It was as I helped prepare food for my beloved godmother’s wake that the bombshell was dropped.
Butter knife in hand, her daughter told me that the wonderful woman whose life we were about to celebrate had an extramarital affair with her own cousin’s husband – and that it had gone on for 40 out of the 50 years she’d been married.
‘Mum told me about two years ago,’ said her daughter, pouring us each a glass of wine. ‘She thought she was going to die at that point and couldn’t bear going to her grave never having told anyone.
‘She said she couldn’t quite believe that neither her cousin nor her husband had ever given any sign of knowing about the affair; that she was still amazed she’d got away with it.’
My godmother, who died a decade ago at the age of 74, had then given chapter and verse to her daughter, as if a burden was lifting. ‘Weirdly, I wasn’t horrified, even though it was my dad she had been cheating on,’ said the daughter.
‘It seemed a little late in the day for that and I’d seen with my own eyes how devoted my parents were to each other – though it has made me look back at family gatherings through a different lens. Most of all, I just wanted to know how, how often, when, why, where… and she had that deathbed thing of losing all filter so, blow me down, she told me everything!’
The secret to their success had apparently been a wish right from the start to preserve their respective marriages and not to throw a wrecking ball into their families’ lives.
It started when they all lived in London in the 1970s and it revolved around hotel rooms and naughty afternoons while she left the kids with an au pair.
Susannah Jowitt discovered that her godmother had a 40-year affair
Susannah asked a group of girlfriends about ‘how to have an affair’, anonymously, and says the replies were very enlightening
After a decade or so of that, they both moved to different ends of the country and only saw each other a few times a year – but when they did, the liaison would resume.
Typically, my godmother would tell her husband that she was going to see her cousin on, say, a Tuesday, and book into a hotel nearby for that first night.
Yet she’d tell her cousin that she wasn’t arriving till the Wednesday evening – and spend the whole day having sex with her lover before turning up to have a cosy supper with them both. The husband, I suppose, was ‘working late’ on Tuesday night and ‘at work’ on Wednesday.
For the rest of the time, they depended on phone calls, typewritten letters, then emails and texts. The arrival of the smartphone, she said with a twinkle to her daughter, made life a lot easier.
‘We had strict rules of conduct,’ she told her daughter. ‘And we never, ever broke them. I always imagined that it would end but it just never did.’
The affair became less intense as they got older, but it didn’t ever stop. The last time they met in a hotel room was about six years before she confessed all to her daughter. We just lay on the bed and cuddled – but we still took all our clothes off!’
Her lover died the year after that meeting, but his wife and my godmother’s husband were still alive.
I couldn’t take my eyes off them at my godmother’s funeral, but there genuinely seemed to be no edge to their mourning.
That revelation inspired me to give a similar storyline to the oldest female character in my third novel – a woman who has no intention of wrecking the marriage of her lover, but simply desires a fillip of risk and naughtiness to breathe oxygen into her life as a wife and a working mother.
What she needs, I thought, is a set of rules to act as boundaries within the affair – and to come up with those rules, I widened my source material beyond my godmother.
Thinking very carefully, I drew up a list of 17 girlfriends who had, over the years, hinted that they knew about such things and asked them in an email entitled ‘Can You Tell Me How To Have An Affair?’ if they wouldn’t mind clicking on the Google Forms link and submitting anonymously to a survey.
The replies were very enlightening – a dozen of my girlfriends confirmed they had strayed – and turned my preconceived prudery on its head. I am happy in my 27-year marriage and have no experience of having an affair, but I was fascinated by the craft and craftiness of their guidance.
Here are their top five rules of engagement…
1. Don’t get caught!
Not one of my 12 girlfriends who’d had affairs had got caught; not one. ‘The first rule of Affair Club,’ said one friend, ‘you do not talk about Affair Club.’
No matter how tempting it is to talk about an extramarital adventure, she explained, that is a surefire way for word to get out.
Not getting caught is otherwise remarkably straightforward, all my sources agreed; just be risk averse and only meet when and where you know you’re not going to bump into a witness.
We’ve also got to be realistic: not everyone can get away with dirty weekends away or trysts in hotel rooms, so nearly all my responders had used their own houses for assignations, putting the chain or the double-latch on the door to prevent nasty surprises. Very few had ever spent the whole night away. One respondent kept things very simple.
‘I have an on-off affair with my gardener, while my husband is up in London for work,’ she said.
‘I wanted to tackle our overgrown jungle of a garden by myself but it was too much so I took a recommendation from a friend and hired him over the phone for a day a week. The minute he turned up, I took one look and couldn’t think about anything else; dreamt about him, had fantasies, the whole thing, but told myself I was imagining any spark: he was 15 years younger!
‘Then, one day, we were in the shed, of all places, and when I passed him a cup of tea our fingers touched and he looked at me and, just like that, it all kicked off.
‘To start with we were like rabbits – in the shed, in the greenhouse, outside all over the hidden corners of the garden – but never inside the house, like that somehow made it more acceptable! My husband has never even met him.’
‘Such is the arrogance of most husbands,’ said another friend scornfully. ‘They are remarkably lacking in suspicious imagination.
‘Mine now works from home so daytimes are no longer an option, but I have got away with countless “dinners with girlfriends” and many imaginary nights at the theatre when, in fact, I’m seeing the other man. Obviously I always read all the reviews for what I’ve supposedly seen – I’m not stupid.’
There are tips sprinkled through all these confessions that sound like MI5 briefings.
File his contact under a woman’s name: Jackie Casanova, for example. Limit messaging to a time when you’re not with your nearest and dearest – nothing says I’m playing away like blushing at some saucy text while serving up the family supper.
Pay for hotel rooms not with a credit card or from the joint account, but with cashback from the weekly Tesco shop.
Never take phone calls from your lover unless you’re alone. Mute or archive him on WhatsApp. It’s basic affair-craft.
2. Don’t fall in love
My 12 girlfriends had all had ‘successful’ affairs. That is, they went under the radar and didn’t torpedo any marriages. No hysterical confrontations were had, and no bunnies were boiled.
But still I was struck by the hard-headed practicality that came through in their stories; all seemed remarkably dispassionate. Reading between the lines of their responses, this seemed to be because of the way they had set up their affairs, with many abiding by similar rules of conduct to those my godmother had sworn by.
Top of everyone’s list – written by one in shouty capitals – was an exhortation, ‘DON’T FALL IN LOVE!’ That way, it seemed, madness lay: all but three of them answered a simple ‘no’ to the question: ‘Did you fall in love with your affair?’
‘I started a flirtation with an old college flame, who had got back in touch after being overseas for a few years and even before we slept together, I fancied that I had fallen in love with him,’ said one.
One of the revelations that came out of me questioning my friends was how, when it came down to it, a successful affair was like any treat: best in moderation and best not to overthink it
‘I think it was a way I could justify straying to myself. So when we arranged our first actual hook-up, I hardly waited until our first kiss was done before I was breathing, “I love you” down his ear.
‘He pulled back and said, “Oh dear. Not a good idea. If you really think you do, then we should probably stop now before someone gets hurt.”
‘I was downcast – and embarrassed – but he was rather lovely, telling me that, though he fancied the pants off me, that was all it was ever going to be because he and I were both going to stay in our marriages and no one was going to get hurt, all the while stroking my hand and my face.
‘I was on fire. And it was like a sudden bright dawning of realisation: I didn’t have to fall in love with him – I could just have fun with him. There could be fireworks but no ballistic missiles.
‘That was back in 2017 and it’s been a blast: we don’t get to see each other very often because he moved to Cornwall, but when we do, it’s joyous.’
Not falling in love also seemed to be the equivalent of a moral get-out clause: all my friends except two insisted they still loved their husband and that was why the affair worked. ‘Any drama and an affair would be unworkable,’ said one succinctly.
3. Don’t be a needy stereotype
I was struck by the lack of that affair cliche: the needy, crying woman hounding her lover to leave his wife.
Or, worse, the full drama queen who makes a terrible fuss in public.
This is the trope we are so often fed in Hollywood films or television series – but where were those women among my respondents?
The answer lay in the nature of the sample in my survey: these were women who hadn’t got caught.
‘I virtually never start a conversation with him on WhatsApp,’ said one.
‘He has to make all the running, initiate all the flirting.
‘In some senses, I’m the easy one: I have the empty house where my husband is out all day so I could be on at him all the time, needily asking him when he’s next coming round.
‘But I stepped back from that and now he knows that if he wants it, he has to come and get it.’
These are no mistresses, these are powerful paramours: it seems adultery has had a feminist makeover.
4. Do use it as a confidence boost
Nearly all my friends started one or more answers to my questions with the words, ‘I love my husband but…’, which at first made me feel a little sad for their husbands. But conversations with other women – and men – since have clarified my thoughts.
Most of my friends have been married for 20 years or more and we all know that sex with our husbands cannot stay as exciting as it was in the first rush of passion for that long, unless one of us is prepared to introduce new moves. (If we care enough, that is – a lot of my other friends seem to have given up sex altogether.)
The women having affairs have simply gone one step further and scratched that itch for passion in another way: with someone else.
One was bored in bed, so she signed up to a website for married people seeking affairs.
‘I had the wildest sex I’d ever had with six complete strangers (not all at once). The confidence that gave me was unbelievable – the thrill of knowing that I could seduce gave me enough confidence to get out of my marriage.
‘Oh, the satisfaction of knowing ever since that not a soul knew about my indiscretions!’
Another admitted that she and her lover used each other to push boundaries.
‘We talk on WhatsApp about our fantasies, things we’ve never done, and then when we meet up, we’re excited to try them out: getting all that out of my system makes me happier with my husband and has even gently raised the bar with him so our sex life together is actually improving.’
A surprising theme was that what works for Town isn’t always the case for Country. One of my questions was ‘Where are you based?’ and the division of locations was echoed by a surprising division in the types of affairs they had.
Town mice tended towards colleagues or old flames; their country cousins found it easier to take advantage of their access to those who worked for them – who were, well, good with their hands.
My Lady Chatterley friend was clear on this point: ‘I know we have a pretty good thing going; we can have such great sex together without having to share our lives; that it spices up my life, that he makes me feel young and free for those few hours every week.
‘My husband has never asked much about him and definitely suspects nothing; perhaps because he’s so much younger, perhaps because I pay his gardening invoices.’
5. Don’t tie yourself up in knots
One of the unexpected revelations that came out of me questioning my friends was how, when it came down to it, a successful affair was like any treat: best in moderation and best not to overthink it.
‘This is why married women are so good at affairs,’ said one. ‘We’re already better at multi-tasking, at fitting stuff in, doing all the below-water paddling.
‘I had my first affair about ten years into my marriage and what started out as a bit of fun soon became a bit of a nightmare to be honest because he just panicked all the time, got himself tied in knots lying to his wife, couldn’t cope with – no kidding – the “admin” of the affair.
‘He finally got too scared and dumped me because he was terrified (as I was) that he’d confess to his wife if we carried on.
‘Men are so binary that they often can’t cope with two women at once: that’s why they so often get caught. I felt like I could just compartmentalise it better than him: I already ran my and my children’s lives in parallel, what was one more?’
There’s clearly a moral Schrodinger’s cat here: if the affair isn’t hurting anyone, is anyone getting hurt?
I’d like to think that the potential for hurt would be enough of a deterrent if I were ever tempted.
I exchanged my wedding vows with my husband 28 years ago this July. Which is why it is only the character in my book who will be having an affair: even if my godmother got away with it, I simply wouldn’t want to.
