Beware of the revenge affair

Photo / iStock.

As Jerry Hall admits hers was a disaster, Helen Croydon says no one wins with a 'tit for tat' fling.

When Alice (not her real name) sent a flirtatious Facebook message to an old flame, as her husband slept beside her and her children soundly in their beds, she didn't feel a shred of guilt. "We hadn't spoken for eight years, but I knew he still held a torch for me," she says. "I worded the message carefully. I wanted a result and I knew how to get it. It's surprising how anger can make you very focused."

Just days earlier, Alice, 42, had discovered intimate text messages from another woman on her husband's phone, suggesting he was having, or was about to embark on, an affair. "They were purely sexual, it didn't sound like it was a love affair, but I was devastated," she says. Yet instead of confronting him, she festered - sorrow turning to simmering anger and, ultimately, thoughts of revenge: "My overriding feeling was one of rage, that I had got a raw deal - and I wanted to right it. There were plenty of men I could have flirted with over the years, but I always remained true to my vows. When I discovered he wasn't playing by the same rules, it seemed licence to not make all those sacrifices any more."

The psychology of the "tit for tat" revenge affair seems to elicit - if not sympathy - then at least more understanding than most infidelities. Who, however faithful themselves, can't have thought "fair enough" upon reading Jerry Hall's confession, yesterday, that her well-publicised fling with wealthy horse breeder Robert Sangster in the Eighties was purely designed to give Mick Jagger a taste of his own medicine after yet another dalliance?

Instead of the moralising rebuke that often follows a public admission of adultery, Hall appears to be deemed a mascot for wronged (or at least disgruntled) women. Much like Diana, Princess of Wales, who is thought to have embarked on her affair with Dodi Fayed to make her former lover, Hasnat Khan, whom she wanted to marry, jealous. Or Sienna Miller, who embarked on a two-week fling with Daniel Craig mere months after her partner Jude Law (and Craig's best friend) confessed that he'd slept with his children's nanny.

The novelist Mokokoma Mokhonoana has said: "When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog." So is the counter-affair a peculiarly female phenomenon? "There is still a gender bias when it comes to cheating," says Dr Pam Spurr, psychologist and author of a new book, The Law of Sisterhood. "We expect more men to have affairs. So when a woman does, it's an unexpected twist, that men may take particularly badly - and see as a greater humiliation."

No wonder, then, that while the intention is to bring an unfaithful man to heel, revenge flings tend to sound a marriage's death knell instead. Although Jerry's affair was short-lived (two weeks), she admitted that while Mick initially begged for her to come back, it ultimately spelt disaster for their relationship.

Suzy Miller, author of The Alternative Divorce Guide, believes such affairs aren't just used as weapons by the scorned party to wound their unfaithful partner. "The first reaction to infidelity is fury and deep hurt," she says. "The attempt to fight back is not about revenge. Your self-esteem is so smashed that having a relationship with someone, hearing them tell you you're beautiful, is an antidote. It can feel healing."

When Alice did finally go on her revenge date with her university sweetheart, however, it did no more good than sticking a plaster on a gaping wound. "It made me feel good initially because I was getting back at [my husband], but I didn't feel really attracted to the man I was with. I'd picked him because it was easy, but the sex was awkward and I got nothing from it."

Alice didn't have a second date. Instead, she confronted her husband, who admitted to the texts with a junior colleague, but denied that anything had ever happened. Whatever the truth of the matter, Alice decided to keep her own dalliance to herself - as a mistake she'd rather forget. They patched things up and remain together.

She had discovered the other biggest pitfall of a calculated revenge affair - it lacks the very thing that is thought to drive infidelity: passion. Which makes it, by every possible definition, a losing game.