Fidelity dealbreaker?
What really counts as an affair?
What’s in a kiss? When is an affair not an affair? Excellent questions, which Relate, the relationships charity, attempted to put to bed in a survey of more than 5,000 people. They have, instead, put the cat among the pigeons, revealing the grey areas not just between the sexes, but the generations.
To wit, 91 per cent of women consider a passionate kiss to constitute cheating, while one man in five can’t see the problem. Women are almost twice as likely as men to believe watching pornography alone crosses the line. And 41 per cent of those aged 16-24 think flirting is more than just a social lubricant (compared with 30 per cent of their elders). At the other end of the spectrum, some seven per cent – gender and generation unspecified – weren’t convinced that “having sex with someone else” was an act of infidelity at all.
So, with the nation split, we asked six writers where they draw their own lines…
Rowan Pelling, editor of The Amorist
If my inamorato declared he didn’t think passionately kissing another person was tantamount to infidelity, I would hear another sentence entirely.
What he would really be confessing is, “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” Or maybe a whole chorus-line of girls. If it’s not betrayal, why stop at one? This whole not-cheating line is the sort of thing you say when you’re in pressing need of a Get out of Jail Free card. What that supposedly chilled, non-jealous individual isn’t considering is how he’d feel if you replied, “Cool – I was wondering whether to tell you I had a lovely long snog with the HR boss yesterday. He just wanted to cheer me up after my poor performance review.”
What’s conveniently ignored is how intimate the best kisses are ( just as swoon-inducing as sex in the arms of a master tongue-tango artiste) and the fact a seductive smooch tends to leave you wanting more. To enjoy the taste of someone else’s mouth is to become hungry for their entire delicious being. And once you decide a kiss isn’t treacherous, where will you draw the line, exactly? In a leap and a bound you’re at Bill Clinton’s door, saying anything short of penetration is the innocent equivalent of an arm around the shoulder.
Nobody wants their lover found not guilty on a technicality; they want them to stray true, or at least be brave enough to admit when they’ve been errant. But for the average woman the most maddening thing about the man who snogs another is that he’s probably short-changing her. Most females I know prize kissing far more highly than the men in their lives and are frustrated that, with the passing years, smooching declines in time and quality. Now imagine that a lips-withholding chap is discovered to have been doling out kisses elsewhere. That’s not just downright disloyal – it’s treason.
Nick Curtis, writer
I’m not censorious about porn, but I do draw the line at kissing. Although infidelity begins in the mind, I think it only becomes actual, and actionable, when it reaches a certain level of physical contact. If we were all judged on the whims or urges that pass through our brains, who would escape whipping?
I don’t think flirtation counts as infidelity either, regarding it as a necessary grease to social interaction. Holding hands, hugging, stroking – that’s borderline stuff of which I would definitely be wary. But once lips and tongues come into play, it’s time for the LOVE-CHEAT klaxon to start hooting. And if any actual grease or whipping is involved, I’d say your relationship is doomed. My wife Ann and I have been together 22 years and take our relationship very seriously.
If she kissed someone else I’d be heartbroken. I’m amazed that 33 per cent of people in the Relate survey believed that a relationship could survive an affair, as I think for either of us it would be a deal-breaker.
Fortunately, the chances of me having an extra-marital dalliance are pretty much non-existent because a) I love my wife and can’t imagine having as much fun with anyone else as I do with her; b) the older I get the more my appearance acts as a sort of natural prophylactic or anti-pheromone; and c) I am completely lacking in organisational skills. Early on in our relationship, we realised that if I ever had an affair, my wife would have to arrange it for me.
Kate Figes, relationship expert
There are all sorts of indiscretions which can be considered cheating – from sexting and looking at porn on the internet to “emotional” affairs which never get physical. Some men even believe that a one-night-stand is fine because there was no love involved. Confusion reigns about what really constitutes infidelity. That question lurked in the background of every interview I conducted for my book, Our Cheating Hearts, and there were over 100.
The problem lies not in the nature of these transgressions but in our changing attitudes to relationships. We expect perfection. With true love, our soul mate would never have eyes for anyone else. But the truth about human beings is that we all find others attractive even when we love someone. T’was ever thus. When divorce was impossible or too shameful to contemplate you turned a blind eye and just got through it. Now infidelity of any sort is evidence that a relationship has failed when it probably hasn’t. It just needs a little more honesty, tenderness and discussion about where the boundaries of tolerance lie for each person in that relationship, and why that might be.
Our Cheating Hearts – Love and Loyalty, Lust and Lies by Kate Figes is published by Virago
Phil Robinson, journalist
Most of us will know exactly the moment we made that profound connection with another person, and the butterflies in our stomach made the prospect of an affair suddenly obvious.
If we are protective of our relationship and acknowledge this feeling, we should turn on our heel and walk away. If we stay, respond, arrange to meet again, if we move through this initial thought to talking, flirting, laughing, then we have begun an affair. Obviously, we lie to ourselves. We obfuscate and break the affair down into a series of innocuous moments (it’s only coffee…) where emotional infidelity is nothing and we are only guilty if we engage in physical sex. Thus, we never have to face our betrayal until it is too late. We can open the wardrobe door and take those first illicit steps because Narnia, and its dangers, still feel like a distant prospect.
But we’re not children. We know that an affair begins with a single decision, just as a cathedral begins with a single brick. If you are capable of the emotional dishonesty that allows you to claim an affair only begins with physical sex, then, sadly, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be brave enough to admit your part in the failure of your relationship.
Judith Woods, Telegraph columnist
After 200 years of togetherness – OK so it’s only been 28 but you get the gist – I’m reasonably sure that committing infidelity is quite low down my husband’s bucket list.
Partly because I’m as gorgeous as the day we met, partly because his idea of bedside reading is British Cruiser Tanks: A9 & A10. You heard, ladies. Hands off.
As for the odd sly smooch, we recently attended a wedding and afterwards the happy couple sent a link so we could see the pictures. In one arty monochrome shot, I was being very obviously pinned to a wall and thoroughly kissed. “Oh. My. God,” was my husband’s (not unreasonable) response. “Who on earth was that?” Confused, I peered at the evidence until the truth dawned: “It’s you! Can’t you see the kilt?” Neither of us could remember a thing. That’s the giddy joy of ageing together; short-term memory loss means every day is like
starting over.
Rob Crossan, writer
My definition of cheating has got nothing to do with physically how far it goes with another woman. It’s all about how you feel afterwards.
It’s not whether I want to do the selfish thing and confess my infidelity in a tear-sodden state to my partner. And it’s not whether I go and have a smug “I got away with it” pint. It’s about what I do after those tears or those beers. If I have a beer, that means I don’t care that I cheated. Therefore, I need to break up with my partner as I clearly don’t give a monkeys and will do it again in a heartbeat.
If I have an overwhelming urge to cry and confess, however, that means I must be somewhere near, if not totally, in love with my partner. So that’s cheating. In the end, the very best men have Protestant work ethics and Catholic guilt complexes. If cheating doesn’t bring out that guilt then, perhaps you’re not really cheating. Or perhaps you’re not much of a man.