Affairs are hot stuff. The antics of cheating partners have been hooking audiences from the earliest days of storytelling to modern romcoms and hit podcasts by relationship experts.
It is only natural, then, that a psychotherapist turned author specialising in long-term relationships would want in on the action. “Why do we have affairs?” asks Juliet Rosenfeld in the introduction to her second book, which promises to look at infidelity – something that one in five of us will be affected by – “in a way that we usually don’t”. Her first book, The State of Disbelief, explored her experience of mourning after the death of her husband, Andrew.
Although Rosenfeld has been in practice for the last 15 years, she starts by stating that none of the five affairs she dissects involve her own clients. Instead, in 2021, she placed an advert in various UK and US publications seeking people to interview “under strict anonymity for case studies in this underexplored aspect of behaviour”. The five accounts, which range from a man who visits his mistress minutes after his wife has given birth, to a woman who leaves her wife and their autistic child for a colleague, are “disguised but amalgamated”.
At 60, “Professor M”, an academic in a scientific technical field, had never been remotely interested in any man other than her partner of 25 years. She had a contented, interesting life; they shared friends, had similar hobbies and interests, and played a sport they both loved. But a chance encounter at a conference with a man she had once known sparked a passionate affair, leading to the emotional and physical collapse that pushed her on to the therapist’s couch for hundreds of sessions, often four a week.
All that talk, which included diving back into her early childhood, helped Professor M to get her previous relationship back on track (it “deepened into something more loving”) and underlined for Rosenfeld that affairs “are never just about our present, but about our pasts”.
It is a shame that Rosenfeld’s imagination doesn’t stretch to better dialogue between her main characters. The exchanges between Neil, a senior partner at a top law firm, who is cheating on his wife Serena with a much younger mistress, Magdalena, are particularly wooden. “‘How could you want to ruin my life or a child’s life, you idiot?’” he says in response to Magdalena’s demands for a baby. Rosenfeld’s syntax is also off. “Neil would have sex with her only when Serena was not at the house, but freely when she wasn’t.”
There is, at least, compelling narrative drive as Rosenfeld describes the various ways her respondents embark on affairs. Eleanor, a psychotherapist from Minnesota, falls for Miller, a lawyer, despite him being a patient: a “catastrophic boundary violation”. Siobhan, a lonely mother of three teenage sons who is grieving the death of her youngest child, Mina, starts sleeping with her colleague, Nick. “Frequent business travel enabled their affair to flourish,” she writes, in cursory prose style.
Rosenfeld intersperses these accounts with references to various psychoanalytical theories and texts, such as Freud’s essay on Mourning and Melancholia, “a key to understanding loss”. But, pared back, her interpretations seem rather obvious. She writes: “Freud talks about substitutes, and Nick, I believe was a substitute for Mina. He was also a substitute for the love that Siobhan was denied in childhood,” by her father.
The problem isn’t that Affairs is uninteresting. But it is ultimately unsatisfying. Rosenfeld’s supposedly counterintuitive insight – that the roots of most affairs are “locked in our infancy and childhood” – are hardly new. There’s a reason why so many people can quote that Philip Larkin couplet.
• Affairs: True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Despair by Juliet Rosenfeld is published by Pan Macmillan (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
