It’s all mum and dad’s fault! Can you really blame an adult affair on your childhood?

Few would deny that having an extra-marital affair is a risky business. If uncovered, you may lose your partner and family, be shamed by people you respect and care about, be seen as a liar, cheat and hypocrite. Or, if you’re breaking the rules of engagement with your pop-star wife,
you might find the whole sorry story of infidelity laid bare in lyrics: “We had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant.” Lily Allen says her West End Girl album is not gospel about the breakdown of her marriage to actor David Harbour, but autofiction. Whatever the genre, it’s a swingeing modern take on an old story.

According to admittedly limited research conducted in the UK in 2015 by research data and analytics company YouGov, infidelity occurs in one in five couples (a conservative number as 20% of the 1600 Britons polled wouldn’t answer the question or “didn’t know”). One US study puts it higher, at 25% over a lifetime.

The appeal of a secret liaison varies. For some, it may be that their marriage is virtually dead, but affairs also feature in otherwise “good relationships”. Is it better sex with a new-found lover, a dangerous thrill in a mundane, domestic life?

Not there to judge

“Having this affair is when I felt most loved and desired in my life,” was said by one of British psychoanalyst Juliet Rosenfeld’s interviewees for her 2025 book Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire.

Rosenfeld has often had clients confess to a secret liaison; all therapists have them, she says, sitting in her elegant Wimple St, London, consulting room. “Affairs come up a lot in therapy, and the therapist is often the first person who hears about it, outside of the couple themselves.

“The therapist is not there to judge right or wrong; they are not moral arbiters. You are simply trying to help them understand why they have put themselves in that jeopardy.”

Again and again she has found that many affairs are less about what’s happening now in the relationship, and more about patterns from early on — how someone was loved, neglected, emotionally or physically cared for (or not) in infancy and childhood.

Juliet Rosenfeld wrote Affairs following interviews about why people cheat on their partners. Photos / Supplied

As she writes in Affairs, we may seek to overcome these deficits and losses but via our unconscious they “pop up and lurk around, coming to frustrate and tempt us with things we know scare us, excite us or fill us with forbidden desires”.

If Rosenfeld is drawn to the psychological realm of the subject, she’s not alone. Think of the fuss when the “Coldplay couple”, married to others were caught in an embrace on a stadium camera in Boston. The story consumed screen and media attention for days. Similarly, there was a wave of coverage in 2015 when the membership of Ashley Madison, the dating site for already-married people, suffered a data breach releasing the names of millions of users looking for secret hook-ups. The furore barely dented its standing. In 2019, it announced that it had 60 million subscribers, up nearly 50% on its pre-exposure level.

Affairs are the spicy meat of literature, cinema, TV and even podcasts. Earlier this year, UK TV production company Curve Media launched its first podcast The Affair and after 24 hours was in the No 1 slot on Apple Podcast charts. Featuring interviews with real people who have had or are having affairs talking to therapist Anna Williamson, it’s further proof that tales of infidelity, wreathed in secrecy, are still potent, and reading about them or seeing them on screen is the guiltiest of pleasures.

Rosenfeld sensed that a book digging deep into such stories and then using psychotherapeutic principles to explain why they happened, would find readers. Ethically unable to use her own clients, she placed an ad, headlined “Have you had an affair?”, promising “strict anonymity for case studies in this under-explored aspect of behaviour”. Within weeks of appearing in The Spectator, the London and New York Review of Books, and on British web community Mumsnet, she had more than 60 replies. She eventually settled on going deep into the motivations of five individuals who she interviewed on Zoom, usually with the camera off, during many months.

“Dangerous and sadistic”

The five case studies came from both the UK and US, were straight and gay, and all aged over 40. Interestingly, all had been in therapy at some stage so they were used to opening up to a professional.

The first story, and in many ways the most extraordinary one, comes from Neil. He is in 60s, wealthy, powerful, married for the second time. The most senior partner in a top London law firm, he comes from a humble background. He appears devoted to his younger wife Serena with whom he starts a second family. But at the same time, he is deep in an intense, controlling affair with Magdalena, whom he had met when she was a nanny for his neighbours. Rosenfeld describes him as “dangerous and sadistic”.

Neil’s story is told in granular detail. The power play of an older man and younger woman and how money is involved (Magdalena is eventually replaced by another even younger woman) makes it seem like a Netflix series. Its plot is thick with glamorous holidays, deluxe homes and endless spending. Rosenfeld tells me women readers in particular find it difficult to read about his cruelty, and the young women’s torment.

Neil’s restlessness led him into therapy for a number of years. Even then, it was not until his mother had died that he even spoke about his childhood. It featured a number of red flags such as, while still a baby, he was for months raised apart from his parents while they looked for work in another country. After his father deserted the family, he was raised by a poverty-stricken, mentally unstable mother who had a series of relationships with married men, then a breakdown resulting in electroshock therapy.

The harm caused to children by their parents’ behaviour is a powerful thread in my book and in my consulting room

As Rosenfeld recounts, his memory of more than 60 years earlier was very fractured, but “unpredictable faces, places, safety and reliability were in short supply. Sad and terrible though it is, his resentment and anger towards his mother endures in his vile treatment of women that come his way and who he seeks out.

“Neil’s behaviour is unconfined because he was never contained by his caregiver or his mother. There was no father in reality, but one existed in his mind. Little Neil fantasised about a powerful man who could protect him, his mother and sister, but who was not there. So Neil reinvented him in a negative and damaging way as an adult – a man who could do whatever he wanted.”

Neil sees a therapist five times a week for psychoanalysis, but he is told by his practitioner, “I can only give you a way of living with this and managing it. I cannot cure you.”

One is left in no doubt that Neil’s affairs and lies will continue, although, Rosenfeld says, “I think he loves Serena very much, and feels very guilty about what he is risking.”

Rosenfeld is a fan of Lisa Taddeo’s non-fiction bestseller Three Women. Photo / Supplied

Freudian influence

The other four stories – a psychotherapist who seduced her patient, ending her marriage, alienating her children, but staying with her lover; a married woman who started a sexual relationship with her married, lesbian colleague; a mother of four who became obsessed with the husband of a friend; and a married doctor interested in BDSM practices who had an online affair with a dominating woman he never meets in person.

Rosenfeld tells the stories taking great care with the details. She thought she could produce her within a year. In the end it took five. Rosenfeld is a fan of Lisa Taddeo’s non-fiction bestseller Three Women, in which the author documents the personal and sexual lives of three women: “I loved that book and it was a huge influence. An extraordinary book.”

In her mid-50s, with two nearly adult sons from her first marriage, Rosenfeld is keen to have the work of the therapy room better understood, and also to ensure that therapy itself keeps up with the modern world. She has only recently been accepted as a fully trained psychoanalyst. Becoming a psychoanalyst requires five times a week analysis for “as many years as it takes before your analyst says you can even be accepted for training”.

Formerly an account manager in advertising, then a civil servant, she came to psychotherapy by reading Freud while doing a course in organisational consultancy at Britain’s Tavistock Clinic.

“I became absolutely fascinated by him, and his ideas. You do analysis to end up with a story of yourself that is true and bearable. As Freud said, remembering, repeating and working through. That is the work.

“I know it sounds so odd and arcane but it’s really a way of making sure you have dealt with yourself, and that very intense experience of analysis really allows you to understand all various parts of you, including parts you don’t want to go into.”

But she is no traditionalist. She has already challenged one of the tenets of psychotherapy, holding strict boundaries around what clients know of a therapist’s personal life.

The end of the affair?

Five years ago, she published the memoir The State of Disbelief: A therapist’s story of love, death and mourning. It is an account of her second husband — a fit, charismatic, very successful businessman — his shock diagnosis of cancer and death at 52. “It is complicated when therapists write about themselves; the more patients know about you, the more you impinge upon the work with them.”

She published because she wanted to memorialise him. “It’s always shocking when someone gets cancer, yet it is so common, and people don’t talk about loss and grief enough.” The Times noted of the book, “She’s turned her anguish into a profound portrayal of what it’s like for those of us left behind.”

Now 56, and remarried, her current focus is on her PhD at University College London, looking at why increasing numbers of women are not marrying and having children.

Rosenfeld is interested in why why increasing numbers of women are not marrying and having children. Photo / Getty Images

Psychoanalysis, she says, has quite a conventional way of looking at a woman’s relational lifespan, that what women want is to end up in a good nurturing relationship and to have children. “But that is not necessarily what women want any more. There are many, many ways to have a relationship now, not just for women.”

She admires authors like Miranda July and Sarah Manguso, who express the feeling that many women feel stifled by marriage. “Something is happening, people are writing about these feelings that echo what I hear in the consulting room. Women these days are making very different decisions about how they want to live their lives.”

There is increasing interest in consensual non-monogamy, when a couple agree to have additional relationships under certain circumstances and with consent on all sides. Rosenfeld and colleagues in her London practice are seeing patients wanting to discuss just this set-up.

“It is going to become much more ordinary and that raises many questions. What will that do to the affair? What will it do to male power? We are finding it is usually the women who want to have additional partners and yet, we still have a gender pay gap and women carrying most of the domestic load.”

She is also questioning the idealisation of the couple. “Why do we feel we have to stay with one person until we die? We are all going to live longer, and many have more than one career. Why do we see it as a merit to stay in an unhappy or unfulfilling relationship?”

The short answer is that most couples have shared children and, as she says, children tend to want to stay with their parents, both of them.

“The harm caused to children by their parents’ behaviour is a powerful thread in my book and in my consulting room. A lot is said about resilience and how well children can adapt, but many people say that because they are guilty.”

In her book, and in the small amount of research there is into affairs, it would appear that most affairs happen in mid-life. If the children are affected they tend to be older, and, if the affair leads to the end of a marriage, dealing with the outcome is more likely to be honest and open than in previous generations.

Cheating hearts however are a tale as old as time. And it’s likely to keep filling chairs in therapists’ offices for time to come, however much social mores move on.

“People do all sorts of things that they can’t stop themselves from doing,” says Rosenfeld. “They come and see someone like me to understand why.”

Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire by Juliet Rosenfeld (Pan Macmillan) is out now.

SaveShare this article

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter/XLinkedInReddit