Infidelity: no longer a secret affair

WHAT KATI DID NEXT: Infidelity is on the rise apparently, but before you run off to check the pockets of your menfolk for phone numbers or the collars of their shirts for lipstick ladies, we’re at it as well.

My question is “Is it?” Do we think that infidelity is on the rise or do we think that the way we now live our lives is completely different to the way it was?

Then we all stuck at relationships through thick and and thin regardless of the pain we were causing ourselves/partners/children.

In the good ol’ days, and I’m talking my grandparents’ era here, you couldn’t live with your partner first.

There was absolutely no way you could spend any serious time being intimate with one another. And I don’t mean in the obvious way, I mean just sharing hopes and dreams, as you were always sat in the parlour with your parents/grandparents/neighbours.

You got married for Iife and if you didn’t like it, you quite plainly lumped it because there were nowt you could do about it.

Women didn’t tend to work, so could not have supported their offspring and would most probably have been ostracised for the whole divorce she-bang.

My parents era was similar. They too had to marry to spend any quality time together and, not unusually, my parents and many of their friends are now divorced.

For them infidelities were a part of their lives, just a part that wasn’t aired in public. Dirty linen was most definitely kept in the laundry basket.

Now we have the Jeremy Kyle laundrette to air all our grievances right out there in the public domain.

These days we are more than happy to tell people all about our intimate lives, we don’t need or want to keep quiet about it, just look at the papers. Every day we see a new celebrity falling apart due to a misdemeanour or 10.

I mentioned this infidelity lark to my husband, who thinks of his mid-life crisis as a dim and distant memory. He made it very clear he was too old for that kind of nonsense.

That kind of nonsense being changing his shirt and cutting his nose hair, by the way. No right-minded woman would have him in this state, so at least I’m safe for a bit.