I was flicking through the newspaper and splashed across the page, amid the doom and gloom, were the words: 'Life is short. Have an affair. It was an advert for 'cheating' website, Ashley Madison. This was in and it was the first time I'd ever heard of it. The idea that people would sign up and actively seek an affair seemed so cold and calculated to me. You might think that makes me a hypocrite given that in my then year marriage, I'd already had two affairs.
While my husband was a wonderful man, there had been something missing from my marriage for some time, leading me to seek affection, love and sex elsewhere. But to me, that was different. Meeting someone 'organically' and embarking on a love affair had a level of innocence to it.
I hadn't sought it out and there were genuine feelings involved; I hadn't been someone's dirty little secret. It seemed many of the women using it were sophisticated and intelligent.
Like me, they were looking for something that was missing from their marriage. I wasn't sure about it at first. Some men were sleazy all over me like flies, desperate to send dick pics.
I started to get quite bullish about what I wanted. I started to go for coffees with the men I thought might actually give me what I wanted. Then I met "Melbourne" β that was what I called him because that was where he'd relocated from, due to his wife's job. He was now working in the city I lived in and the attraction when we met up was instant. This was a common thread with every man I got to know from the site: their wives have simply stopped giving them sex, or at the very least, become utterly complacent.
