Why are more women cheating on their partners?

There's been a surge in women having affairs helped in part by websites. We talk to two who have no regrets

- LUCY ROBINSON

After putting on her make-up and doing her hair, Nikki* was ready to spend the afternoon with some good company. As she left her family home and headed off on the 20-minute drive to a nearby coffee shop, butterflies sent her stomach into overdrive.

Having spent weeks talking to a younger man she’d met online, the 51-year-old was eager to see how the connection panned out in person. But while to onlookers they seemed like any other couple on their first date, this wasn’t exactly the whole picture. This was the beginning of an affair.

“It was a weird choice looking back. It was a bit too close to home, so it was risky. We got a coffee, wandered around and sat in the park snogging like teenagers. I felt really nervous because I hadn’t actually kissed anyone for a long time. I worried I wouldn’t remember what to do,” she tells us.

“We’d WhatsApped all day, every day and when we met, we just knew. It felt really right and we didn’t live far away from each other, so it was really convenient. It was everything I’d been looking for.”

THE STATISTICS

As shocking as it may seem, Nikki’s story isn’t unusual. In the UK, as many as one in five Brits have had an affair. And although estimates suggest that men are more likely to have an affair than women, the number of women cheating in relationships has risen by 40% since 1990.

But where people may once have turned to work colleagues or friends, the internet has seen dating websites for married people, such as Illicit Encounters, pop up – and they’re proving popular. The term ‘affair website’ is searched approximately 590 times a month in the UK and when we visited Illicit Encounters on a quiet Tuesday morning, we spotted that 706 registered users were online.