Something on the side?

Workplace Affairs: Affairs with Colleagues are Dangerous

Work can be a dangerous place. And we’re not talking about breathing in the fumes from the photocopier or the scaldingly hot coffee from the coffee machine. We’re talking about the sexual subcurrents that flow through offices.

Firstly, assuming you work in a relatively modern environment, it brings us into close regular contact with members of the opposite sex. This can in itself be dangerous. If you find yourself working alongside some stunning creature from Planet Sex then even if you’re happily attached you can find yourself thinking unhealthy thoughts.

And then there’s the time. 8 hours a day, working knee-to-knee with someone on the same projects in the same space. That’s conceivably as much as you spend with your spouse. And you’re not just watching TV cosily on the sofa – you’re pursuing shared objectives, helping each other out. You might both hate your boss and laugh at a particular colleague. So naturally you go out to lunch together… start to lower your guard and discuss your home life. Maybe you’ve just had a fight with your Significant Other and just want to moan about it.

All the while, you’re getting closer and developing a bond based on personal knowledge, in-jokes and regular contact. Can you keep all that platonic? Sure. Lots of people do. But long before the perils of cybersex reared their head people were finding themselves ensnared in little honeypots of temptation by their co-workers.

Tips For a Workplace Affair

• Discretion! At least cybersex is confined a monitor screen where only an unguarded, over-the-shoulder glance would give the game away. Your office dalliance takes place under the watchful gaze of gossip-hungry colleagues. That means, more than anything else, not showing too much affection towards each other around the office.
• Communication! Your emails, phone use and more can be easily tracked by IT staff. And those guys are just dying to catch someone screwing around – if only to enliven their days. Do not start sending flirtatious little nothings by your day-t0-day work email address. If your IT policy is particularly zealous, don’t even use MSN or personal email accounts – you could find yourself having to explain while you’re using them during office hours in the first place.
• Don’t brag! You might be boning the single hottest chick (or hunk) in Accounts and feel justly proud of that fact. Boasting about it to your less fortunate colleagues might seem tempting. But you know what office gossips are like. Keep firmly and irrevocably schtum.

Do all that and you might – just might – get away with your affair.

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!

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

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.

Would You Cheat On Your Spouse?

The BBC offers a tantalising test for those of us who are curious as to how likely we are to cheat on our partner at some point. It’s a bit of fun but I suspect not very scientific.

In truth, none of us can ever say. Put into the right place at the right time with the right person, few us really know how we’ll react. Sexual chemistry is beyond the compass of rationality. In a world where people get murdered

Many people don’t even know what adultery is, incredible as that may seem. I quick look on Yahoo Answers for Adultery reveals questions like “What makes homosexual behavior different from fornication and adultery?”, “What is the difference between rape and adultery?” and “is it adultery to have relationship after husband committed adultery and divorce is in process?”.

If people are really that unsure as to what it means to commit adultery, you have to conclude that they’d actually find it pretty easy to do. If you don’t know where the boundaries are its very easy to step over them.

All that holds you back is your sense of morality. If it’s strong enough to withstand temptation then you’ll stay on the straight and narrow for all your life. But if you’ve got a sense of curiousity and the opportunity presents itself…

The statistics speak for themselves.

So the answer is actually that you very possibly would. You can deny it here and now, sat looking at your computer screen with your partner busying themselves around in the background. Put dropped into a situation with an attractive stranger who can say for sure? Cheats often stray when they’re least expecting to.

Marital Affairs: Karen from Harrogate is Looking

Busted!

As part of this job, I get to search Google for marital affairs quite a lot. Thanks to Google, loads of stuff comes bubbling to the top. In this case, some guy is trying to track down a chick whose profile he’s seen on maritalaffair.co.uk. If you were being evil, you could probably find out quite a lot about his identity and if I was married to a Karen from Harrogate I might be glancing at her a little bit askance.

Now, there’s a salutory warning about the dangers of using the internet as a conduit for having an affair. You can leave tracks everywhere without even realising it. Google goes far and deep into all sorts of nooks and crannies, so if you do go down this route, use anonymous usernames and only reveal details of your identity in private conversation.