Illicit sex, secret affairs — the truth about our infidelity

Times

4 days ago

By Anonymous
My reasons for cheating are not at all noble and totally predictable for a man my age. I had been with my girlfriend since the first year at university. I am now 36. Last summer I could feel the future stretching out ahead of us and not in a good way. My girlfriend sometimes used to say, 'Do you think we've both had enough adventures to think about settling down?' Obviously she is now my ex but at the time we did everything together.
Whenever Great Western Railway announces that it is running the London to Bath service with a reduced number of carriages I think of my short, intense love affair. The GWR Supersaver leaving Paddington station at 7.30pm is the first cheap evening train and is notorious for the driver announcement, 'Sorry, folks, they were supposed to give me nine carriages for this service but I only have five. Please be kind to one another and give up your seat if someone appears to need it more.'
Last summer I was lucky enough to get a seat on the 7.30 but I gave it up to a young woman wearing a black orthopaedic boot. She looked otherwise extremely fit and healthy. In fact she was in incredible physical condition. She'd had a cycling accident.
She accepted the seat but we were crammed close together and so we got talking. I think you know within two minutes whether there is something between you. She said, 'Thank you for the seat,' and the etiquette is that you look away, scroll on your phone. It could have ended there.
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But she asked me, 'Haven't I seen you on this train before?' We live in fraught, judgmental times when the signals between men and women are hotly discussed. I thought her question was an invitation to keep talking.
The second signal came at Reading station, when the train overcrowding often thins out. The person next to her got off and I took the seat. Other seats were available but I took that one. When the snack trolley rumbled down the aisle we had a drink together.
When you have an affair you cross the boundary way before you kiss or have sex. For me, buying those two small bottles of wine was it and I did it as though watching myself. I did it knowing that if my partner at home could see me clinking our plastic cups and laughing it would probably break her heart.
I took her number and she took mine. We sort of denied even to ourselves what was going to happen. I cycle too and I said I'd talk to a friend about fixing her broken bike.
'Well, you definitely sound like the expert,' she said. 'Should I call you?'
That is the exact moment when I thought, this person really likes me. I think we are going to have sex.
My long-term girlfriend had me on the Find My feature on her iPhone so she could see exactly when I was heading from my office in central London to Paddington and then home to Bath. Nothing in my life was unpredictable. You'd think, in the world we live in, that might be good, reassuring, even, but there is a limit.
Cycling is the one thing I do at weekends that makes me feel totally free. I was soon sending messages to my new friend asking how her ankle was doing. Sometimes I saw her on the train and within a few weeks we went out on a ride together. After that we enjoyed a weekend cycling trip in Wales. I purposely chose a place in the Black Mountains with bad phone signal. We didn't even get the bikes off the rack.
I don't expect people to understand but having sex with a secret lover that no one in your family or wider social circle knows about is intoxicating. You can be the person you want to be, even pretend a little, especially if you know you are going to return to normality at some point.
I got found out because a couple that my girlfriend and I were friendly with saw me on the train with my lover. I don't think we were even doing anything inappropriate at that moment except, apparently, I put my hand on my lover's shoulder as we shuffled down the busy carriage. The way she looked back and smiled at me was the clincher. The male half of the couple shrugged it off. The female party texted my girlfriend. Women know.
By Victoria Richards
When I watched footage of the Astronomer chief executive Andy Byron ducking down to shield himself from view after being caught in too-close contact with a colleague via a Coldplay 'kiss cam' (Byron, who is married — for now, at least — has since resigned), the first people I thought of were his wife and children, how they felt after their private grief was beamed across the globe.
Betrayal is betrayal — it always hurts — but it hits differently when it's in the public eye. There's an added layer of horror and humiliation. You can't deal with your broken heart in private; you aren't granted the privilege of space to lick your wounds before announcing that you've broken up. Your agency is completely torn away. I should know.
That's because I found out on live radio that the man I called my boyfriend — who had keys to my home, who fed my cat when I went on holiday, who bought gifts for my children, who spent New Year's Eve with me at my parents' flat, who once offered to drive around all night to find a pharmacy to get my son's emergency asthma medication — was living a double life.
The woman he said he'd broken up with more than a year earlier wasn't his ex at all. He'd never moved out, like he said he had. They were very much still together — still living together. I heard her say so.
She was on a radio show and I was listening — and I make no apologies for that. After all (and we've seen this played out in lurid, laugh-out-loud detail in Lena Dunham's Netflix hit Too Much, in which Megan Stalter's character, Jessica, develops an unhealthy obsession with her ex-boyfriend's new fiancée), it's normal to be a little … fascinated, say, with your partner's ex. Olivia Rodrigo wrote a song about it.
But what I didn't expect her to say were the words 'my boyfriend', referred to in present tense, and to be talking about my boyfriend, also present tense.
I gave him the chance to tell the truth, messaging him to report what I'd heard. 'That's interesting,' he said, implying that she might be in denial, poor thing. I almost believed it. But then I did what any good journalist would do and went straight to the source: his girlfriend.
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I messaged her myself. 'Hey,' I wrote. 'This is a bit awkward but I heard you say your 'boyfriend' on your show and I know who you're talking about — but we've been seeing each other ever since you broke up and he moved out from your flat. I was just wondering why you said that.'
'We didn't break up and he didn't move out,' she replied almost instantly. 'In fact, he's sitting right next to me right now. Let me ask him.'
When she asked him he came back with the excuse that I was a girl who 'had a crush on him'. When pressed he admitted something had happened 'once'. Which is (almost) funny when you consider that I'd seen him so often I'd given him a key.
As I swapped screenshots and time stamps with the other girlfriend and his web of lies unravelled, I discovered that I bore more than just a passing similarity to his 'ex'. In fact we were practically identical.
We shared photos to prove it all: cards in his handwriting, messages claiming to be in one place when he was really with 'the other one'. We found out he'd left the same brand of underpants — one red, one blue — in my bathroom and at hers. That when I sent him a 'care package' after a family bereavement, it was delivered to a room he used for storage. That rather than wanting to be alone at the funeral, as he'd told me, he'd gone with her. That when he said he was 'in therapy', he meant couples therapy.
It should probably come as no surprise, given how similar we are, that when I eventually met the other girlfriend we loved each other. And here's where our story is different from the classic 'cheater' tale: we dumped him and kept each other. Now, every April, we go for a candlelit dinner to mark the anniversary of the day I listened to her show.
It's a new kind of love story. And one that, I hope, will be happy ever after.
By Tom Nash
I was 33 when I had an affair. I had been with my wife for ten years and we were having a few issues. We'd always been a passionate couple. When we did separate everybody was shocked: they never thought it would be us.
But for the 18 months before the affair started we had been trundling along. I worked long hours in the City and tension had been building between us, over our extended family. We got to a point where we didn't know how to talk to each other without it descending, not into conflict, but quietness.
I know for some couples it's the kids who get in the way. But not for us. We had the same parenting styles and all that. It was finances and wider family strains. These things can really take their toll.
I met Donna on the train. We were commuters. We took the same inbound and outbound Intercity train each day. There was an instant spark. I remember thinking, I'm in trouble. It wasn't even a physical thing, though obviously that was there. Over the course of an hour's train journey we were talking as though we had known each other for decades.
It transpired that we both walked from St Pancras to our offices, rather than using the Tube, to get our steps in. We had taken different routes but we began to take the same one.
She was going through a separation and I would talk to her about my struggles. For the first several weeks we were just friends. It was an emotional affair before it was a sexual one. In between we did have that conversation, that there was clearly something there. I never thought I would be that person to cheat but I did.
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For a while we tried to keep away from each other. We even agreed on alternative walking routes and different trains. But it was magnetic, we kept getting thrown back together. One of our trains would be late and the other person would wind up on the same platform.
The secrecy was absolutely horrible. I loved and cared for my wife. She was one of the closest people in my life. I had a love for her just above the kind I felt for my parents. I absolutely hated myself, and more than anybody else could do. I would feel physically sick most days about who I had become and how weak I was. I felt awful covering my tracks.
I had a panic attack at work one day and knew it was coming to a head. A little while after that I told my wife it was over. I didn't tell her about the affair straight away, which I regret. She said she had had her suspicions. I genuinely didn't want to hurt her. She was then told other people's versions of the truth, which were exaggerated and hurt her more. She deserved my accountability. We are great friends now but that only came with honesty.
I'm now a divorce coach and work with people who have had affairs. Until you're in that situation you don't know how you're going to deal with it. You can stand there and say I would never do this, because I said that for years. I'm still with Donna now, eight years on.mrdivorcecoach.co.uk
By Anonymous
Six years ago I discovered that my husband of the time was having an affair. I look back at it now and realise that, of course, part of me had probably known beforehand that something was up but at the time I was deeply shocked. The level of betrayal I felt when his infidelity was uncovered is something I find heartbreaking even now.
I loved him. I was faithful — devoted, even — and to find out that he was so lovingly intimate with another person … the pain is beyond words. So I have deep empathy for the wife and husband of the Coldplay 'kiss cam' couple. To have their marriage troubles exposed in such humiliating fashion only doubles the devastation.
My husband was not exposed quite so publicly. His affair came to light because a friend of mine happened to be on holiday in Cornwall and there he was, in a tender embrace with someone who wasn't me. More than that, my friend told me — trying to be tactful but also wanting me really to hear the truth — that they looked very 'at ease' with each other.
I then confronted my husband. At first he denied it but eventually, as I stacked up the evidence provided by my friend, he caved in and told me that he had been seeing a former girlfriend for the past five years. It wasn't just a fling, he explained, as if that made it any better.
Of course I had chosen not to see what was right in front of me. He had locked his phone and changed his PIN a while back, saying that we all had the right to privacy. His behaviour, however, was so strange and distant that I did suspect something was going on. I just wasn't sure what.
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I had started going through his bank statements, which is something I don't feel very proud of. About six months before the affair was exposed I saw that he had sent some flowers from Interflora and they certainly hadn't come to me. But I'd got myself in a double bind — if I were to tell him I had gone through his bank statements, he'd be furious, so I couldn't say anything.
I'd always known that he had a soft spot for this ex-girlfriend and I had felt threatened by their relationship. I had endlessly quizzed him about it and he had told me I was paranoid. The gaslighting became extreme and I began to think that I had lost my mind, that he was utterly devoted and faithful to me, and that I had gone slightly mad.
So was it a relief to find out that I wasn't crazy? I would like to say yes but of course that wasn't the case. The fallout from affairs is horrific, as anyone who has been through such a situation knows. In my case it turned out that quite a few people had known, some of them only just before it was exposed. They told me afterwards that they had decided not to say anything as they felt the basis of our marriage was happy and that maybe I would shoot the messenger.
At the time I felt so confused and didn't know what to think about this. Now, though, when I think whether I would have preferred not to have known, the honest answer is no. Once the affair was exposed it made me look much more clearly at our marriage and I realised how damaged it was. The affair was the tip of the iceberg. An untrustworthy person isn't just untrustworthy in one area of their life. Sometimes they're just someone who lives in a different reality to the rest of us.
For quite a long time after my friend's reveal of what she'd seen, my world fell apart. After an affair is exposed there is endless questioning, damage, humiliation, guilt and shame. No one wins in this situation. But here's the upside: there is life afterwards, which is something the partners of the Coldplay couple may not feel right now. Either your marriage will rebuild in a way that is stronger or you'll be out of a fundamentally flawed relationship. It was those two nuggets of knowledge that helped me finally get over my marriage and move on.
By Anonymous
When I saw the video of the CEO on the Coldplay 'kiss cam' I thought, if you're going to cheat, get better at it. I slept with my married boss for about four years. I was 13 years younger than him. We managed to keep our affair completely secret. The secret element made the whole thing feel even hotter.
The Coldplay couple shouldn't have been so obvious by ducking down as soon as the camera was on them. They should have just acted like everything was normal or hugged the other woman there next to them, because they made themselves look guilty. If they had not reacted, no one would have thought anything bad about it. If my boss and I had been on a kiss cam during the era that we were sleeping together and he had tried to duck, I would have been like, 'What are you doing?'
My boss and I would only hang out after work or on work trips — he wouldn't text me on the weekend, like, 'Let's do something.' We would go for dinner around the corner from the office, just the two of us. We'd use the work card to pay for drinks and food.
We were always subtle at the start of the night but then after a drink we'd get more obviously flirty and touchy-feely. But if another colleague had walked by the two of us looking cosy at dinner, we would have just acted like everything was normal and said hi, rather than freaking out like the Coldplay pair did.
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At one point during the affair he said, 'Maybe I'll come to your birthday,' and I said, 'I'd love you to come.' But then he didn't come. So I think that's the boundary — we only hung out at things that could have been passed off as work if someone saw us.
He and I got on really well as friends before anything happened. The first time we went from friends to more was on a night out after work. Our colleagues had gone home and he and I were the last ones left at the bar. Suddenly he went in for a snog. It took me by surprise. He's conventionally good-looking but not my usual type and not someone I would have gone for.
It is hot sleeping with your boss, especially when none of your colleagues in a meeting has any idea that the two of you are shagging. I would be mortified if anyone we worked with found out about us. There were times when we weren't as careful as we should have been around our colleagues on work trips. I'm sure my boss worried about people at work knowing about us too but he was more reckless than me. After we had slept together in a situation that was a bit risky, he'd ask: 'Why did you let me do that?' I'd reply, 'Well, you said it would be hot.'
The affair didn't benefit my career and that's not why we were sleeping together. But if it had come out, people at work would have assumed I got favouritism or promotions because we were sleeping together, which I didn't.
I feel bad for him because it must eat him up, having this whole secret side to his life. I've got the better side of the deal because I can talk to my friends about it if I need to. I've told a few of my female friends who I know wouldn't judge me and would never meet him. But he has to keep it under wraps.
I don't think anyone would suspect anything was happening between us, partly because his social media is all about his family. There's loads of pictures of his wife and kids on his profile. It just goes to show that no one knows what goes on behind closed doors in a marriage.
Morally it's not too hard for me to justify the affair to myself because I am someone who believes in open and non-monogamous relationships. Also, I'm not the one who is married.
I also feel less guilty because I know that he and his wife are quite progressive. He has said they probably would go to a sex party and do some experimenting so they're not your average monogamous married couple. That said, his wife has no clue about us. He would never confess our affair to her because he broke her trust.
By the end we were acting like we were a couple when no one else was around and I ended up catching feelings for him. I wasn't really making an effort to date other people at that time because I just wanted to hang out with him. So my love life wasn't really moving forward and I was a bit too invested in him.
I quit that job and we stopped having sex when I left the company. I decided to leave the job partly because I was thinking, will this affair just keep going on for ever?
We see each other occasionally as friends and, when we do, I can tell that the spark is still there between us.
By Anonymous
My infidelity drama had all the hallmarks of a five-star blockbuster. A woman from the past, a dramatic break-up in the rain, a ruthless betrayal and a very modern addition: an Instagram DM from a mystery ex.
Four years ago, when I was 27 and almost a year into a relationship with a man called David whom I'd met on a dating app (another classic 21st-century plotline), I received a private message on social media from a lady I'd never met but knew about: David's ex-girlfriend.
The ex — let's call her Kat — wanted to know if I was still seeing David. I corrected her: we'd upgraded from 'seeing' to 'boyfriend' several months ago. 'Oh,' she texted back. 'Well, we'd better have a call.'
Work went out of the window. My housemate and I spent the rest of the day stewing over all the reasons she might want to speak to me, workshopping different ways I could answer the phone when she called. But I knew that exes don't get in touch to send their best wishes for your new relationship; they usually bring bad news and by now I'd learnt that the horrible washing machine feeling I got in my gut usually preceded a break-up.
Eventually Kat rang, though the news was worse than I'd imagined. She and David had begun sleeping together recently. They'd done so three times, to be precise, all during weekends I'd been away, including the weekend after he'd told me he loved me.
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Had he told her about me? Yes, she said. David had told her my name, my job, that 'it was just a bit of fun' — why do they always have to bash you? — and that I lived in London. It was this information that she used to sift through his followers on Instagram to find my profile and send me a message. Women, when they want to, have a way of finding out information that a McKinsey efficiency expert would admire.
So why was she telling me now? It wasn't that 'girl code' had jolted her moral compass back into action — the reality was she'd just found out David had also been sleeping with her best friend. She was hurt and wanted to get her own back.
Had I been asleep at the wheel or was he just a very good liar? I spent days going round in circles, questioning my sense of judgment until we had a dramatic showdown in the rain on the River Thames opposite Tower Bridge. It was tipping it down and we were both crying. It felt like a scene from Made in Chelsea. I remember an American tourist walking past and saying: 'Oh my gaaaad, that is the most dramatic break-up eh-vah.'
He promised to go on some sort of redemption arc and get therapy (ugh at men who use therapy to recast themselves as a good person) but ultimately I had the best revenge. I'm very happily in love with a lovely new boyfriend. Last time I heard, David was back living at home with his parents.