Have you ever heard about a friend’s hot, passionate affair and thought: How on earth do you find the time and energy? It’s a concept that conjures up images of burner phones, fake work trips and a lot of anxiety-inducing late-night spirals, but what is the reality like? And what keeps people in long-term affairs?

For obvious reasons, it’s hard to accurately gauge the state of affairs in the UK, or anywhere, as statistics are clouded by a certain amount of secrecy. Our interest in affairs, however, is easier to measure. Search service Counselling Directory noted a 30% year-on-year rise in people looking for information on ‘affairs and betrayals’ in 2024. Meanwhile, the year’s ‘infidelity index’ conducted by Illicit Encounters, a dating site for married people, found that the trendy Somerset town of Frome had the highest rate of infidelity in the UK. And when the documentary Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal landed on Netflix last month, it reached number two in the platform’s UK chart within 24 hours, beaten only by Bridgerton. The three-part series explores the 2015 hacking of the dating site for extramarital matches, which exposed the data of upwards of 32 million users who’d been seduced by the site’s tagline: ‘Life is short. Have an affair.’

And while affairs are often thought of as a man’s game, it seems that more women are pursuing them now than in the past. In 2017, psychotherapist Esther Perel found that the number of women who admit to cheating had risen by 40% since 1990; fast forward to 2023, and Illicit Encounters noted a 50% increase in women signing up to the site. “We’ve tended to see men having affairs as more common, more culturally acceptable. It’s more shocking when women do, and perhaps treated with more moral judgement,” says author and psychotherapist Eloise Skinner. “In terms of the research, there’s a fairly consistent likelihood of infidelity when comparing men and women, with some studies finding them more likely among women.”

More of us are having affairs than ever: 3 women share how they get away with it