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# Your cheating heart

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
Saturday June 18, 2005
The Guardian
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.

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.

Article continues

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.

"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."

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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."

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."

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".

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.

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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."

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."

Names have been changed.

· 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

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006