By Anonymous
WAKING up groggy after a fizz-fuelled lunch is never a good idea. It takes me a good few seconds to realise I’m in a hotel room with the shapely arm of a snoozing naked woman draped over me. I gently remove it and hear her phone ringing.
Looking over, I notice it’s Peter calling. Her husband and my colleague. I allow myself a smirk because by God is he dull. Wherever he thinks his wife is, I’m fairly confident he won’t assume she’s with me.
After a blast in the shower, I exit the hotel room ten minutes later and, just for fun, give
Peter a call to check in on our latest project. I’d met Lydia, the lady of the shapely arm, two weeks earlier at a work do held in a swanky restaurant overlooking the Thames.
I work in financial technology — often crunched to ‘fintech’ — and in truth I hate these networking events. Fintech has a disproportionate number of men working in the industry and to say they are geeks is putting it politely. But the one spark on the horizon is that these soirees are an opportunity to meet their better halves.
Peter and I had been collaborating on a systems launch — we still are — and it was the first time he had introduced me to his wife. I do what I usually do, which is a surreptitious tensecond appraisal. Brunette, curvy figure, yoga-toned arms by the looks of them. Lydia held eye contact for a beat longer than necessary. Bingo!
I’m very rarely wrong about a woman’s level of interest in me. She was easy to find on social media and in fact accepted a lunch invitation more quickly than I’d expected...
Over the decades — I’m 56 — there have been dozens of Lydias in my life. I wouldn’t describe myself as some sort of snake-hipped Lothario, but I do have homes in London and California, and being on the move has undoubtedly served my libido well. I’m currently on my second marriage, and have a daughter, 27, from my first.
I didn’t, and don’t, set out to sleep with other men’s wives deliberately. It’s just how it happens. To be honest,
I get away with it because I’m the last person you’d expect to seduce your wife. I’m not exactly Brad Pitt. I’m a fairly average looking bloke, 5ft 10in, Jason Statham bald with the beginnings of a dad paunch.
But I’m never going to be one of those men you spot on the tennis court who are happiest in male company. You won’t find me at the 19th hole, pint in hand, boring on about my injuries.
The truth is I find male company crashingly dull. I’d far rather be entertained by their partners.
Was this the reason author John le Carre became a serial love cheat, often with the wives of his friends? Or was it — and I relate to this too — his means of feeling an addictive kind of power over other men? According to his biographer, le Carre had at least 11 affairs. The spy novelist and former MI6 officer, real name David Cornwell, claimed infidelities were like ‘ a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind’.
HIS mistresses included an au pair who looked after his son; the wife of a spy colleague; a journalist, and a former model.
Biographer Adam Sissman noted: ‘Several of the women with whom he had affairs were married to friends of his; this might happen by accident once, or even twice, but with David, it happened again and again.’
I understand. My sexual yearnings are exactly the same. If a woman isn’t attached to a friend or married to a colleague, then I’m afraid the sexual pizzazz just isn’t there.
You might be wondering why and when did all this start. Well, I don’t need Freudian analysis to work it out. The pattern really began when I was in my teens.
I was the youngest of three boys, and a bit of a surprise to my parents, who had only ever wanted two children. I was told this blunt fact often, and perhaps used it, in my young boy’s head, to explain why I seemed to lack the kind of parental love I saw my clever, sporty brothers receive.
Not that I had a Dickensian childhood. I was just neglected. Without my parents prodding or praise, I was left to it and, as a consequence, ended up average at everything. While my siblings eclipsed me in the classroom and on the sports pitch, I discovered I was good at one thing. Listening.
It was a skill I honed in the company of my brothers’ girlfriends. As an awkward adolescent, ignored by his family and regarded as nothing
but a harmless kid by the girls — at least at first — I became a sounding board for them.
I heard all sorts. Their insecurities, their dreams and why they were head over heels in love with my brothers.
In fact, I learnt so much about the psyche of women during my teenage years that I couldn’t help but become an expert in it. My emotional intelligence grew and grew. I don’t know why but something told me it was important to give them a nonjudgmental place to get things off their chest.
You know what comes next. Yes, I ended up having my first sexual experiences with my brother’s girlfriend when I was 15. Granted the girl in question probably felt sorry for me. But the feeling of one- upmanship, combined with the afterglow of orgasm, was beyond edifying.
I felt glorious, as though I was on top of the world. Sleeping with my brother’s girlfriend gave me an added frisson because I was having sex with someone he — one of the golden boys who monopolised my parents’ attention — cared for. At last, I was the one in control.
Fast forward to university, where I fell in with the rugger lads who studied hard and partied hard. I wasn’t particularly interested in having a girlfriend back then — it was just a relief to start forging a life away from the family home. Casual sex was fine — until my third year, that is, when I acquired my first serious girlfriend.
A fellow student who’d been hanging around our crowd for a year, she hadn’t especially captured my attention, until I found out that my best mate had a crush on her. That’s when I became laser focused on making her mine — and I did. We married three years later.
If my best friend was hurt by this blatant act of unbrotherly theft, he never said anything. In fact, I made him my best man at our wedding.
Obviously, the story doesn’t end there because I don’t think a year went by when I wasn’t unfaithful to my wife. It was the early 1990s, we were living in London and while we had a shared social circle, I was already deliberately cultivating another separate network in the business world.
The dot- com bubble meant my services were in demand; money sloshed about for socialising and I was back and forth across the Atlantic, too. By my late 20s I had an apartment on the West Coast and was schmoozing Silicon Valley, talking about this start up and that launch. Being a workaholic