Jana Hocking says many of her followers are having affairs, or have had affairs. Photo / Instagram
OPINION
There’s a horrifying trend I’ve noticed that guarantees you the best sex of your life.
It first came to my attention when I started doing a ‘Tell me a saucy secret’ Q&A on my Instagram each Monday night to fend off boredom that comes with the start of the week.
First off, people were a little shy in coming forward with their secrets so I found an app that guarantees absolute anonymity for anyone to post their saucy confessions, even from me.
That’s when the real secrets started coming in, and many of them had a theme.
You see, it would appear that a LOT of my followers are having affairs, or have at least had affairs, and they all said the same thing: “It’s the best sex I’ve ever had!”
When I delved into their stories more, I realised that the one key thing that made it the best sex, was the sneaking around, knowing that they were doing something naughty, the risk of getting caught and the hidden passion they were giving to made it all a bit … fun.
It made me think back to the one time, many years ago, I gave into an affair, and I realised they were right. When you’re plodding along in your everyday life, it can get a bit monotonous.
You’re a few years into a relationship and you’ve got into a rhythm. You know that on Tuesdays you will make tacos and watch Survivor, Fridays it’s pizza and a movie night. You have heard your partner fart, snore, and leave their whiskers in the sink. Life is fine but missing that spark.
Then someone at work, or at a friend’s BBQ, or at the gym starts flirting with you and you remember how fun it was to get butterflies. To feel wanted. To look forward to seeing someone again, and it’s like a little fire builds inside of you.
You start longing for that serotonin rush more and more. Before you know it, you’ve had one too many drinks with your crush and you’re giving each other eyes. You’ve got a bit of tequila bravery, and suddenly you’ve given in to your desires and you’re sneaking somewhere for a hot makeout session.
You wake up the next day with absolute dread in your stomach, but then a few hours later, you get a weird feeling of excitement. Life just got a little more interesting. Before you know it, you’re meeting in car parks to do the romp, saving each others names in your phone under different pseudonyms. Suddenly ‘Josh’ becomes ‘Lucy’ so your partner will never suspect a thing. “Who’s texting you?” “Oh, just Lucy from work”.
It’s horrible to admit, but I can understand why everyone is stating that affairs allow you to have the best sex of your life, because it’s not just the sex, it’s everything around it as well.
The planning, the secrecy, the illicitness of it all. I can understand how it becomes addictive, when your past life was feeling like a never-ending groundhog day.
According to psychologist and relationship researcher Scott Haltzmann, infidelity is a “flame addiction”. He explains that a person having an affair craves the other person, wanting to experience the same addictive behaviour repeatedly.
He says, “When most people think of infidelity, they don’t think of injecting heroin or smoking crack cocaine. They ought to, because the behaviour that takes place during an affair mimics exactly the behaviour of a drug addict.”
Like a moth drawn to a candle’s glow, the person who is having an affair keeps coming back to the same addictive behaviour. Infidelity is a “flame addiction”.
And the figures don’t lie. The Ashley Maddison website, that is basically Tinder for married people, gets a whopping 17,000 new sign-ups a day.
Well that’s slightly petrifying.
So are affairs worth all this serotonin and excitement? The simple answer is no. The damage they do to families, and the emotional toll it puts on your partner is almost unforgivable. It’s painful and unfair.
As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, I know how horrible it can be knowing that your partner has not only had sex with someone, but shared intimate moments. Waking up in spoon position, scratching their back before they go to sleep, holding hands, kissing. Watching their face light up when they share a joke. That’s what breaks your heart. It’s the intimacy that comes with an affair.
So sure, it may be the best sex you’ve ever had in your life but with that potentially comes the most pain you will ever feel in your life as you watch your partner’s heart break in front of you, as you spend months, or possibly years, trying to win their trust back, as you watch your family split apart.
Suddenly you will long for those Taco Tuesdays, and Friday movie nights with the person you broke. Because, from experience, and from the numerous affairs we see reported in the media every day, the truth usually comes out, and are the carpark shenanigans worth it?
You’ve got to really weigh that up.
Jana Hocking is a columnist and collector of kind-of-boyfriends.