Today is International Happiness Day.

I’m cool with that, there’s nothing wrong with taking a day out to make sure you’re feeling perky.

What I am most definitely not cool with though is the press release I received yesterday from a married dating site claiming that the secret of happiness is an extra-marital affair.

What the proverbial f*ck?

According to their research, “89% of people who are actively looking for an affair claim it has made them feel happier” and “78% said they feel their marriage has improved since joining the site”.

What a pile of crap. These people haven’t improved their marriage because they don’t have a marriage – they are cheating. How can you possibly for a minute believe that a relationship based on lies and deceit is a happy and healthy one? 

Can an affair make you happy? International Happiness Day

I’m not trying to take some moral high ground here or present myself as totally naive – I understand that people have affairs. What I don’t understand though is how these people can claim it makes them happy. Being at a point in your marriage where you are having an affair in the first place is bad enough, but most affairs are in themselves miserable, wretched and exhausting things.

What made me most furious though was the blatant exploitation and manipulation on the part of the dating site. Do they honestly believe that they are somehow contributing to the nation’s happiness and helping to create happy marriages by promoting their services? Are they actually trying to win new customers with the promise that an affair will lead to happiness, all on the back of something like International Happiness Day, something that is meant to be positive and uplifting.

A spokesperson for the site comments: “Our members, whether they have found an illicit partner or not, are taking control of their lives and looking for that something that’s missing from their current relationship, be it physical or mental; they are taking a positive step towards personal fulfilment and that is going to make you happy.”

What a crock of shit. A positive step would be to talk to their partners and tell them how they are feeling, not to start living a deceitful double life.

What do you think? Am I being unreasonable is being so cross about this?

 

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I am something of a paradox when it comes to trust. In general, I tend to believe if not quite that all men are lying, cheating bastards,  that they all at least have the capacity to be deceitful, and are quite likely to stray should the opportunity present itself.

I can’t help this and I apologise to all the men who have never ever lied to their partners.

However, whilst my world view may be a little depressing, I still have a bizarre naivety when it comes to individual relationships, and will basically believe anything anyone tells me. You’d think you’d have to be an idiot to accept  any one of the following lies, yet in previous relationships, accept them I have, without, at the time, doubting them at all:

“Oh this black eye? Oh yes, I got that dancing over-enthusiastically.”

“Yes it is weird that it took me two and a half hours to get home from work even though it’s only ten minutes away. Yeah, the traffic was a bit bad.”

“My wife?? No, I’m definitely not having sex with her.”

You get my drift.

The thing is that I really want to trust people, and just can’t help but see the best in someone and give them the benefit of the doubt. I also believe that a relationship has to be built on trust. Whatever my opinion of men in general might be, I have to believe that my partner is different, otherwise what’s the point?

I was reading today about a recent study that revealed that a quarter of men have a secret email account that their partner doesn’t know about. A quarter of men! My first reaction was shock, but then I was confused. Why do people need a separate account? Aren’t emails private and personal anyway? I would never read a partner’s email, just like I would never open their post, so why the need to be secretive?

It’s not that I wouldn’t want a partner to read my emails, but it just wouldn’t occur to me to share. It would be a bit like being on the phone and someone picking up the other line to listen in. Just weird.

The survey also discovered that:

  • One in ten men deliberately set up a separate account because they wanted to hide an affair or money problems
  • One in twenty men have a second secret mobile phone
  • Nearly 20% of men store pictures of an ex-partner
  • 77% of men delete text messages in case their partners look at them
  • A quarter of men had emails they said they wouldn’t want their partner to see and a third of these said they had flirty emails stored secretly.

It kind of cancels out the joy of Santa and his stuck beard doesn’t it?

What I want to know though, all this man-hating aside, is do you read your partner’s emails and/or text messages? If so, do they know about it, or do you do it in secret? Am I the unusual one in not openly sharing emails or at least sneaking a peek behind my partner’s back?

Or, if you’re a man, do you do any of the things in this survey? I’d love to know…

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I read an article in Grazia this week that made me mad.

It was written by an anonymous male journalist, who was claiming that being cheated on is basically much harder for a man than a woman. He was empathising with the recently wronged Robert Pattinson. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s so much worse when a woman cheats on a man.”

Of course it is.

Just like it’s always worse when a man gets a cold?

(Did you detect my oh-so-subtle sarcasm?)

He goes on about how much harder it is for men to be cheated on, because it leads them to doubt themselves and their sexual prowess and makes them wonder what they were lacking as a man that made their partner stray. “When women have their hearts broken,” he whines on, “they get endless counselling sessions from friends until they feel better.”

Seriously, does it get much more patronising than that?

Firstly, anonymous male journalist, I would like to point out that just because we don’t have penises, doesn’t mean we are immune to worrying about our sexual performance. Newsflash for you – women occasionally experience self-doubt! Gasp! We also like to think outside the bedroom too, so our trampled self-esteem will affect lots of other areas of our lives as well. (This is similar to multi-tasking. It’s that thing women do when they think about more than one thing at once*.)

Also, this sweeping statement about women finding comfort in their friends makes several very basic and not always correct assumptions. It assumes that all women have friends that they feel comfortable confiding in, and it assumes we want to bang on and on to them about our problems. Neither of these are necessarily true. Heartbreak is often a very personal and private thing, and although men may have this image of women gathering in packs, necking Chardonnay, proclaiming all men to be bastards and immediately ‘feeling better’, it’s simply not true.

The fact is that being deceived by someone you love and trust is gutting, whether you’re a man or a woman, 18 or 80. Just because women might be more inclined to vent their emotions with friends sometimes, doesn’t mean the pain cuts any less deep.

If anonymous male journalist is still wondering what it is that he lacks as a man, perhaps he should focus less on the contents of his trousers, and more on his understanding on how women think and feel.

*Said in an anonymous male writer style patronising tone

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My last post about infidelity sparked some really interesting discussion, and has got me thinking about just what fidelity means, and how important it actually is in a relationship.

So, given I always get such thoughtful interesting responses, I wanted to ask some more questions about what loyalty in a relationship means to you.

Firstly of course we have the issue of what is cheating? I think we have established that the majority of men (all my readers excepted obviously), would probably cheat if they had the chance and knew they could get away with it, but what exactly do you define as cheating? Is it a kiss? Is it sex? Or do men take the Bill Clinton approach to just how much bad behaviour you can defend… ‘I did not have intercourse with that woman…’

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I was talking to a male friend at the weekend about infidelity and he came out with a rather shocking statement.

He said that the only thing that stopped men from cheating on their partners was the possibility of getting caught. He reckoned that if there was a guarantee that the wives and girlfriends would never find out, that ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of men would cheat.

I will say that again just in case you didn’t hear me properly – ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

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