'This is how it feels to have an affair' (Interview with an unfaithful friend)
About five, six years ago I got a call from an unknown number. It was my friend’s husband telling me that she’d been having an affair with another man, but not to hate her. I didn’t hate her, I said. Oh, he replied. Why not? That week she split up with both of them and moved out, and he never spoke to her again. While she and I have talked plenty since, we’ve never talked properly about the affair itself, which, at the time, was a secret not just from her husband but all her friends too, including me. I called her yesterday afternoon, in the house she shares now with her new partner. They’re painting, putting up shelves, preparing for a baby.
Tell me the moment that you knew you were going to have an affair.
I think so much of the beginning of the relationship lived in messages, emails and a sort of extreme level of contact…
You and your husband were friends with him and his wife, in a kind of foursome right?
Yes. Then me and him started our own friendship. It was genuine - it felt grown up, and clever and stimulating. He was older, successful - a forensic psychiatrist. I felt very special when I knew that he wanted to hang out with just me. Then the volume of contact built to a point where I was starting to realise, I think I feel something, and it moved into that delicious zone, which is obviously incredibly seductive. When his name popped up on my phone I would be buzzing. I remember eventually there being a reckoning, where we both acknowledged a crush. But then he said, oh, I think I'm just a bit listless in my marriage. And I remember being really hurt by that.
Why?
Like, I could be anybody. Then one day I went to an exhibition with him, which felt illicit because his wife didn’t care about art. There was the crackle of something very real. And then there was a message saying, we need to stop, we need to be careful. We hadn’t even kissed.
How did you feel about that?
It was the most excitement that I'd felt in fucking years.
And where was the excitement located? Was it in the idea that he wanted you enough to risk their marriage?
It was a huge inflation to my ego. I really fancied him, and he felt so grown up. Then it started to feel incredibly perilous which was obviously very seductive but all of this happened in quite a short space of time, like a couple of months at most. We agreed that it had to stop but then I went to his house and the wife was at work and there was a very unspoken thing that something was going to happen. There had been a kind of running up to the line, running away, running up to the line, running away. But I remember that being so consuming, it was all I could think about from morning to night, a physical consuming thing.
Why was that, do you think now?
I think probably a degree of desperation?
And at the time?
At the time I don't think that was conscious at all. I think there was a total blinkeredness - like, this has to happen. But at the time I had thought, well, maybe I can do this for a while, then stop it and stay in my relationship, even though it didn't feel good.
Did you know the relationship wasn't good before this all started?
Yeah, but in a way that I felt scared to acknowledge.
And how much did you think about your partner during the affair? How present was he?
A lot. In the immediate aftermath, yes. I felt real terror. And I remember the ground just feeling so wobbly. My friend used to have this phrase ‘falling off the floor’ when she felt really despairing and that is what it felt like. But it was such a kind of laser focus on being with him.
And did you tell anyone?
Nobody.
How did that change the thing?
Well, I think it just becomes so radioactive inside - the secret just expands and expands. And when it's that physical it feels uncontainable. All of the metaphors around affairs are about something filling up and exploding. But I think somewhere in me, I knew that it would never end their marriage.
But it would end yours?
Probably, yeah.
And how did that feel?
I can feel it now talking about it - it felt terrifying. but in a kind of essential way. It's so hard to describe.
Did you mind that you knew they would stay together?
For a time, I was fixated on the idea of him and me being together, and that we would go off and have a life. But it's not the first time in my life that I've had that kind of fantasy of who someone is and what they would want from me. It was an obsession that burned so intensely and then exploded. But it was really lonely. It was all at once the most thrilling thing that I've ever experienced and the most lonely.
When you were in it?
Yeah. Because the idea of speaking it aloud was unthinkable. And I didn't, until obviously it did explode and I felt like I was truly on the edge of insanity.
Why didn't you tell anyone?
I was so afraid of judgment.
You said that's not the first time that you've projected a fantasy onto a partner?
No. And that feeling is incredible, of feeling the most wanted I've ever felt in my life and then suddenly like just a little piece of plastic.
So what's that about?
It's a recreation of something, of being in someone's direct gaze and, and then a complete turn away, and how familiar that feels. I actually remember texting you when I had left him, and I remember you messaging and saying like, are you okay? I sent a long message and you replied saying, shit happens or something. And that was such a relief at the time.
Do you think that the other person could have been anyone?
At the time I thought there was a special thing. But in hindsight yeah, I think it could have been anybody. It was all about the fact that he wanted me. I think all of the cliches are cliches for very good reason. It is electrifying to be that close to a bomb going off. It just is. How could it not be? Like walking through a field of landmines, and you know that you could detonate at any second.