By Tanya Sweeney
Saturday Jul 4 2009

Men and women have been straying from their partners for centuries,but cheaters have become more adept at hiding their infidelities. So how do you catch them out? Tanya Sweeney talks to the victims and to those who've done the dirty themselves.

There is a joke beloved of women who've caught their significant other with his pants down: why is it that some men are so fond of giving their manhood a name? Because they don't like to have a total stranger making all their decisions for them.

Philanderers -- both male and female -- are as old as the hills, or at the very least as old as Shakespeare, who astutely wrote: "Love is not love/which alters when it alteration finds/or bends with the remover to remove." In more recent times, the sanctity of marriage has faced the double threat of the internet and mobile phone technology. Yet, according to author Tess Stimson, nothing poses more of a deadly menace to a marriage than the modern, liberated girl's way of thinking.

In her book, Beat The Bitch, Stimson observes that, while men are highly predictable and uncomplicated creatures, single women are a different breed altogether. Those who prey on married men are highly adept at justifying their actions. Their invariable schtick? All the good men worth having are already taken. They're the ones who are doing the cheating, not I. His marriage is over in all but name. There's a double rush when the guy is taken. Even more significantly, Irish society no longer requires these women to even justify their actions in the first place.

"Women are quite ruthless now, it's quite frightening actually," observes Stimson. "They end up boasting to their friends about their married conquests. In the drama Mistresses (currently showing on RTE 1), they never tell each other off about sleeping with married men. The whole concept of the 'sisterhood' is a total myth. We women don't help each other in the workplace and we certainly don't in other areas.

"What's more, the shame of divorce is gone and it really is a case of 'all's fair in love and war'," she adds. "The second wife is immediately moved into the fold, and not an eyebrow is raised; in fact, she's immediately accepted into the family, regardless of the circumstances that got her there."

Some of the statistics raised during Stimson's research are certainly enough to strike cold-blooded fear into the heart of any dedicated wife or girlfriend. According to her, three out of four men will cheat on their partners. One in four men has had more than four affairs. Her figures show that 88pc of 'alpha' males cheat, while 85pc of women who suspect their lover is cheating are correct. And, perhaps most startlingly of all, 60pc of men having an affair are happy in their marriage.

Nowadays, the 'casual encounters' section on Irish sites such as Craigslist.org and Gumtree.ie are teeming with adverts posted by married men and women looking for clandestine, no-strings-attached sex. "Attached guy looking for some extra-curricular fun," reads one. "I'm in a relationship so would prefer an attached woman, as they will understand the need for discretion too." Another soliciting a sexual partner in Dublin reads: "I'm married with kids, so this won't happen at my place. It'll be outdoors, in a car, in a hotel room or your place if you live close."

For Shane Doran, a private eye who specialises in marital infidelity cases at the Dublin-based 1st Priority Investigations, business is certainly booming. For €60 an hour, he will survey men and women for his suspicious clients using a blinding array of gizmos and gadgets. Chief among then, he explains, are tracking devices on vehicles, button and pen cameras, and 'bugging' software for mobile phones.

"You can put this on your partner's phone so you can ring into their phone," he says. "Every time they get a text message, you get it too. We can also buy deleted text message-reading devices. It's only a couple of hundred euro to buy, so it's certainly in use.

"I'd say the ratio is about 3:1 female to male clients," he explains. "They contact us at different stages, not just because they found their partner cheating. Some partners want to make sure their partner doesn't cheat before they get married. Others have been married 30 or 40 years. Some are paranoid and there's nothing going on, but they want the peace of mind. The majority of these people -- about 90pc -- would be up to something."

Still, it hasn't always been this way. Only 20 years ago, author Kate Thompson was an actress playing Terry Killeen -- the nation's most infamous 'scarlet woman' -- on Glenroe. Nothing could have prepared her for the outpouring of ire she faced in the direct aftermath of the storyline.

"The day after it aired there was such a furore on the radio," she recalls. "I rang the show's writer, Wes Burrows, and said, 'There's a riot going on', and he said, 'That's exactly what I wanted to happen'. I came from a pretty bohemian background so I didn't find the idea all that shocking. I'd go into the studio to do a voiceover and the receptionist would be like, 'Oh God, I hate you'. It could get pretty distressing."

Thompson admits that when she met her husband Malcolm Douglas 31 years ago, both were in other relationships at the time.

"Malcolm confronted me and said, 'It's time to choose: him or me?'" she recalls. "The relationship I was in had run its course. I was so madly in love with Malcolm that there was this instinctual feeling of love, so I didn't feel I was betraying anyone.

"Maybe years ago I might have wondered about Malcolm straying, but it's natural to think like that in the beginning," she adds. "But flirting is a form of social intercourse. He flirts extremely well and he knows I do too."

Not every tale of infidelity boasts such a happy ending: 29-year-old radio show producer Laura was so devastated when her partner of four years, Conor, cheated on her that her weight plummeted to four-and-a-half stone.

"I'd encouraged him to go away on business," she admits. "I rang him while he was away and he sounded so 'off' that something clicked. I asked, 'Are you with someone else there?' and after a silence, he said yes. It turns out he'd met her four weeks beforehand.

"When I look back, I think I knew something wasn't right," she adds. "He wasn't as attentive, and he'd get upset easily. He was very withdrawn, he didn't want us to do anything together and he was anxious for me to go to bed or to get out the door to work, so he could speak to her."

At Christmas, Conor made a decision to stay with Laura, citing her as the love of his life. However, it transpired weeks later that he was still continuing his affair.

"I think he was waiting on me to decide to do the walking out on him," says Laura. "I always thought of cheating as a deal-breaker, something I'd definitely end a relationship over, but I began to think, 'I love you, we can work through this', which I guess went against my feminist credentials! When he made the decision that it was her he wanted, it wasn't in my capability to exact any type of revenge on him."

Stimson herself writes on the grisly subject of infidelity with no small degree of authority -- not only has she been a self-confessed 'scarlet woman', but she has also been the wronged wife in the past.

"(My husband) Brent had been fairly distant and absent for a while, and we'd row over nothing," she recalls. "We were on holiday and I popped back to the hotel room to get some sunscreen. Well, you can imagine the sort of conversation he was having with his lover on the phone. I wanted to push him off the balcony. I went off in a daze; after all, I had two small children aged three and nine months to look after. I did some checking later and found out that the affair had been going on for years. Strangely enough, I found consolation in the fact that he hadn't left me."

Intriguingly, she met Brent while he was still married to his second wife. "It happened by accident, I didn't set my cap at him," she says of their romance. "I'm not making excuses. With the benefit of hindsight, I know now that this relationship would never work out. Marriage is tough enough without this sort of start."

A statuesque and feisty blonde, Stimson has a charming, virile presence. She may be a thoroughly modern and intelligent woman, but her ideas on how to keep a man from straying may rankle forward-thinking girls. The main thrust of her argument? Women have become so combative by nature that marriage becomes an endless power struggle. While wives and girlfriends have no end of vitriol for the poor fool who forgets birthdays or anniversaries, they aren't upholding their end of the relationship bargain.

"Men have been screwed in the past 30 years," declares Stimson with no hint of irony. "What women don't realise is that men don't need us anymore. They don't need us because they can get companionship, sex and kids easily enough. We women have done ourselves out of a job here. Why do we women expect all this special treatment? It's not all about us. We sit at home passively expecting these great romantic gestures and it's all very one-sided."

A man in a complacent relationship, therefore, is more likely to look outward in order to get his needs -- sexual, physical and emotional -- addressed. What's more, those who cheat are simply addicted to the swoonsome rush of romance that marks every new romance. "There's this thinking with women: 'Hold it, I have the complete right to be a slob in my own home, and I shouldn't have to play the games I did when I started this relationship'," she explains. "It's not about high heels and lipstick before dinner every evening, but it's about caring enough about him to care for yourself.

"It's not a 'Stepford' way of thinking, it's simply about an even balance," she counters. "I hear a lot of people saying this is anti-feminist thinking, but you get more out of life with honey than vinegar. Sit in isolation for a few years while the men go off with the women who've figured this out, and see how anti-feminist that feels."

Thompson is in staunch disagreement.

"There's no sense of feminism having done anything if you think like that. Especially because I'm working at home, I don't have to put make-up on the way I used to have to when I went out to RTE to work. Malcolm will come home and I'll still be working in my pyjamas. If anything, I think that's an inclination of a healthy relationship."

"I don't think putting in so much effort years into a relationship is that feasible in reality," agrees Laura. "We should have had the ideal relationship, and we didn't see each other for weeks on end a lot, so it should have been exciting. You try to keep doing things together, but it's certainly not the sole responsibility of the woman. If men have their head turned, there's nothing you can do. I wasn't neglecting my wifely duties, so to speak -- he just wanted something more."

The jury may be out on Stimson's advice, but she does make one intriguing point that should come as some comfort to cuckolded wives: while only 3pc of men ever leave a marriage -- often within three months of starting the affair -- only one in 10 of these will ever work out. And, in the immortal words of James Goldsmith, when a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy.

"When men leave, no-one at all is the happier for it; in fact, the guy almost always regrets it," she reveals. "They get on with the new relationship, mainly out of pride. I've met so many men who wish they'd stuck with their first wife, because they still end up in the same emotional and sexual rut with the second partner, only they're much poorer financially for it."

Of course, one question looms large: is there a way back to marital bliss after a partner has been exposed as a cheat? Once both parties are aware of what led to the affair in the first place, Stimson claims that a life of harmony is there for the taking. In fact, it might be possible for both parties to end up in a more honest relationship.

"If your husband has had an affair, he's weighed up the idea of divorce and not being with you for some time, whereas you're only being confronted with the idea at that moment," advises Stimson. "Try to think about, aside from the affair, whether this is a relationship you want to stay in. I say give it two or three months before you make any big decisions.

"If you're into revenge, I think it's a question of pinpointing the thing that drives him mad, even if it's something as trivial as changing the dust jackets on all his books. I think that sort of small gesture is the best type of revenge -- plus it doesn't end up in court!"

And if all else fails, Stimson wryly hints that oral sex is key to matrimonial harmony; after all, it's the foremost service, she says, that all call-girls get asked to perform. "I've never met a man who didn't like it, put it that way," she smiles. "Women are always so sexually liberated early on in a relationship, then a few months in they admit it's the one thing they don't like doing."

On a different note, Laura surmises that it's possible to survive an affair, once both parties genuinely want to be in the relationship. "Personally, I honestly don't know if I could have forgiven and forgotten. But you can get over it, that's the good news. The worst thing is the anger and fear of it happening again that you carry into your next relationship.

"The fear will always be there, and you don't have to be cheated on for it to be there. It's a question of making sure that, even if the scars are still there, they still allow you to be loved and to love again."

Beat The Bitch: How To Stop The Other Woman From Stealing Your Man by Tess Stimson is out now

- Tanya Sweeney

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