Affairs are no longer the leading reason for divorce... so does infidelity still matter?

Has infidelity finally lost its sting? In an age of multiple marriages and serial relationships, has the pain of betrayal been downgraded?
When the rich, famous and powerful - from Wayne Rooney to Bill Clinton and Dominique Strauss-Kahn - can get away with adultery and skulk back to their wives, marriages bruised but not battered, is adultery just an inevitable lovers’ blip, rather than a reason to divorce?
When the rich and famous like Wayne Rooney can get away with adultery and skulk back to their wives, is adultery just an inevitable lovers' blip, rather than a reason to divorce?

Just a blip? Many marriages are surviving despite one half having an affair

According to accountancy firm Grant Thornton’s latest annual study of divorce in the UK, extramarital affairs are no longer the leading reason why couples decide to split up. Infidelity has been replaced by ‘growing apart’ and falling out of love as the most popular motivation for filing for divorce.
But, as always in the minefield of relationships, the issue is not as straightforward as it might first appear.

 

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To suggest that infidelity is a mere blip would be to dismiss the devastating impact of betrayal and the very real pain that adultery causes. For infidelity makes a mockery of marriage vows — those promises that certainly did mean something to most people at the time of making them.
What has definitely shifted as far as attitudes are concerned is that the shame and secrecy around the issue of infidelity have all but disappeared, helping people to recognise not only that it goes on in all walks of society, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean a marriage is doomed.
At the point when the husband of Amanda Eggerton (not her real name) confessed he’d been having a three-year affair, she was 47 years old and the mother of two teenage girls.

'Finding out he'd cheated on me was agonising - but the prospect of divorce was even worse'

‘I didn’t suspect a thing and then one night we were in bed together reading and he just put down his book and blurted out the whole sordid scenario.
‘He felt so guilty that he needed to get it off his chest — whereas I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.
‘At that moment, despite his genuine remorse and his promise the affair was finished, all I could think was: “That’s it then, the marriage to this man I love is over.”’
But Amanda decided to put any decisions about divorce on hold. Her daughters were in the run-up to their GCSEs and A-levels at the time and she was determined not to do anything that would adversely affect their concentration on their studies.
Over the next few months, and with the help of a counsellor, she slowly began to tot up all the good things about her marriage and realised she wanted to save it.
‘I chewed over everything I didn’t want to lose. Patrick is a great dad, funny and smart, and we’re both teachers, so we have a great deal to talk about. Family means a lot to us — not just our kids, but our wider family as well. I love his old mum and my sister adores Patrick.
‘But our sex life, which was never great, had dwindled to nothing. The truth is, I’m not a particularly sexual person and I didn’t think Patrick was either. He never pestered me.
‘But of course Patrick DID want sex; just not with me. What hurt more than the idea of him having sex was the realisation that he really cared for this other woman.’ 

Tied by marriage: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his long suffering wife Anne Sinclair

After a few months in therapy on her own, Amanda persuaded Patrick to go with her to couples counselling. They decided not to divorce, but rather than attempt to revive their sex life, accepted their affectionate but virtually celibate marriage.
Ten years on and they’re still together. Amanda doesn’t know if Patrick has had further affairs, but says: ‘I wouldn’t blame him if he had. In an odd way, the affair has brought us closer, because, although he may have sex with another woman, I now know he’ll never leave.
‘Some people might think a celibate marriage is a sham, but I bet there are far more celibate couples out there than will own up to it.’
For Charlotte Friedman, a former divorce lawyer and now a family therapist who runs the UK-wide Divorce Support Group, an affair is far from being the inevitable death knell to marriage, especially in cases such as Amanda’s, where both partners want it to work. 
According to Charlotte, there are two main types of infidelity.
‘The first is where one of the couple is unfaithful as a means of getting out of the marriage.
‘But in the other instance, it is more likely to be a symptom of a problem in the marriage, which doesn’t necessarily mean the unfaithful partner wants it to end.’

LOOK OUT

74 per cent of men admit they would have an affair — if they knew they wouldn't get caught

In cases like these, Charlotte suggests, it’s often going to be the betrayed partner who has to do the most work to get the marriage back on track.
‘It takes huge will to summon up the courage and energy to come to terms with the affair and to work hard at building trust again, but once that happens the marriage may well survive.
‘In my experience, affairs can live on as the elephant in the room for a good two to three years before things quietly settle down again.’
In certain cultures and strata of society, infidelity has always gone along with marriage — regarded as both outside and incidental to it.
Royals have been getting away with it for ever. When Camilla Parker Bowles blithely continued her affair with Prince Charles after his marriage, she was doing just what her great-grandmother Alice Keppel had managed to pull off without any chorus of disapproval.
In fact, when Keppel — a married woman like Camilla — became mistress of Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, in 1898,  the Prince’s own wife, Alexandra of Denmark, is said to have remarked that she preferred Keppel’s discretion to that of the Prince’s previous mistress.
Then there’s the French acceptance of the maitresse. The great intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously embarked on a lifelong relationship that openly accepted what they termed ‘contingent love affairs’ on both sides.

All is forgiven: Being unfaithful wasn't a marriage breaker for footballers Ryan Giggs, left, and Wayne Rooney

Despite her literary success and celebrity as a feminist role model, De Beauvoir continued to insist that her relationship with Sartre was her greatest achievement.
And now we have the spectacle of Anne Sinclair, wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, standing by her man not just in the wake of an alleged sexual assault in a New York hotel room (the case has now been dropped), but willing to overlook his serial infidelities throughout their 20-year relationship.
While the British public are harder on their infamous love rats than the French — Ashley Cole, John Terry and Wayne Rooney, to name but three who have been castigated by the public and media alike — their wives, it seems, are sometimes more forgiving, lending further credence to the downgrading of adultery as a marriage breaker.
This is especially true in the case of Cheryl Cole and Coleen Rooney, women who have their own careers and financial security, and really don’t need their partners to prevent them vanishing into obscurity.
Some therapists believe that infidelity should not be condemned so much as understood.
Esther Perel, a New York couples therapist and author of Mating In Captivity, has advocated a more rational attitude. Extra-marital affairs, she has contended, are a way for individuals to explore themselves and revitalise a stale sex life. While recognising the trauma of infidelity, she also argues the case for tolerance.

STRAYING POWER

54 per cent of women confess to being unfaithful at some point in their lives

For my friend Gina (not her real name), now in her late 60s, confronting her husband about his infidelities was never an option.
‘It’s different for women now,’ she told me, ‘but I had no career or means of providing for myself and the children, at least not to the level of comfort my husband provided.
‘And given that we always enjoyed a fulfilling sex life, I eventually accepted this particular need of his. I’m not saying it wasn’t agonising at times, but the alternative — divorce — was worse.’
Now Gina can even wryly laugh about it: ‘The old boy is retired now and I think he’s run out of sexual steam for other women.
‘We’re together so much of the time these days that I can’t see when he’d have the chance for anything extra-curricular. And we’re happy enough. Certainly happier than we would have been if we’d ended up alone.’
There aren’t any reliable statistics on infidelity, but anecdotal evidence would suggest that while more men than women have affairs overall, the number of women having affairs might be increasing. For women in particular, the opportunities have never been greater.
We return to the workplace after motherhood, we travel on business or on girly breaks away and — if we are so inclined — can hook up with men over the internet.
According to Janet Reibstein, Professor in Psychology at the University of Exeter and author of The Best Kept Secret: How Love Can Last For Ever (Bloomsbury), the rush to end a relationship in the wake of an affair might get you into more trouble than dealing with it.
‘We’ve all seen the fallout from divorce, especially where children are concerned. And we all know that sex does occur outside marriage and that many marriages seem to survive it.’
So falling out of love and growing apart are now more pressing reasons for divorce than an affair.
As one male friend, whose marriage ended in divorce after 20 years, poignantly expressed it: ‘The brief affair my wife had played no part in the hurt I felt.
‘What had cut like a knife was the day she told me she wanted to go on a summer holiday without me. That was the real moment when I realised she no longer loved me.’
Adultery, it seems, may be endured, forgiven or accepted.
But when the loving spark dies, a modern marriage is unlikely to survive