It’s never been easier for your husband to cheat

That’s the damning verdict of bestselling novelist (and unfaithful wife) LISA HILTON — and it’s all because of our fixation with social media and mobile phones

WHEN the world is full of potential lovers, why restrict yourself to just one?’ I wrote those words in an article on monogamy in 2007 — and how bitterly they have come back to haunt me.

The piece affirmed what I then believed — that pleasurable sex between consenting adults was simply not that big a deal — and described all the boyfriends I had cheated on with a brash, careless arrogance that now makes me squirm.

At 28, I believed I had found someone whose pain mattered more to me than my own selfish pleasure and I was truly convinced it would never happen again.

And yet, after 12 years of marriage, I once again had an affair and the relationship in which I had invested so much hope and love ended in divorce.

I have still not fully come to terms with the anguish my behaviour caused and I don’t believe I may ever do so. The divorce remains a fissure of pain across my life, dividing it irrevocably into before and after.

Yet, while I will never stop regretting that failure, I don’t believe the affair was its root cause. There were many other reasons for the unhappiness my husband and I lived through, but somehow, we were, I think, both trapped by our expectations and by a culture in which infidelity still remains the ultimate taboo.

There are many more ways to betray a person than infidelity but, as crimes against marriage go, it is still the trump card — the sin that cancels out all others.

And, for men and women alike, it has never been so easy to find a willing partner for sex outside our marriages. Indeed, recent statistics suggest a 40% increase in the number of women conducting affairs, while the figure for men has remained relatively stable at 22%.

THE rise of smartphones and social media has affected all of our lives, but none more so than those looking for extramarital sex. Online dating, hook-up apps and ‘sexting’ have entirely redrawn the parameters of our collective behaviour.

Perhaps the last social change of equal significance was the invention of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s, which finally freed women from the fear of illegitimate pregnancy.

Just as that innovation heralded a rethinking of sexual politics, perhaps the accessibility and temptations offered by the web might require us to reconsider our attitudes to extra-marital affairs.

Adultery ends so many marriages and causes so much suffering. If we were to take a more generous and adult view, this could change.

In my own case, I had genuinely tried for years to discuss my feelings with my husband, but it just didn’t work. I don’t pretend I was ‘driven’ into another man’s arms — I knew exactly what I was doing and made a conscious choice. Yet, as soon as the affair came to light (he looked through my phone — the modern classic), it was as though all the other issues in our marriage ceased to be relevant.

Cheating is a complex, delicate, emotionally harrowing subject, so it often seems easier to reach for a cliché to explain it.

We are all familiar with the conventional wisdoms: the middle-aged man desperate to cling on to his waning youth; the exhausted wife who ‘lets herself go’ or loses interest in sex after childbirth, the ‘sex addict’ who cauterises childhood traumas with endless affairs.

But maybe we could start by being honest about one thing — people cheat because it’s fun. Infidelity necessitates hypocrisy, but perhaps the worst form of dishonesty is not admitting to enjoying it.

Lust turns us all into infatuated teenagers: desired, beautiful, powerful. It keeps Agent Provocateur and much of the hotel industry in business.

The temptations of infidelity are a constant in our culture. The intensity and drama of cheating are what keep us glued to TV dramas such as Dr Foster and The Affair, so is it surprising if we sometimes want to be the star of our own forbidden romance? And, perhaps exactly because it makes us feel young, I wonder whether cheating becomes even more tempting with age.

As responsibilities and regrets pile up, the question of ‘what if?’ can morph from idle curiosity into burning necessity — a kind of sexual rage against the dying of the light.

If I go to a business lunch at a smart restaurant, I find I still have a radar for the adulterous couples — they’re the only ones ordering wine, holding hands across the table, anticipating their stolen afternoon.

I don’t judge because I remember all too well the heady sense of release that comes from re-experiencing desire.

I might regret the affair that ended my own marriage, but I can’t honestly say that I didn’t enjoy it at the time.

Along with the guilt and anxiety came a delicious sense of secrecy, of repossessing a part of my femininity I thought I had lost, of being flattered and spoiled and paid attention to.

Maybe there’s even a sense in which being a mistress feels somehow more empowering than being labelled as a wife — one can imagine oneself (however naively) as a figure charged with some magical, carnal power, rather than the quotidian creature of the supermarket shop and the school run.

Perhaps that lure of secrecy is even more entrancing than physical sex — the sense of recovering a forgotten, hidden self, of sharing an identity that hovers a glimmering inch or two