They were married in a church – white
wedding, string quartet, 250 guests. He
was barely out of uni, working at a tech
company, and on fire with ambition. She was
his sweetheart, a cool-eyed beauty in the
mould of Garbo or Bacall, with a wry sense of
humour and an unbeatable bluff at the poker
table. They seemed meant for each other.
Bryan and Gina. Gina and Bryan.
Three years later he was a manager at
a large tech firm – basically convincing
partnering software companies to play nice
with each other. From the outside, everything
looked great: six-figure salary, big house, two
cars and then a newborn son. The Dream,
basically. And then...
"You never wake up and say, 'Hey, I'm
going to have an affair today,'" Bryan says.
Life, he's learned, is sneaky. And temptation
is everywhere. Mostly it remains at a distance,
winking from the TV screen or slinking by
on the side of a bus, but every now and then
it swerves close. Maybe the temptation is at
work. Maybe at a party. Increasingly, says
Rick Reynolds, founder and president of
AffairRecovery.com, it's on the Internet.
"Twenty per cent of all divorce petitions
mention Facebook," Reynolds says, citing
a survey by a UK-based law firm. With the
added oxygen of sites like Facebook, he
says, old flames reignite. "Even if you had
good reason for letting these people go by
the wayside, you forget that. And then the
context makes it easy to say things to them
that you would never say in person."
Bryan was as high-tech as the next guy.
For him, however, temptation arrived the old-
fashioned way.
"She started working as an intern," he says.
Asked to describe her, he sighs, a long exhale
through the nose. "Hot," he admits finally.
Because she was hot. This is the truth. Her
auburn hair was short, her mouth ample, her
wit raunchy. She aspired to be a model and
knew how to make the most of the company
dress code. Just standing next to her gave
him a charge. And when she left the room a
sort of vapour trail of hotness lingered, until
everything collapsed once more into the
purely ordinary, the desk rematerialising,
IT STARTED OFF
WELL ENOUGH.
covered with dreary paperwork, a pasty-faced
colleague blinking back into focus, saying his
name. Bryan? Bryan? Hello?
His mind could never quite seem to get a
fix on her; her party lifestyle was so different
from anything he knew; he'd married so young
and had a son soon after.
It began with drinks at the local bar with
the rest of the team. She drove a souped-up
sports car. He razzed her about that. And
about her so-called boyfriend. She claimed she
was engaged but didn't have a ring. "Well that
doesn't count, then, does it?" he said.
It went on like that for a month or two.
Mostly harmless. Then he went out of town
on business and ended up at a jewellery store
in his hotel. He bought a bracelet for her. He
didn't forget he was married, though – he
bought earrings for his wife.
Today, Bryan is awestruck by his capacity
to deceive himself. "You start to tell yourself
lies and then you start to believe them," he
says. "Your make-believe reality becomes real."
Infidelity is generally thought to begin
with deception, but Bryan's story suggests
that self-deception may be the key ingredient.
Even before his best friend began lying for
him when his wife called and loaning his
apartment for trysts, Bryan had become his
own enabler by hiding the truth from himself.
Nor is he alone in this. Around 60 per cent
of men and 45 per cent of women are
willing to report that an affair has occurred
sometime in their marriage, according to
Sexual Health Australia.
The eye-popping figures start to make
sense once you realise what we're up against.
Evolution, for one thing, which has left men
in every country four times more likely than
women to hanker for multiple partners.
Then there's the ineluctable machinery
of attraction itself. The dopamine spike upon
catching her eye, the illicit thrill Bryan felt just
thinking her name, the almost sensual way
it contained her, the same way he longed to
contain her, hold her, possess her.
"When you feel intense romantic love,"
says Dr Helen Fisher, a research professor at
Rutgers University and author of Why Him?
Why Her?, "it's the same brain region thatbecomes activated when you feel the rush
of cocaine.
"Romantic love is a wonderfully
pleasurable addiction when it's going okay,"
Fisher says. "The problem is when it's not."
All affairs end. And it's the rare one that ends
well. In fact, an Israeli study of couples in
therapy found that about 84 per cent of affairs
leave the marriage worse off than it was
before, with more than a third of those ending
in divorce. What's more, fewer than 10 per
cent of men who cheat eventually marry their
new love interest and of those who do, 75 per
cent end up divorced again. If that weren't
enough, the emotional isolation so common
with divorce raises blood pressure to the