2 days ago
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Professor M was a 60-year-old academic in a scientific, technical field. She chose to lie on my couch, rather than sit opposite me, from our second meeting. Thick black glasses framed her strong nose and she wore monochrome, androgynous clothes. She had a stern authority about her that I noticed the very first time I met her. Her hair was uncoloured and cut into a chic crop. She had lived in London since university in her home country on another continent, and English was her third language, which she spoke perfectly. She had never seen a psychotherapist before.
In the first weeks of our work together, she talked – without stopping, breathlessly – about a man she had known in her 20s while undertaking doctoral work in America. By chance, they had met again recently at a conference overseas where both were presenting papers. They had sex in a hotel room hours after this meeting. A relationship began, with intense communication by email, text and phone. The man lived in a city about four hours by train from London, with his wife and three teenage children.
Professor M, who was rather a formal person, told me during our third session that she was ashamed to admit she was “utterly possessed by his penis”. At this point, she had been with her partner for 25 years. In that time, she had never been remotely interested in any other man. Her lover had erupted completely unexpectedly into her life. Her contented, interesting existence with her life companion had been blown apart. Now, the sound of her lover’s voice led to sudden “electric shocks down below” and she bought herself a vibrator to manage her new “roaring libido”.
In those early sessions, she wanted to describe her relationship with her partner. He had an adult son from a previous relationship, whom Professor M was close to, as she was to the rest of his family. Professor M and her partner had many mutual friends, shared similar hobbies and interests, and played a sport they both loved. This made her affair all the more baffling to her. Until her lover arrived in her life, she told me she was happy with her partner, or thought she had been.
Twice a week I would see her and she would describe her yearning for her secret lover. It seemed to build over the weekend, when contact was restricted because of his wife and Professor M’s partner. However, they had found a routine, a way of staying in touch via phone calls, sometimes Zoom conversations, emails and presents they sent to their offices in their respective universities. No one knew of it but them. And now me.
As a psychotherapist I have strict codes about discussing my patients: I do so only under clinical conditions, and always anonymised. But I’m writing about Professor M because she asked me to. I had placed an ad in the classifieds section of various publications: Have you had an affair? Published author and psychotherapist keen to interview under strict anonymity for case studies in this underexplored aspect of behaviour.
Professor M, by this time a former patient of mine, got in touch. She knew I was researching the subject and suggested I include her story. She hoped it might help others, she said, to see the devastation that an affair can cause. To my surprise, she was not alone: the responses to my advert flowed in.
We are not normally let into affairs at all, let alone given an intimate account of them. Affairs often remain secret, even after they end. Affairs are powerful disrupters, yet they go on around us all the time, hidden from view. One in five of us will have an affair. (These are the ones that are reported and can be found in statistics.) We will all know someone, if not several people, who have had one. You may have had an affair yourself or you may have been the “victim” of an affair. Despite many radical changes in society’s attitudes to how we live, who we live with and how we define ourselves, affairs continue to shock, perplex, disgust and fascinate us.
There are affairs where a spouse is aware of what is going on and even supports it. There are emotional affairs, when no physical sexual betrayal takes place. There are even now affairs that are conducted entirely online. Without ever meeting, two people are immersed in a profoundly inappropriate, disinhibited long-term sexual relationship. I spoke to someone in this situation. He is a distinguished doctor who sends photographs of his genitals to a young woman he will never meet in real life. He describes himself as crazily in love with her.
I also spoke to a “happily” married man, a patriarch and now grandfather, who has long relationships with married (sometimes), pregnant women decades younger than him; a psychotherapist who treated and then seduced her patient, destroying her career and losing her licence to practise in the process; a woman married to “the love of my life” for 25 years who left him for a woman (her children did not speak to her for more than a year after they found out about the affair); and a senior management consultant who has sex with her chief executive, knowing any relationship between employees is forbidden and a sackable offence.
I now believe, having researched this subject over four years, that, for many people, affairs are as hardwired in our DNA as fidelity. What is rarely understood is that the roots of most affairs are there decades before two people meet. Yes, decades. Here’s why: the reasons are locked in our infancy and childhood. That is, in the past not the present. The unmet needs for affairs are locked deeply within our psyches: to be held, communicated with, responded to, loved. Without adequate caregiving and interest early on, we seek emotional and physical reassurance and stimulation in myriad ways throughout life. Having an affair is one way.
Psychoanalysis does not give us all the answers, but it helps us understand our behaviour. By exploring the unconscious through the stories of others, we can begin to learn more about the motivations for this most risky of relationships. So it was for my work with Professor M.
From the beginning of the therapy, there was rarely room for me to speak or comment. Professor M would come in, throw her bag and her coat on the chair opposite mine and almost fling herself on to my couch. I sat behind her, observing her expressive hand gestures as she talked about this man obsessively. She described every aspect of him and every detail of what he did to her.
I frequently felt overwhelmed and squeezed out by Professor M’s monologues. She was obsessively interested by him, like a teenager with a rock star. Her lover was not her usual type, but she worshipped his body. She wasn’t an aftershave fan, but she adored his smell. She didn’t have a physical “type”, but she was really turned on by his stocky chest, hairy back and firm calves. She spoke of the smooth, clear skin on his back and muscled buttocks with ardour. He played a very physical team sport twice a week and she fantasised about watching him play, beating opponents on the field with his incredible skill.
She described waiting between calls, for their virtual “meetings”, as a kind of hungry longing. She bought herself another vibrator as the first one had broken from overuse. Her lover’s voice, the way he cleared his throat, even his occasional cough down the line also had a profoundly erotic effect on her. During these first two years of therapy, Professor M and her lover managed to meet for a number of overnight meetings, occasional weekends and, three times, almost a week’s holiday, always disguised as international conferences. Her excitement before these illicit escapes was palpable and I found myself unusually interested to know what had happened at our sessions after she had met her man. She would return thrilled but low, as he had left again. For a long time, I felt convinced that, despite the complexity of her situation, her love for this man would overcome all obstacles. I also felt sure that he was deeply in love with her.
They had conversations, often in long emails, about the new life they would live together, with Professor M leaving her partner to live with her lover, who would also leave his wife. As he had three children, she understood the onus would be on her to adapt for their sake. She seemed excited about the prospect and was confident that, although it would be hard, it would all be possible. The man had sent her estate agent particulars of the types of flat they might live in, near the university he was sure she would be able to get a job at. They had had detailed financial discussions about how the assets might be split and merged. Mainly, however, what Professor M talked to me about was how her lover talked to her. She was “fabulous”, “brilliant”, a “total star”, and I could hear her smiling as she put her mobile phone down by her side on the couch, having read me her lover’s latest email.
Throughout, Professor M insisted this illicit love affair in no way impacted on her relationship at home. Things continued happily between her and her partner “as usual”. It was not that she did not feel herself attracted to him, but rather that her lover had blown away any sexual interest in him.
I often felt like an irrelevant bystander to this passionate coupling. Why was I even there, I sometimes wondered, other than as a cipher to “hold” the secret of this extramarital affair? I felt impotent in the face of this middle-aged coup de foudre. During the first two years, I didn’t get to know anything about the early life of Professor M. This is relevant, as normally with a patient I would know or have a sense of their childhood, parental figures and experiences, in the first months of treatment. Strangely, I had no sense of this with Professor M; I felt I knew almost nothing about her past. It felt as distant and foreign to me as the continent she came from. I was allowed to hear only about her present and her future.
There was something infantile and pleading in her rapturous accounts of this great love affair. She spared me no detail of the erotic lust on both her and his part. I was compelled to listen, but not to enter the room she created with her lover. Now, I see that only when he abandoned her would I fully meet Professor M in my consulting room.
One day in early spring 2018 she arrived agitated and angry. It was a Monday; she had spoken to her lover late that Sunday and he had told her that, despite his commitment and love for her, despite all their quite well-developed plans, he couldn’t sacrifice the lives of his children for his own happiness. His children were beginning university, one overseas, and he could not leave the family home, or their younger sibling.
Professor M said she had dreaded this coming and it was “fucking outrageous”. She seethed and I saw her fists clench. Her lover had repeated to her: “Not yet.” She would have to be patient and hold on. As she said this, for the first time, I was not sure I believed him. I had a feeling he was leaving her. My emotional reaction changed as dramatically as my patient’s. I felt, from then on, profound concern for her. My feeling of being a bag carrier for her erotic escapades disappeared.
At this point, the appearance of this rather tough, professional-looking woman changed. Her cheeks looked sodden whenever she left, and sometimes on arrival. I could see her harshly pulling a tissue along her lower lids again and again. The sessions themselves had a different quality. They were now full of silences, other than when she demanded of me that I tell her: What was going on? Where had he gone? What the hell was going on? Who the fuck behaved like this? Why can’t you make him stop it?
From then on, and into the early summer, Professor M’s lover was only sporadically in touch. She alternated between intense anger and despair. The sessions were sometimes silent other than for her sobbing. At other times they were a rant of indignation and furious tirades about this “fucking idiot”. But the treatment also changed course completely. There was no doubt that Professor M had been dropped and relegated by this man.
I felt a despondent exhaustion as well as a feeling of not being able to “bear” her. The 200 or so sessions we had had so far had been hard in so many different ways. Sigmund Freud, the 19th-century inventor of psychoanalysis, talks about the archaeological digging of the process. It is a slow, hard sifting away, sometimes extremely repetitive. The truth is, I had felt exhausted by Professor M, quite often, in the first two years, but now I began to feel bored.
Boredom is a red flag to the therapist. When a patient bores you, it is important to think about what is going on. What are they trying to do? Distract you into some daydream of your own? Put you to sleep? Or is there something so awful it cannot be said? With Professor M and her long soliloquies about her lover, detailing the minutiae of their interactions, I often felt stultified. But I kept listening, wondering what I was bearing witness to. Was I there to record this man’s presence in her life, to prove that he was really in love with her, that this was not a fantasy? I was the only person who knew about him after all. But, alongside the tedium, a darker feeling often came to me, something like: this would not end well. It was at this point that his communication with her was drawing to a final close.
Professor M’s clothes became shabbier in some hard-to-discern way, and her sharp, short haircut grew out and was no longer assiduously trimmed. The cool boyish styling that had seemed so elegant looked unkempt now, even childish. Twice a week, as she entered my consulting room, she would make eye contact of a beseeching quality, as if without words she was desperately asking me for help. A patient’s non-verbal cues always need interpretation and acknowledgment, and I tried my best to discern what she meant.
Their previously well-arranged times to speak became much patchier, then very infrequent, and finally entirely unreliable. Then they stopped almost completely. Professor M would plan to be home, or out, waiting in her car to take his calls, but they would not come. She would wait, and wait, and wait, infuriated with herself, wasting time that could otherwise have been spent on papers she needed to mark or research proposals she had to make. However, as contact with him lessened, I felt her move closer to reality.
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One day she arrived, already in tears as she came into the room, and told me she could no longer lie down on my couch but needed to sit opposite me in a chair. She sat, hunched and hollow-eyed, staring at a point somewhere behind my head as she told me she thought she might die and, over the weekend (it was a Monday), had considered killing herself.
This was the après-coup. This psychological term concerns the effects of events over time in the mind. It has a quality similar to a whiplash injury; the effects of such a brutal impact that may not be felt for years in the body after the initial blow. The trauma could not be understood at the time. However, a later event remobilises the latent traumatised feelings. I was left with a devastated three-year-old, shrinking in her adult body. The change in her physical appearance reinforced this. I was suddenly aware that she had lost a dramatic amount of weight.
As time passed, the man began to write to Professor M accusing her of unrealistic expectations and naivety. Professor M fought back with equally accusatory responses, but she did not have much more fight left in her now that the man had gone. She was exhausted.
She made me think both of an alcoholic giving up drinking or a baby suddenly deprived of the breast, who has been subjected to a violent weaning. Around this time she wrote to him saying she could not go on like this. I felt she was at a point of risk and suggested we upped her sessions to four times a week. I did not feel she was suicidal, but I felt unclear as to how she would manage the enormity of this loss alone. The secrecy of her relationship meant that no one but me knew what she was going through. She eventually felt able to request some compassionate leave from her department head, and I knew we were into the beginning of Professor M’s recovery.
Over the next six months, she accepted she would never see her lover again. This man had taken so much of our therapeutic space, but now, alongside the silence and crying, I began to get hints of her early life.
Professor M returned to the couch, with her legs pulled up, on her side in a foetal position, often gasping with tears for the entire 50 minutes.
As she continued to pore over the relationship, one cold winter morning Professor M told me something new. Her attraction to her lover had deepened in their second summer together when he grew his hair long. She remembered long sessions in bed on one of their stolen weekends when she had fiddled and played with it, telling him what beautiful thick hair he had and how it helped to drive her wild with lust.
She suddenly “remembered” that the only other man she had ever kissed with long hair was her late father. When she was two, about to turn three, he had left her mother, never to return, and emigrated to the other side of the world. Professor M was raised alone. Her mother, a GP, had had to work extremely hard to manage her work and the childcare, and Professor M would remain the only child of a lone mother.
As often happens when a patient’s presence can almost feel unbearable, it slowly became clear to me why Professor M had needed me to suffer so much. In psychotherapy, the “transference” is the way the therapist embodies multiple hidden current or historical figures in the patient’s mind. These are often very private, sometimes shameful feelings the patient has that can be explored, if their therapeutic alliance – the relationship between therapist and patient – is sufficiently trusting. Who the therapist represents shifts and changes, often within one session.
Partly, I could see how I became to Professor M like her mother: overwrought, angry, unable to take anything more from her unhappy little daughter. No wonder she had to dominate the session and not let me in. She was furious with her mother. It was very possibly something that had happened with her lover, too, I felt: she had become too demanding, too unsatisfied, too needy.
Slowly, I learned that Professor M was not allowed to speak of her father in childhood. She possessed hardly any photos of him other than two or three given to her by her paternal grandmother (who would die early on in Professor M’s life). She understood her father had remarried when she was four or five, although she had never heard from him after he left.
Soon after this, Professor M arrived with a photograph and gave it to me. The black-and-white image was of a beautiful, full-cheeked toddler, gazing adoringly at her father who clutched her stocky thighs, staring besottedly at her. Her chubby hand was pulling on his (indeed beautiful) dark hair brushed back from his face while they both smiled, their features, strong noses and, from what I could see, clear blue eyes mirror images of each other. I was deeply moved.
Throughout her life, Professor M’s intellectual faculties had compensated for the very early deprivation of her father. And, in our work, in essence, the tiny toddler part of her had been brought back to life. Going back, we pieced together how something important had happened to Professor M when she had first met her lover (aged 24). That had been too early a time for them both, with burgeoning careers and itchy feet.
But it had been profoundly reopened when she met this man as her lover, at 58. A going-back-in-time, a psychical regression, had taken place at this point. Her lover, unbeknown to him, was put in the role of the missing father. This was a completely unconscious displacement by Professor M. I might even propose that she was in the throes of a psychotic disavowal. What that means is that she could go back to a time when she was happily in love with and loved by her father. If she was successful in this disavowal (and denial of reality), she didn’t have to suffer from his missing, his abandonment, his departure, because there he was, embodied in her lover, and her adult self. Consciously, it was simple: she had an adult lover. Unconsciously, she had Daddy back or, maybe, he had just never gone.
The desperation, adoration and desire to be seen and loved by a man, as the photo showed me so vividly, had been abruptly taken away when her father had left. He was replaced by a mother who was quite possibly bereft and desperate herself but, to her only child, cold and hostile to her wish for her beloved father to return. The witness I had played to her extraordinary, passionate, secret love affair was her secret victory over her mother. All of this, of course, unconscious. But her maltreatment of me reinforced this feeling. I had suffered through two years of hearing about her sexual odyssey and enjoyment in silence.
I was in some hidden way the GP mother, who helped her many patients, but who was now going to listen, in detail, to absolutely everything this little girl had to say.
Professor M continued to see me for several more years, reducing to once a week. Her life started to fill up again, in a good way, with her partner, a research grant and a new hobby together: tango dancing. Her stepson married, and a grandchild was soon on the way, which she and her partner were thrilled about.
In the end, she and I came to think that her lover had probably done her a service. The abandoned, demanding little girl, unable to contemplate reality or her parents’ complex reasons for separating, had been brought back to life by this man. In effect, she had remained stuck in a time warp of idealised adulation with her father. She had never moved on, and never been angry with him (consciously) for his departure. Yet she was intuitive enough as a small child to know that to challenge her mother would have been unwise.
In time, she could also contemplate her mother’s vulnerability, moving to empathy for a young, deserted female GP in the 1960s. She eventually had some admiration for her.
Professor M was the patient who brought alive the complex nature of an affair for me – how deeply the roots of it are likely to be embedded in our early love lives. Our infantile passion for each parent, or even the idea of a parent, if a child has one parent not two, or is born posthumously, is critical to a mature emotional life. We love our parents in order to be able to grow up. Then we turn away from them to find our own loving adult attachments. However, if in early childhood our managing and interpretation of these relationships is subverted, interrupted, prevented, almost unavoidable damage may not manifest for decades.
I don’t believe Professor M felt no guilt about her affair with regard to her partner, but I know that her relationship with him deepened into something more loving as the years passed. She still writes to me every 18 months or so and although I tend not to write back more than a line or two to patients, in order not to disturb the analytic relationship, I do always acknowledge these emails. Perhaps it gratifies us both that she can update me about her life with such pleasure.
