  The best story I heard yesterday: A colleague of the woman whose house is currently my home revealed to the woman whose house is currently my home that she is leading a double life.
She is 50, has a husband and children and a home in Greater London, she works at the cop shop and she makes her family's dinner and does the housework like any normal person does. But she also has another man in Yorkshire, who she speaks to and text messages on a secret, second mobile phone that her family knows nothing about. Her mother is in a care home in Yorkshire, and every weekend she goes to visit and lives her second life with the second man.
Man number 2 is her first love, childhood sweetheart, and she believes that they were "meant to be together". I am quite struck by this story. I know that people have affairs all the time, that people cheat and play away and treat their families with no respect, or trade in for a younger model, or make a silly mistake during a rough patch... There is no mystery in infidelity anymore. It's a cheap trick, but it's also the usual run of things in quite a lot of cases. Now it's not so much whether someone has cheated, but the spirit in which it was done, the emotions at play, the character of cheater and cheatee that determine how we judge the offence.
Nothing new there. But what really fascinated me about this story is the secrecy involved. Can you imagine what it entails to really have secrets that you can't tell the people that mean the most to you, on a longterm basis? I don't know what it must be like to be able to get gratification and happiness that you can't show or share with anyone. I'm fascinated by it. Because normally, infidelity is all about negative emotions, guilt, revenge, jealousy, paranoia, unhappiness, dissatisfaction. But it seems to me that this woman is doing this because it actually fills a gap and it makes her happy.
And she's pleased as punch that she finally got her man. Weird. Secretly, I'd quite like to know what it's like. I have two mobile phones, and two sim cards, two numbers. I could do this. The technology is at my disposal. IIf I could find two willing volunteers, I might try it... 
