Are all my midlife friends having affairs? (Apart from me)

[SnowIsOn]

This was the title of an article in the Times at the weekend.

The writer is an author who in the process of researching a character for her latest book contacted select female friends who then anonymously reported back - 12 out of 17 were having or had had affairs.

Obviously take this fluff piece with a huge pinch of salt but I can only think of a handful of people I know who’ve had affairs and they’re all just acquaintances. So this just doesn’t ring true to me. See it a lot on threads here, but that’s from a huge readership and very self selecting, and it’s mostly the husbands who are doing the dirty.

Or am I very naive, are a large minority of mid life women having affairs and are super good at hiding them?

I know 2 out of my 9 closest friends were in the last 12 months. Both since ended things with their other halves and not for the people they cheated with.

Just to add - one of them was purely emotional plus sexting with an old flame who lived the other side of the country so very easy to keep that quiet.

The other one was with a colleague - so only physical a handful of times at work events / conferences / after work nights out.

Both senior (VP / Director level) in Sales & Marketing.

Discovered burner phones in crap hiding places often give the game away, as far as I can tell. I've thought my hiding places through though. (It helps being extremely untidy.)

It would be my kids who would find a burner phone, they have no sense of boundaries! I’m also fairly tidy and organised.

Im clearly not affair material.

Maybe no kids also helps with hiding places!

(My number one is the drawer with a shameful amount of old, dead phones in it - who would notice another? And keep the battery dead so no one can turn it on anyway, like the rest of them - only plug it in to use it.)

@gannett, you’re a natural. That is such a good point.

I have often thought my ideas are wasted on someone who has no desire to have an affair.

Gosh this is good!

I think affairs are quite common.
Women are better at hiding it, as the judgment is so much harsher for women. Who are all the married men having the affairs with, if not with married women?

Women cheat just as much as men.

If a woman has an affair i feel a man is less likely to leave her as result, as he cant be bothered with the fall out. As such the affair goes "unknown" to those who know the couple.

If a man has an affair, i reckon 50% of time wife thinks "thank good, i can finally boot him out" or is that devasted by it relationship ends, so people know about the affair.

I wasn’t suspecting you for a moment! Anyway, your skills are equally applicable to — I don’t know, spying and industrial espionage?

Social media and messaging apps have made it way too easy for people to make fools of themselves (and their significant others).

Totally disagree. It’s so much harder nowadays to hide it. It was easy to have affairs years ago. You just said I’m working late. There were no phones, no ring doorbells, no emails, no sat nav history, no online hotel bookings. People would go away for work for a few days and be completely incommunicado for the duration. Nowadays it’s technology that catches people out.

someone wrote a book for modern times : Affair!: How to Have Your Cake and Eat it by Barnes, H. Cameron. Paperback Book

The ones I know about are the ones that have left relationships to be with the affair partner. One I had suspicions about but it wasn’t my issue to investigate, it later came out. In midlife I think it is more common than people realise.

I never understand when people say, 'how do they have time?'

Everyone finds time for what they want and prioritise. That's why someone in an EA even will find time to text the affair partner even though there is a spouse and children at the house with them.

It is very important to understand the fundamental difference between how men and women develop feelings during an affair. Men, due to their high testosterone levels, which opposes formation of oxytocin bond of love, don't fall for the other woman that easily. They look at the affair from purely the physical point of view. Women on the other hand, develop an oxytocin bond far too easily after physical intimacy and are more likely to fall in love with their affair partner. That is why an affair is is almost always more devastating for a woman and her married life than to a man.

And yet in this thread the anecdotes point to it being the husbands who are more likely to run off with the shiny new woman, while many wives seem to have been able to quietly keep the other man in le jardin secret, without becoming addled by his magical dick.

To give a different perspective on a fascinating thread. I’m a bloke (never cheated by the way) who is/was the other man.

The affair started when she (I’d assumed she was happily married) started flirting with me on Teams. We’d been friends for a while but I honestly hadn’t thought of her in that way.. She then engineered a couple of occasions where we were working on the same project together.

One day she just came out and said she thought her marriage was over and something instantly flipped in my head. We started seeing each other at work, after work, booked hotel rooms, went for drinks. Not a soul knew, although we did nearly get caught once or twice by colleagues. We kept that up for a few months until it started getting serious.

She told her husband (they are now getting divorced and he is seeing someone new) and we told people at work. One colleague wasn’t surprised but everyone else was. They were happy for us but it just shows you just don’t know what is going on in people’s lives.

If you look at the stats around cheating - the increase is from women while men are cheating more still - women are catching up fast ( and will probably soon on a par with men )
a large survey from the USA a few years ago found infidelity rates in under 30s are now higher in women than men

ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-of-cheating-in-america

This is just making excuses for poor judgement from women

I know 2 middle aged couples who have got divorced last year, both 20 years + marriages - wife was cheating in both cases , “staying for the kids” was the excuse, in both cases the marriage was dead and they were really staying for the comfortable lifestyle- while screwing over people

Testosterone doesn’t ‘block’ oxytocin or prevent bonding. That's just not supported by actual research, and men produce and respond to oxytocin just like women do. Both sexes can form emotional attachments through intimacy, and both can also keep things purely physical. The idea that men stay detached while women inevitably bond is an oversimplification.

I think this covers it 100%
women are just as likely ( if not more so) to be unfaithful as men - but women also value children, comfort, security and home life- and are probably a bit more careful to cover their tracks

More divorces are initiated by women. So it makes sense if now we have more opportunities and are more financially independent that infidelity amongst women will rise to match men.

It’s rarely about how much time anyone has, or doesn’t have. People prioritise what’s most important to them. Astonishing how even the busiest seeming person finds time for their ‘fix’.
Affairs and such like put your ego on steroids and inflate it like a helium balloon. Formerly totally sensible, ‘would never, ever…’ people, get themselves in a lot of trouble.
Flirtations/ attractions have a huge draw, and outside of a drunken one night stand rarely happen suddenly. Lines get crossed fairly slowly and incrementally at first. Then people justify and minimise the “wrongness” of each line crossed, until they are forced by something or someone to look back (or get discovered) and realise how far it’s gone and that they’re actually in an affair.
You can only say “It’s just flirting, where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it.” so many times to yourself until you realise that’s now bullshit and it’s become something else entirely. And the ‘harmless’ bit of excitement it’s added to your life is now an addiction you really don’t want to lose.
Proximity, availability, opportunity, plus how high the chances of getting caught are (as well as a talent for switching off/ dialling down your screaming at you, jumping up and down conscience, by justifying and lying to yourself) really are all that is needed.
If you’re starting to realise you’re not getting any younger and life’s a bit Groundhog Day (as it sometimes is for all of us, no matter how happy) or your relationship is in a rough patch (all long relationships have highs and lows) or you’ve been through tough times and this person empathises and gives you sympathy, you can also be more vulnerable.
So, I honestly believe that pretty much all of us can be more vulnerable when our own particular circumstances are right. It’s only what we do when faced with that dilemma/ choice that separates us. At that point no matter how happy/ unhappy we are or well/ badly treated, or how tough life has become,
the responsibility becomes our own, Nobody else’s, we can choose.
People really can shock the living hell out of you. I’d never say ‘never’ about anyone. I’d have bet my house, life and everything I owned on a close friend of mine never, ever doing this, but one day her life totally blew up, went absolutely nuclear, because unbeknownst to everyone around her, she was on a dating website and sleeping with some guy.
It was so out of character that it was the equivalent of finding her off her face on drugs, standing naked in Sainsbury’s shouting through a loudhailer that she was Napoleon. This wasn’t even midlife, really, she’s in her fifties. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Long seemingly happy marriage, three happy young adult/ young teen kids. Well educated, great career and pillar of the community. Solid as a rock to the outside world.
Out of all of my friends she’d have been the last person you’d ever think would do this, even her very closest friend had no idea. Who she was before became totally unrecognisable.
Apparently she’d got chatted up at work by some guy, enjoyed it so much that she started questioning her marriage and life choices and decided her husband was boring, life was too short to never feel ‘young’ again, so the dating site gave her her ‘high’ and men who wanted to get into her knickers told her everything she wanted to hear.
Her life went from a very comfortably well off, traditional, solid family life and long steady marriage (25 years plus) to a Jeremy Kyle show pretty much overnight when her poor husband found out.
She trashed her family including her beloved kids. You’d never, ever have seen this coming. Madness.