for men has remained relatively stable at 22 per cent.

The rise of smartphones and social media has affected all of our lives, but none more so than those looking for extramarital sex. Online dating, hook-up apps and ‘sexting’ have entirely redrawn the parameters of our collective behaviour.

Perhaps the last social change of equal significance was the invention of the contraceptive pill in the Sixties, which finally freed women from the fear of illegitimate pregnancy.

Just as that innovation heralded a rethinking of sexual politics, perhaps the accessibility and temptations offered by the web might require us to reconsider our attitudes to extra-marital affairs.

Adultery ends so many marriages and causes so much suffering. If we were to take a more generous and adult view, this could change.

In my own case, I had genuinely tried for years to discuss my feelings with my husband, but it just didn’t work. I don’t pretend I was ‘driven’ into another man’s arms — I knew exactly what I was doing and made a conscious choice. Yet, as soon as the affair came to light (he looked through my phone — the modern classic), it was as though all the other issues in our marriage ceased to be relevant.

Lisa (pictured) believes the temptation for infidelity is popular throughout our culture and it can make us feel young 

Cheating is a complex, delicate, emotionally harrowing subject, so it often seems easier to reach for a cliché to explain it.

We are all familiar with the conventional wisdoms: the middle-aged man desperate to cling on to his waning youth; the exhausted wife who ‘lets herself go’ or loses interest in sex after childbirth; the ‘sex addict’ who cauterises childhood traumas with endless affairs.

But maybe we could start by being honest about one thing — people cheat because it’s fun. Infidelity necessitates hypocrisy, but perhaps the worst form of dishonesty is not admitting to enjoying it.

Lust turns us all into infatuated teenagers: desired, beautiful, powerful. It keeps Agent Provocateur and much of the hotel industry in business.

The temptations of infidelity are a constant in our culture. The intensity and drama of cheating are what keep us glued to TV dramas such as Dr Foster and The Affair, so is it surprising if we sometimes want to be the star of our own forbidden romance? And, perhaps exactly because it makes us feel young, I wonder whether cheating becomes even more tempting with age.

As responsibilities and regrets pile up, the question of ‘what if?’ can morph from idle curiosity into burning necessity — a kind of sexual rage against the dying of the light.

If I go to a business lunch at a smart restaurant, I find I still have a radar for the adulterous couples — they’re the only ones ordering wine, holding hands across the table, anticipating their stolen afternoon.

I don’t judge, because I remember all too well the heady sense of release that comes from re-experiencing desire.

I might regret the affair that ended my own marriage, but I can’t honestly say that I didn’t enjoy it at the time.

Along with the guilt and anxiety came a delicious sense of secrecy, of repossessing a part of my femininity I thought I had lost, of being flattered and spoiled and paid attention to.

Maybe there’s even a sense in which being a mistress feels somehow more empowering than being labelled as a wife — one can imagine oneself (however naively) as a figure charged with some magical, carnal power, rather than the quotidian creature of the supermarket shop and the school run.

Lisa believes many people are obsessed with fidelity despite upper-classes traditionally taking a more relaxed view 

Perhaps that lure of secrecy is even more entrancing than physical sex — the sense of recovering a forgotten, hidden self, of sharing an identity that hovers a glimmering inch or two above pedestrian reality. The reality of the affair may be furtive and squalid, but that’s never how it feels at the time.

Easy to dismiss as pathetic, but I know I am not alone.

Many people might agree that marriages can’t, or shouldn’t, function without the assurance of sexual exclusivity, but there are other models of romantic love available.

The French (who have always been terribly good at adultery) and the English upper-classes have traditionally taken a more relaxed view.

So long as there was no scandal, wives were quite prepared to countenance their husbands’ peccadilloes. More recently, the bestselling author and relationship therapist Esther Perel, suggested in her latest study, The State Of Affairs, that infidelity can be ‘understandable, acceptable, even an act of boldness and courage’.

Yet, if anything, as a society, our views on the subject seem to be evolving in quite the opposite direction.

Over the past few years, I have dated several younger men, all of whom seemed to be obsessed with fidelity.

I broke up with my last boyfriend when I found him looking through my phone for the second time.

While I considered such an invasion of privacy completely unacceptable, he genuinely seemed bewildered that I should care. ‘Why are you worried if you have nothing to hide?’

As it happened, I didn’t have anything to hide — I have finally learned my lesson.

But, nonetheless, it seems as though the concept of privacy has fundamentally shifted, that our hyper-connected world has fuelled insecurity and paranoia as never before.

Lisa (pictured) wishes she had the chance to discuss why she cheated on her husband at the time and questions if it would’ve saved her marriage 

We might consider ourselves far more sexually liberated than our parents’ generation, but it seems that we are also far more anxious and judgmental.

Looking back on my own marriage, I can see that infidelity was easier than working on the emotional core of our difficulties. I have subsequently had therapy to discuss and work on the reasons why this was the case and I know now that I simply never want to be in that situation again.

I can only wish that, at the time, I had been able to discuss why I did it, rather than being immediately censured, that we had been able to find a way out of the hurt and confusion provoked by my affair without it ending my marriage.

Of course, staying in a bad marriage is never a good idea and we should certainly be grateful that women are no longer condemned by the expense and stigma of divorce to remain with abusive or serially unfaithful partners.

But, equally, I question whether infidelity in itself necessarily implies that a marriage is bad.

If we accept, as everyone who has had an affair knows, that infidelity can offer satisfaction that even a happy marriage can’t provide, might we not allow ourselves the possibility of a more gentle and tolerant version of commitment?

Confessing to infidelity is a huge challenge and, for those who have been cheated on, the hurt and anger can black out a more reasonable response, but in reacting to such a confession, it is also important to accept that solving infidelity — just like committing it — takes two.

This is a terrible truth to confront, but the price for not doing so may, as I know, be even higher.

Lisa Hilton’s book Ultima, the last in the Maestra series, is out now (Zaffre, £12.99).