URL: 
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1509033,00.html

<h>Your cheating heart

   <p>Email, text messages and intimate websites ... they're all making it
   easier for us to stray from long-term relationships. But if these
   'affairs' are unconsummated, are we still being unfaithful? Joanna
   Briscoe on a modern dilemma
   <h>Saturday June 18, 2005
   <h>The Guardian
   <p>Infidelity is defined purely by sex - or at least we think it is. One
   drunken shag with someone whose name you've forgotten and you're
   unfaithful; an unconsummated 20-year passion nurtured in secret and
   you're a model of monogamy. But outside sex, there is an arena of
   messy feelings for which we don't quite have a name - covert
   relationships that involve secrecy and guilt.

   <p>We are all emotionally unfaithful. Even the most fiercely devoted mind
   will occasionally, momentarily, wander, even if the body has little
   intention of following. These days it is much easier to
   compartmentalise aspects of our lives and, if we want, act on those
   impulses. Aided by a culture of long working hours, isolated freelance
   employment, almost universal access to ever-developing modes of
   communication, there is a whole new network of flirtation, a
   soundless, secret exchange of personal intimacies.

   <p>Suzannah, 34, the art director of a large design company, has watched
   office flirtations develop over the past decade. "It used to be a
   covert squeeze by the photocopier or a quick illicit drink," she says.
   "Now, for example, there are two people in my company I know either
   fancy each other or are sleeping together, and yet I never even catch
   them looking at each other. All they do is email each other all day,
   and do very little work. They have this huge, ongoing opportunity.

   <p>"But then, through my work, I've got a friend with whom I have a big
   conversational thing - he's my closest friend and there's an area of
   life that he fills that my boyfriend doesn't, and so there's an
   intimacy to that. I do question myself about this; I have to
   acknowledge that my boyfriend wouldn't like it at all. The interesting
   question is, where do we draw the line? In a way, it's infidelity when
   you feel excited by the situation, when you feel unfaithful."

   <p>Lizzie, a caterer in her 30s with two children, counts herself as
   "very happily married, and I definitely wouldn't want to have an
   affair, but life can be a bit humdrum. I always saw one of the fathers
   at my daughter's school, and I knew he was interested in me, and that
   excited me. I sat on it and thought, 'If it doesn't have to be
   physical, why not?' I can't be very friendly with him openly, so we
   had to find other ways of connecting. I did fancy him, but we've had
   one talk about sex and both said, no, we can't, that's not going to be
   part of it. The connection is something else; the secrecy in itself
   lends a flavour to it.

   <p>"So we text a lot, and talk covertly in public places. We email, and
   occasionally meet for a drink. I do feel guilty about it, but it makes
   me feel good, makes me feel I'm still eligible, still out there. It's
   been something I've been able to keep separate, my own little secret.
   Two of my friends know - and I only told them because they hinted that
   they were in comparable situations. I want to own something not
   harmful that's good for me. It did distract from my marriage a bit, to
   be honest - a couple of nights I slept in the spare room, because the
   text alert kept going and I thought, this is ridiculous. I don't think
   it's morally OK, and I've pulled myself back from it, as otherwise it
   would be all-consuming. I now think, my marriage is my marriage; this
   is something extracurricular. I personally feel the ultimate
   connection is sex, and I worry that if I did, it would be
   disappointing and there would be nothing left - and I wouldn't do that
   to my husband. But there's definitely something edgy and covert and
   beyond the realms of what's acceptable."

   <p>After a certain age, an almost universal desire to settle down with
   the right person takes hold. Plato's image of lost souls storming
   about free-range until they slot together with their other halves
   remains powerful, even in an over-sexualised era where we obsess about
   adulterous celebrities. We still want to find The One. But, at the
   same time, The One may not be enough. We believe we shouldn't have to
   adhere to the constraints of our parents' putative lifelong mating. We
   want it all, and believe we're entitled to it all. We end up combining
   the best monogamous intentions with a whiff of rebellion against that
   very state. Pure monogamy is not quite in tune with our supposedly
   swinging, secular society.

   <p>David Miller is the founder of Loving Links, an extra-marital dating
   service for "thoughtful, attached men and women looking for romance".
   "Adults now don't want to grow up," he says. "We're told that we
   should be having this, this and this, and we feel hard done by if we
   don't. It's also the case for the baby-boomer generation: we're all
   Peter Pans, and no one's yet sent us a letter saying we have to stop
   having fun and sex."

   <p>There is a compulsion for the attached to seek romantic, if not
   fleshy, liaisons as a licensed way to have something on the side.
   Websites such as Friends Reunited involve a sizable chunk of the
   population in one big adult sleepover, texting and emailing anyone
   they like or fancy the sound of. This is justified as mental relief, a
   reward for juggling partners with long working hours and last-minute
   children. And for living so unprecedentedly long.

   <p>Robin, an advertising executive who has been sexually faithful
   throughout his nine-year marriage, maintains ongoing romantic
   fantasies. "I think guys do all the time," he says. "There's this
   notion that women like romance and men like raw sex, and I think
   that's not necessarily the case. People talk about sex addiction, but
   I think sex addiction is a kind of romance addiction. It's part of
   male desire - not a priapic need, but a need to be validated and
   adored and made to feel whole by someone's reciprocal gaze. It's
   people who come into your life on a regular basis - you build up a
   little bit of a crush on them, and the next thing you know, you can't
   quite look them in the eye and you've got a fantasy about them. I go
   to Pilates a couple of times a week, and there's got to be someone
   I've got a crush on at Pilates, someone my imagination lands on. In
   the class, in its wordlessness, there's something relatively intimate
   about it. There's a girl who's got a tattoo on her shoulder, she's got
   a good shape and is nice and probably in her mid-30s, and in another
   life I could see myself with her. I kind of identify with her. It's
   more a romantic thing than a lust thing, but with an element of lust.

   <p>"I'm very happy in my marriage, but if I don't have somebody I feel
   romantically towards outside it, then I feel there's something wrong
   with my life. I see it as perfectly reasonable, not a problem, because
   I think there's an absolute moral distinction between shagging someone
   else and having fantasies about someone else. It casts a spell on your
   boring daily life."

   <p>I wanted to write about slow-burning emotional infidelity in my new
   novel, because profound longing is more powerful than swiftly
   gratified lust. A frisson of mutual recognition can develop into a
   fixation in which both parties are stroking each other's mind, an
   exchange charged with suppressed sexual desire. Close and frequent
   mental interaction can be intensely erotic. It is astonishing how
   quickly even the most monogamous can turn into tumescent fools,
   deleting messages, fantasising about torrid futures with people they
   barely know. The straitjacket of no-sex-allowed becomes an addiction
   in itself. "Having a partner who's emotionally unfaithful is maybe
   more hurtful than one who's physically unfaithful," says Miller. Paula
   Hall, a relationships therapist at Relate, thinks of infidelity as a
   breach of trust. "It's when you're sharing emotional stuff with other
   people that you should be sharing with your partner."

   <p>According to a study last year by Dr Monica Whitty of Queen's
   University Belfast, online emotional involvement can have as much
   impact on an existing relationship as sexual infidelity. In her study
   of 234 participants, who evaluated hypothetical online situations,
   women were found to be more likely than men to view emotional
   infidelity as cheating, and also more likely to see online infidelity
   as harmful to a real-life relationship; however, others described the
   interaction as "just a friendship" and would not classify it as
   infidelity "as there was no physical sex taking place".

   <p>The online interactions studied ranged from mild flirting to cybersex,
   and Whitty found that people's definitions of fidelity varied wildly.
   "The new technology and opportunities for infidelity are evolving
   together. Cyberspace is a safe place to flirt. With online infidelity,
   people see a fuzzy boundary between reality and fantasy. Our social
   scripts about what is acceptable behaviour online are not as clear-cut
   as they are offline, and there's more opportunity for betrayal now
   that we've got more people to choose from online. People work less on
   their own relationship; they tend to look elsewhere. Increasing
   numbers of people are now going to therapy because of online betrayal.

   <p>"The results of this study show that couples need to be clear what the
   rules are when it comes to online cheating," says Whitty. "Emotional
   involvement, even without physical consummation, can be just as
   damaging to a relationship." Hall agrees: "Generally, research says
   that there is more personal disclosure online than in a face-to-face
   situation."

   <p>One woman I know in her 20s regularly emails strangers, going out on
   drinking dates as a relief from the stresses of her relationship. Many
   of her friends take a similar approach to their romantic lives. We may
   be approaching an era in which heated romantic or sexual online
   relationships will be deemed acceptable, just as men have
   traditionally used porn while some partners turn a blind eye. The
   repressed British psyche is well suited to a form of communication at
   once intimate and detached. In news reports of the misadventures of
   David Beckham, the provocative texts he sent Rebecca Loos were given
   greater prominence than details of any alleged sex, the most secret
   flirtation unravelling in all its ungrammatical glory.

   <p>Cate, a lecturer who has lived with her girlfriend for four years,
   recently emerged from an obsessive but non-physical relationship with
   another woman. "What was so dangerous," she says, "is that we seemed
   to have an incredible meeting of minds. The more tangly and intricate
   the conversations we had, the more it seemed that we had to keep
   having them, that no one else thought like this. It's only now I
   realise that, because it was almost all through letters, emails and
   phone calls, I could ignore the fact that I didn't even physically
   fancy her, though I'd persuaded myself I did. It could remain an
   affair that was about to happen, which was incredibly exciting.

   <p>"I'd sit at my desk rigid with anticipation for the bing of my email;
   there was nothing like the thrill of an enormous, involved email from
   her. It was like a speeded-up 18th-century romance - we were courting
   while pretending not to, and the speed made it all more exciting and
   feverish. Because it almost all took place at my desk, it was very
   easy to pigeonhole: it was a marvellous, stimulating life of the mind
   with nothing to do with either the sex or the arguments I was having
   with my girlfriend. I didn't really feel guilty: it felt like this
   discovery of a soulmate that should be encouraged, and nothing to
   worry my girlfriend about. Even as it got more romantic - and it went
   on for nearly two years; it consumed me - there was a safety belt:
   nothing had actually happened."

   <p>More partnerships are now formed through the workplace than through
   social life. Most adults spend more waking hours with colleagues than
   with their partners, making meaningful, exciting and even intimate
   workplace interactions inevitable. The mind is a sex organ, especially
   for women, a fact that is overlooked in a body-fixated and
   anti-intellectual era. In the workplace and by email, inventive brains
   thrive.

   <p>Hall says this transformation of the workplace into one big
   touchy-feely melting pot of sensibilities has significant consequences
   at home. "In terms of work, we all talk more openly: it's horribly
   American, but we're getting more and more into 'sharing' ourselves.
   The ethos of the workplace has changed a lot, too - there's more
   emphasis on self-awareness, on emotional intelligence and literacy, on
   teamwork, all things that are about building a community in the
   workplace. Increasingly, it's the right place to share more personal
   stuff. And then it can get dangerous." The office can be a sexy place.

   <p>Carey, an events organiser, has been in a relationship for eight years
   but has formed a strong emotional relationship with someone at work.
   Her friends are similarly distracted. "I've got a small group of
   friends. We've known each other for ever and we're all married or with
   someone. In the past few years, we've begun talking in a really
   excited, conspiratorial way about who we've got a thing for on the
   side. It reminds me of when we were in our early 20s. We've got
   children, we're older, but there's this wonderful excitement at having
   a mental crush, a fascination, a thing going on with someone you hope
   won't lead to anything. It's boring talking about your marriage, and
   somehow too revealing - you can't talk about married sex because it's
   too intimate. We talk about other people instead."

   <p>Some would argue that emotional infidelity can actually help a primary
   relationship, but Hall disagrees: "Just because chocolate makes you
   feel good, it doesn't make you healthy. There's a tendency to say,
   'I'm getting my emotional needs met elsewhere, which cuts down my
   frustration with my partner.' Men have used that excuse for years to
   have sex."

   <p>Names have been changed.

   <h>· Joanna Briscoe's novel, Sleep With Me, is published on July 4 by
   Bloomsbury at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (inc UK p&p), call
   0870 836 0875

