No one will admit this, but affairs can happen just as easily within happy relationships as they can in unhappy ones, writes Farrah_Storr
Here’s a confession: I have been cheated on, as well as, I have cheated.
When I worked in magazines we explored affairs in the single-minded way one is taught to approach them. That there is a victim and there is a perpetrator. We should have sympathy for the victim and contempt for the enactor. The standard questions I was taught to ask, being:Questions that felt mired in quasi-religious reckoning. These questions rarely allowed the interviewee to give a full, more nuanced story- though they often tried.
Then six months after we first met I booked a trip to New York with my mother for Christmas. I posted a picture of the two of us on social media. By the time I landed at JFK, I had a message. P was on a flight out to see me. P’s wife only wanted to know two things: had it been a physical relationship and had we been to New York together? I knew she had always wanted to go to New York but had never been. I said no to both questions. I guess I wanted to protect her, having seen the devastation it had caused my husband. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do in the long run.
I first met R at a training session with a mental health charity back in 2007. I was 25 and single; he was 27 and in a long-term relationship of 10 years. We started spending time together and very quickly confessed our feelings. I suppose you could say I pursued him to start with, but he was in a complicated relationship and I honestly believed that we would be together. I spent the best part of my twenties living this way- weekends away with him, stolen moments here and there.
I have been in a relationship with R for almost half of my life now. He knows everything about me- even the parts I don’t want to acknowledge myself. I think, in a funny way, this is why I could never be in an official relationship with him. It’s too vulnerable a place to spend all my time. What’s more, I’m very happy in my current relationship. We understand one another in different ways to the way R and I understand one another.
I first came to understand the complexities of an affair when I was 15. My mother, who was in a very unhappy relationship with my step-father, sat me down and told me she was in love with someone else. The relationship had ended and she was still very much in love with this other man, as well as devastated that it had not worked out as she had hoped. In that moment I didn’t judge her; she was finally experiencing the kind of love she'd always wanted for herself.
I had been in a relationship for 6 years when I met the man I was to have the affair with. My partner and I had been living together for 5 of those years and on paper he was perfect. But for some reason I wasn’t happy and I could never pin point why exactly . So one day I took myself off to America on a three-week acting course. That’s where I met the man I was to have the affair with.
Ultimately I think the affair was a moment of enlightenment. It gave me a space to reflect on my behaviour. And if you stray, I think the best thing you can do is examine why you strayed. If you are willing to risk so much, there must be reasons, that you are perhaps unaware of, that are hidden within that risk.in June 2019, at a party through a mutual friend. I was 26 and lived in London; he was in his 40s and lived on the other side of the country.
A few weeks later, Will was out with friends in London and asked me to meet him for a drink. I did and that’s when the affair started. I remember the first time we slept together - we both wanted it so badly, but the next day we both felt sick with guilt. Me, because I had a partner back home; Will because I was another man’s girlfriend. I remember having a terrible panic attack on the train home, and then crying on the phone to Will saying I couldn’t do it anymore .
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