GIVE ME A BREAK:Some believe that playing away can work wonders for your marriage - but it would be a logistical nightmare, writes Kate Holmquist.
I'M THINKING OF having an affair. After all I've heard about how marriage-enhancing playing away can be, I reckon it would be positively irresponsible of me not to have an affair. I owe it to my preoccupied spouse, half-asleep thanks to the sofa/TV combo, because he will benefit when I become one happy little nuclear glow-worm spreading love everywhere and returning home with a grin on my face. I will be more loving, patient and kind than ever - if not out of guilt, then merely to create a diversion.
Apparently some woman has written a book about this. I haven't read it. I've heard all I need on the airwaves and in the local café where the MILFs gather. "Sure, isn't that how the French have always done it? Cinq à sept - 5 to 7. If I were French, instead of running home after work to a mountain of laundry and surly faces, I'd be sipping champagne with Pierre." The woman saying this has amazing perma-tanned legs and she's fiddling with her thinning hair while gazing into the table-side wall mirror, as though she's considering extensions.
I want to tell her that this is Ireland, so it wouldn't be Pierre, it would be Paddy. And that cinq à sept she's collecting the kids and cooking up a man-pleasing meal, à la Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking, but why spoil her reverie? What she's saying makes sense, doesn't it? Why fight with an icy spouse when you can ski off-piste. All loved up in the afternoon, it's possible to put up with anything at home - snoring, socks on the floor, boredom.
Niggling marital resentments are hardly relevant once you've left the mummy-track for the affair-track because - and this is the eureka insight - with an affair, you no longer have to work at marriage. No need to strive for intimacy anymore. Just do take-out once a week. The other six nights, relax, put your feet up and savour that bit of naughtiness on the side, like an order of chips feels when you're on a low-carb diet.
So, to make life better for everyone I'm drawing up a shortlist of candidates to have an affair with. It's a very short, shortlist. I think I need to get out more. That's the first step definitely. But where does one go?
A male colleague tells me that there's a particular bar in a particular hotel where married people of like mind meet on a particular night on the mutual understanding that what happens upstairs in the mega-euro per night rooms is nobody's business. Hmm, I don't think I'd have anything to wear. And I don't fancy that meat-rack vibe I put up with as a teenager. I don't want to compete with other women for the filet de boeuf.
Do you think that maybe having an affair is awfully expensive, what with the new lingerie, the waxing, the shoes - especially the shoes? As any woman knows, shoes and underwear are the two most essential ingredients to feeling remotely sexy in an undressing situation. Plus, you have to be slightly drunk and in the dark. With a stranger, I mean, as opposed to the husband that has grown to appreciate your abstemious low personal maintenance lifestyle. Put it this way, marriage has turned you into a cheap date.
So, as I peruse my shortlist, I reckon that my paramour should be rich. Otherwise, I can't afford the taxis, the hotel rooms, the lingerie, the waxing, the meals of truffles and caviar eaten off my baby-flab tummy (note to self: need personal trainer, yet another expense). This narrows the field considerably.
The other requirement is that for a successful affair, the lovers must fancy the pants off one another but not too much. You don't want anybody falling in love and putting marriages at risk. An affair is meant to be a bit of harmless fun, a sort of emotionally lubricating ego-boost - like sexual Botox. You might fantasise about being in a Sarkozy/Bruni situation, when all you want is a good shag and then home to your own bed.
The thing is, how can you have great sex with someone you don't love and can't love because neither of you wants commitment? During a loveless affair, wouldn't you start to identify with being the side-dish? Presumably, your lover doesn't want to go awol from marriage either, which leaves you with that strangely detached feeling of sex without intimacy, which is like staring through a shop window at a gorgeous chocolate dessert you can't actually allow yourself to taste.
When the ludicrously lascivious text messages, the discreet emails and the plain-speaking credit card receipts are eventually discovered, you then have the task of convincing your spouse that your affair has been in the best interest of the marriage.
He/she will either call a solicitor, or go have an affair of his/her own, which you certainly will have no right to complain about. And when you're the one left with the sofa/TV combo, you'll remember that when you got married, you were sick to death of having to sexually compete and all you wanted was somebody to cuddle on the sofa with. It'll be too late then.
