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We all know that an affair can brutally hurt and break up a marriage but what if it can actually help it? Bel Mooney has taken interest into the question herself and has input her own opinion according to peoples’ experience. Check out the article below here…
Every single week I read anguished letters from women or, less often, men whose marriages are rocked to their foundations by an affair. As this paper’s advice columnist, I’ve almost become used to the deception, rejection, anguish and loneliness which mark yet another marriage crisis.
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But I say ‘almost’ . . . because you never quite get used to the terrible hurt these indiscretions cause. Sometimes reading them makes me want to weep. Alesha wrote to me sadly after her husband conducted a year-long affair with a former colleague of hers:
‘I’ve asked him time and time again the reasons for the affair and he admitted he felt trapped by family life. He also admitted to a mid-life crisis.’
Even after ending the affair — at Alesha’s insistence — her husband made her life miserable because he wanted to be somewhere else. Alesha told me:
‘I’ve tried to look at my own shortcomings and move on. Now I rarely bring it up, but he seems depressed which makes me think he is missing her. I have told him several times if he wishes to re-start the relationship just tell me and I would still let him see his children when he wants to.’
The dignity of that letter is heartbreaking.
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Another writer, Laura, described the effects of finding out her husband was cheating:
‘I’m not coping. I’ve lost a lot of weight, have no self-confidence and hardly ever look in the mirror as I don’t like what I see. I loved the life we had and thought he did too, but now I know he didn’t, it’s hard to see any point in life.’
But it’s not just men who cheat, of course. Another of my correspondents, James, encapsulated the feelings of men whose wives have sought excitement elsewhere:
‘I did everything for her and loved her so much and this feeling of betrayal is like a knife in my chest.’
How anyone could read stories like these, which land in my postbag with seemingly increasing frequency, and maintain that affairs are anything other than devastating? Yet a controversial new book is doing just that. Dr. Catherine Hakim (a social scientist who used to lecture at the London School of Economics) has published a book, The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power, which claims that ‘recreational sex outside of marriage can be good and healthy.
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She argues that a fling between two married people cheating on their spouses, with no strings attached, may actually reinvigorate their marriages and make them less likely to divorce. Hakim believes we need ‘a fresh approach to marriage and adultery’ and to accept the culture of the ‘playfair’. So what exactly is the difference between an old-style ‘affair’ and a thrilling, modern ‘playfair’?
Well, it seems the ‘new’ (as defined by Dr. Hakim) aspect of this very old sin is simply that ‘the internet is opening up a whole new culture of affairs between married people’, with the result that physical betrayal simply doesn’t matter so much any more. That’s hunky-dory with the learned Doc, because she believes that ‘sex is no more a moral issue than eating a good meal.’ At the risk of sounding ‘moralistic’ I’d like to point out that there is no single aspect of human life which is not subject to moral rules. Not one. We ignore them at our peril.
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But for the likes of Dr. Hakim, it seems the late Sixties never ended and anything goes. She believes no harm is done by these ‘playfairs’. Married people who meet and have sex through websites ‘enjoy the excitement of an illicit relationship without any of the domestic fall-out,’ she argues, adding:
‘Why should we not be able to recapture the heady thrills of youth, while protecting a secure home life?’
The theory, you see, is that if you’re having it off with a lover in secret, you’ll stay married. I ask you — who the hell does this woman think she’s kidding? You only have to consider the effects of broadcaster Clive James’s illicit eight-year relationship with Australian former model Leanne Edelsten — his wife of 44 years has thrown him out — to see the devastating ramifications of affairs.
This isn’t the first time Dr. Hakim has courted controversy. After all, suggestive books will sell more copies. She’s good at flashy titles for fleshly thoughts. Her last tome was called Honey Money: The Power Of Erotic Capital — which argued that women need to make the best of our assets to please our men, like so many geisha girls.
Read more at DailyMail…