Something on the side?

How to avoid getting caught having an affair

If you are having a marital affair then in all likelihood you don’t want to get caught.Possibly you still love your partner and your affair is just a way to get some sexual excitement. Or maybe you have kids and would hate to see them get hurt. Or maybe you just can’t afford a divorce.

Either way, protecting yourself from discovery is absolutely paramount. Here’s some tips to help you get away with your naughtiness.

• The overarching principle is: keep it simple. The more complex your life becomes, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong.
• Don’t develop regular patterns of behaviour. “Working late” in the office is fine from time to time. When it starts happening every Thursday, you’re going to need explanations as to why that is. Even if you have a convincing explanation, eventually your partner is going to start resenting the fact that you’re always late and never seem to get a promotion
• Keep separate communication channels. It should be a no-brainer, but using your everyday email account to make arrangements or swap sordid messages with a lover leaves you open to a massive danger. Email addresses from the like of Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are free and can be dedicated to certain relationships you don’t want anyone else to know about. Make sure, of course, to use a careful choice of username and password that is different to those you use for day to day activities.
• Don’t take uneccessary risks. Part of the sheer excitement of having an affair rests with the danger. But it is foolish to start increasing that danger through choice. Sure, sex in a back alley might be the most exciting of your life, but you’ve literally no idea who might walk around the corner. If it’s someone who knows either of you – however tangentially – the game could be up.
• Don’t lie to your lover. You’re already engaging in lies as it is. But if you start telling your lover that you see a great future for you together just to get them into the sack then you’re multiplying your risks many times over. If this is just excitement on the side then just tell the other person so they know where they stand. That way, you lessen the risk of unwanted emotional attachments.
• Don’t like to yourself. Don’t kid yourself about your motivations. If you want out of a marriage then you’re better seeking legal advice than a shag on the side.
• Don’t make your secrecy too obvious. If you have a workaday email account, make sure your partner has the password so that they feel that they are trusted. Likewise, don’t be too obvious about keeping your phone hidden or on your person at all times. Make sure that your lover knows when, where and how to contact you when their is the least chance of discovery.
• Don’t trust people with your secret. Unburdening yourself to a friend might seem like a sensible step from an emotional perspective but now the number of people who could potentially blow your cover through a careless word or conversation is suddenly much, much higher.

Many people think they’re clever enough – or their partners stupid enough – for them to get away with the most colossal risks. But taking risks puts your life in the hands of luck rather than judgement. By following the precautionary principles behind these practical steps, you’re giving yourself the best chance of getting away with your affair.

Good luck!

Jon Terry Has Been Having an Affair

John Terry. Equally at home at centre back or in your fiancee's privates

Ahhh… the perennial topic of celebrity cheating has a new figurehead today as England Captain John Terry has been caught knobbing Vanessa Perroncel – fiancee of team mate Wayne Bridge. Naughty naughty… especially given that Terry himself is married to his childhood sweetheart and a father of two.

We’ve seen time and again in these pages how the pressure cooker of emotional that an affair can unleash in even the most apparently stable of lives. What this all means for Terry and Bridge, who must share a dressing room having shared a girl is anyone’s guess.

One thing is for sure – the allure of a man such as Terry, captain of his country, athletic, inspiring, fabulously wealthy is such that even someone married to another multi-millionaire athlete can fall under that spell.

It also shows that man who has everything in the world – a stunning wife, money beyond reason, at the very pinnacle of his profession can still fall prey to the temptation of illicit, dangerous sex.

Whether you’re a housewife, doctor, golfer or footballer the pull of the dark magic of sex can override every rational calculation. Perhaps it can lead to fulfillment… but it can also lead to despair. Are you ready to have an affair? It’s not for me to say. But even the rich and the famous struggle to keep a lid on the emotions and sexual tension that it can unleash.

Be careful out there…

Having an affair with a married man

So you want to be “the other woman”. Maybe you get off on the fact that you’re fucking some other woman’s husband just because it is so very, very wrong. Or perhaps you actually love this guy and hope that, one day, he’ll leave his wife and run to your arms. Or it could be that you’re both simply after a little bit of mutual fun.

All ways up, you’re treading a line that can be both thrilling and dangerous.

Firstly, you’re messing with something that – even now- is a totem of society: marriage. While everyone knows that marriages today are less of a permanent feauture.

…an undeleted text message or a pair of knickers left in a glovebox can have disastrous outcomes for all of you…

Secondly, you’re messing with another woman. Time after time in these pages, we cover lives that are ruined (or even ended) when affairs are discovered. It isn’t uncommon for a woman to want vengeance on the other woman ahead of her husband.

Thirdly, you could be messing with a man’s happiness. He might have come into the affair thinking that he loved his wife but wanted a casual shag on the side. But what if he starts to fall for you? Are you prepared to handle the consequences if one day he turns up on your doorstep with a dozen roses and a suitcase of his belongings? What starts in mere sex can quickly escalate into something more profound unless there is total honesty between the lovers about what they are looking to get out of their affair.

Finally, consider whether kids are involved. You might not especially care if you hurt his wife by stealing or fucking her husband – hell, maybe she even deserves it – but do his children deserve. It could be that his marriage is headed for the rocks anyway, but how far you want to contribute to that process is something that you have to live with between you and your conscience.

Chances are that, like so many, you will be caught up in a whirlwind of lust and blind to potential consequences. But remember, no matter how many precautions you take, an undeleted text message or a pair of knickers left in a glovebox can have disastrous outcomes for all of you.

Some advice…

1. Be honest about your intentions
2. Be as sure as you can be about his intentions
3. Think about his wife, children and domestic situation
4. Do not get too casual about contacting him if his intention is to stay with his wife
5. Walk away if you think there is a danger of discovery

GP Colin Shawcross Murdered for an Affair

Sex, lies and head trauma.

You have to wonder whether it’s worth it. Sure, there’s the pulsating pleasure of illicit sex – the kind of steaming passion you haven’t felt since you were a desperate teenager… but what when it goes wrong?

GP Colin Shawcross is merely the latest addition to the pile of dead bodies caused by extramarital sex. The good doctor became friends with nurse Julie Hill after taking her out to dinner when she was moving jobs from the Sheffield Hallam hospital.

Of course, you can’t have dinner with a chick these days without it ending up in a hotel room and it was little surprise when the two found themselves in a series of steamy clinches. Dr. Shawcross was unusually frank about his affair – showing a little bit more honour than many of those who’ve found their way onto these pages. He told his wife about the affair and moved out of the family home.

For once, a love that blossomed illicitly seemed to have a bit of hope for the future.

Meanwhile, Hill too confessed to her husband. But rather than the relatively civilised and adult arrangement that the Shawcrosses managed to find for themselves, Hill’s husband took it all rather badly.

In a series of text messages, he threatened suicide until Hill moved back in with him out of fear. But under such circumstances, things could never last. When at last she announced that she was leaving him for good, it unleashed a tidal wave of fury. He smashed her mobile phone against a wall… threw her personal effects from the window… and then set out to find Dr. Shawcross.

We can only speculate what went through the doctor’s mind as the enraged husband approached his car. Seconds later, he was beyond thought – his skull split by a pick-axe handle. After the savage attack, his killer bundled his body into the boot and attempted to bury it in nearby woodland.

The case, as they say, continues.

So another tale of extramarital sex ends in tragedy and death. When will you people learn? But even so – you’re still interested, aren’t you? Why not tell us about it in person before you wind up in these pages as just another statistic…

Jackie Collins had an affair with Marlon Brando? WTF?

Had the body of a 19 year old when she was 14. Now... looks about.. errr.. 72

Well it happened a long time ago, but it’s still interesting news. In a wide-ranging interview with American tabloid The Globe, the British author of sensationalist sex novels like ‘Bitch’ confessed sleeping with Brando when she was 15.

Attending a Hollywood party with her older sister – the actress Joan Collins – Jackie claims that:

“He sent someone over to me to say, ‘Marlon thinks you’re great-looking and have a great body and would like to meet you.’ We had a very brief but fabulous affair. He was at the height of his fame and gorgeous.”

Collins, now 72, claimed to have ‘the body of a 19 year old’ at the age of 14, but regardless how well she was stacked, Brando could have faced serious legal problems had the affair come to light at the time. California law allows for a 4 year jail sentence for anyone having sex with an under 18 if there is more than 3 years between them.

Brando, like a lot of movie stars, was alleged to have an enormous sexual appetite. In interviews, he alluded to numerous affairs – including a long lasting one with Marilyn Monroe. His tastes just didn’t stop with women. Famously, he told an interviewer in 1976:

“Homosexuality is so much in fashion it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me”

So there you have it.

How to avoid emotional attachment while having an affair

Having an affair is tricky. Aside from the trouble inherent in evading detection, it is almost impossible to tell how you and your extramarital affair will work out from an emotional perspective.

A lot, of course, depends on your reasons for embarking on an affair. If you are actively seeking a new partner and a way out of your marriage, emotional attachment is probably exactly what you’re looking for with your new partner. But if you’re having an affair just because you think you need a thrill or a bit on the side, then keeping emotions out of it makes it easier to do and get away with.

Honesty

The first point therefore is to be upfront with the person you’re intending to have an affair with. If all you want is fun, then you’d better be honest with them. Firstly – and most importantly – you must tell them that you are married. They deserve to know where they stand. Like anyone in a relationship, if they discover that they’ve been lied to they’ll be hurt and angry.

Keeping a lid on affair is pretty hard as it is. You hurt someone’s feelings then there is no telling what they will do. It is precisely because of this lack of openness that people go so far as to commit murder in an attempt to hide their activities. If you’re just after some casual fun, then make that clear. Don’t proclaim undying love and buy presents. Stick to sex.

Anonymity

A second strategy is to maintain a degree of anonymity. The more you let someone into your life, the greater the opportunities are for you to become too interested in each other. You don’t have to lie about your job or your relationship, but you don’t have to tell the other person any great detail. They needn’t know where your office is or what you do there. By keeping some of the detail of your life away from their knowledge, there is less basis for feelings to grow.

If you’ve got the opportunity, you could even go so far as to use a false name, a disposable phone number and a one-off email address.

The Amount of Contact

Thirdly, minimise the contact you have with the other person.The more you talk to them, the more you grow to like them. If you start sharing jokes… telling each other what your day at the office was like and so on ever day, then you are putting your affair on a different level. You are also harming your marriage. This is the stuff that you are supposed to share with your spouse. By sharing it with someone else, you are subconsciously putting the new relationship on the same kind of footing as your marriage. That quickly leads to questions forming in your own head about who you truly love.

Be Prepared to Cut it Off

If you’re planning to avoid getting tangled up in someone else’s emotional life, you have to have a certain degree of calculation about you. You can take all the steps you like to stop yourself becoming too attached to the other person, but if they’re investing more in you then you have to be prepared to cut and run. Look for danger signs:

• Proclamations of love.
• An increasing amount of contact between you
• More sharing of day to day troubles
• Starting to dismiss your partner between yourselves in conversation

Once you start to cross these bridges, you are putting yourself in a more emotionally attuned situation. You need to remember that you came into this for sex and thrills. If and when you start to feel emotion creeping into the equation, you have to be prepared to cut things off.

Peter Robinson’s Wife Was Having an Affair

Politicians are renowned for dipping their wicks into anyone who goes weak at the knees in the presence of power and influence. But sometimes, its their long suffering other halves who fall prey to temptation while their partners are voting and shouting and fiddling their expenses. And, as ever with affairs, tragedy can follow.

Northern Ireland’s first minister Peter Robinson has quite a lot of shit going down. If IRA splinter groups aren’t trying to foment revolution and Sinn Fein bring him down then it transpires that he’s spent the last year dealing with the fallout from his wife’s “inappropriate relationship” with what Irish newspapers are calling “a much younger man.”

So far, so ordinary, but this week’s tale has a sadder bent than most. The first that Robinson knew of the affair was when he found his wife during an attempt to take her own life.

The emotional consequences of an affair can be deep and long lasting for either party. If you’re thinking of cheating then be warned that things can spiral out of control in directions you never imagined. You might think you’re getting a little shag on the side, but before you know it you can end up in way over your head before you know it. Even if it doesn’t spark any feelings in you, the other person can fall for you and make your life more complicated than you’re prepared for.

And if all that gets too much, you might find you’re prepared to go to almost any lengths to find an escape route – from murder to suicide.

On the other hand, you could feel cool about the whole thing. If you’re planning to have an affair, then think very carefully and make sure that not only you know what you’re doing, but the other party is on the level too.

Angelina Jolie thinks marital affairs are OK?

In your face, Pitt - Angelina says she might shag me. Kind of.

The big-lipped star of such classic films as Gia (which, frankly, we only know about because it has a some sensational lesbian sex scenes) and.. err… Tomb Raider has told a German magazine that having affairs is no big deal.

“I doubt that fidelity is absolutely essential for a relationship. It’s worse to leave your partner and talk badly about him afterwards. Neither Brad nor I have ever claimed that living together means to be chained together. We make sure that we never restrict each other.”

I guess that’s fine and dandy when you’re rich as Croesus and have a great ass but it probably doesn’t translate well to normal people. It’s also not exactly a great message to pass onto the kids, I guess, because there’s no guarantee that they’ll end up with someone as ‘understanding’ when they come home reeking of other people’s sex.

On the plus side, I guess that means it’ll be fine to try out some chat-up lines on Angelina if she’s ever in town. I’m going for my all-time classic standby: “Are you a spanner? Every time I look at you my nuts tighten”. Whaddyathink?

New Hampshire to Legalise Adultery?

We’re used to seeing how some parts of the world still treat adultery as more than a mere moral failing and have actually gone so far as to criminalise it. Punishments vary from a mere two years porridge to a public stoning.

Despite the fact that most of us associate that kind of legal system with backwaters like Somalia, adultery is still on the statute book of several US states. New Hampshire’s own law is in the spotlight as the state plays host to a debate about whether the law should be repealed.

Over the years, the punishment against adultery has softened from ’standing on the gallows with a noose around your neck for an hour’ (WTF?) to 39 lashes to today’s more liberal $1200 fine.

Republican Timothy Horrigan is one of the most visible proponents of a change in law. His summary is crisp and eloquent:

“We shouldn’t be regulating people’s sex lives and their love lives. This is one area the state government should stay out of people’s bedrooms.”

According to experts from DePaul University of Law in Chicago, laws against adultery are very rarely actually used in the states following a Supreme Court decision in 2003 (Lawrence vs. Texas) which found that the state had no legitimate reason to intrude on personal lives.

Although that case centred on the case of two gay men who were arrested in their own bedroom for sodomy, the principle that the state cannot arbitrate sexual conduct has proved to influential. Much to the annoyance of conservatives such as Kevin Smith who makes the counter-argument.

“Even though this criminal law probably is not enforced right now and probably has not been enforced for some time, I think it’s important to have a public policy statement that says generally or in all situations adultery is not a good thing. And I think, by repealing that statute, you’re essentially diminishing the harmful effects of adultery.”

Personally, that reminds us of the use of laws here in the UK to “send out messages”. Like the continuing debate on the legalisation of drugs, there’s little evidence that merely having a law acts as any kind of deterrent. Hell, try screwing some guy’s wife in Somalia and you’ll find yourself getting the lash – or worse. Despite that, people still screw around. The law is a poor instrument to use to attempt to change personal morality.

Against the backdrop, campaigners in the state are stepping up their attempts to get the law repealed and make life a bit easier for people who want to have an affair.

“Unofficial death sentence” for having an affair

We’re kind of used to stonings and executions for people caught having affairs in lands where more extreme forms of Islam hold sway. What is more disturbing is a case from Spain – where a woman from the Catalonia region has been rescued from the hands of 9 men who had unofficially ’sentenced’ her to death.

The men allegedly held her in a remote farmhouse where she was awaiting her ’sentence’ when she engineered a chance to escape. A police spokeswoman told reporters:

“According to the victim, she was taken against her will and sentenced to death by a group of men. The men may have formed a court to apply sharia law.”

7 of the 9 are now in jail waiting to face trial for illegal detention and attempted murder, whilst 2 have been released on police bail. It’s pretty disturbing that attitudes like that have made the leap from Islamist parts of the world to the heart of modern Europe.

Still – at least Tiger Woods is probably safe. For now.