I don't regret cheating. An affair is how women can feel truly alive

It’s a pretty sad day when a married woman realises her husband doesn’t care about her. Oh, maybe he does because they share children and a mortgage, but he doesn’t value her as a person, or as someone whose desires are of interest to him.

On that day, a woman might say to herself: ‘You know, if I cheated on him, he honestly wouldn’t give a fig why I did it. He would only care about how it hurt his pride.’

I came to that moment often in my marriage. Although I did not actually cheat until I could think of no other way to get his attention. I was that desperate, and it’s a decision I’m not proud of.

But my husband didn’t want to spend time with me, talk about the relationship, go to therapy or even go out to dinner – and, well, being intimate with someone else was a skill I still had.

And so I began a fling with a male friend who listened to me and made me feel hopeful. I did it to feel alive again when my marriage was like a plastic bag wrapped around my head.

I was reminded of that feeling this week after reading an obituary of French actress Brigitte Bardot. In it, she was quoted as saying: ‘It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be.’

I wholeheartedly agree. I knew that ‘the right thing to do’ in the good old Anglo-Saxon tradition would be to suffer in silence and ‘be good’.

But I also knew such a path would lead me to shrivel up in my marriage – a state I had seen in the marriages of others, unions held together by bitterness and resentment.

I did not want to spend my life loathing the person I had married with a promise to love. The consequences? Our fling would go on to end my eight‑year marriage when he found out (he seethed down the phone, then changed the locks on me).

But having been painted into an emotional corner, being honest with myself felt more important than faking a happy, sexy marriage for ever.

Of course, Brigitte’s little quip scandalised an entire generation back in 1968. But its apparent selfishness was really a progressive sentiment. With it, she opened our eyes to the value of passion – seen back then as something that burns out in the first flush of romance.

Beautiful, famous, wealthy and sure of herself, Bardot followed her own dictum that no woman should ignore their true desires.

Married four times, she had many – some say hundreds of – highly publicised affairs that often overlapped with her marriages.

As for me, married twice with important relationships between, I never expected any man to be faithful but, until recently, could not say that was a grace I wanted extended to myself.

My marriages were to men I genuinely loved, but the only notion of fidelity discussed was that full-blown affairs were not allowed.

I remember being confronted by my own mother – who was a very happily married woman – after I presented her with yet another boyfriend. She eyed the new handsome beau and snapped: ‘How long do you think you can keep doing this?’ I was in my 40s then and my reply was, and remains: ‘I don’t know. Shall we wait and see?’

Now 55, I can see that I wasn’t ready to be that standard wife when I was younger. I was too needy, too greedy and too selfish.

It’s not that I started a relationship already looking for the next one. I simply wasn’t ready for all the changes that happen in a long-term relationship, for the notion that feelings and needs often don’t match up. So when I cheated, it wasn’t about sex but a much-needed ego boost. It felt like a more natural, more energising way to live. I don’t remember feeling guilty because I never strayed in order to hurt anyone.

The modern view on cheating has shifted since Bardot dropped that bombshell.

I have friends who carefully ask me to lunch or coffee, then delicately ask for advice about an unhappy marriage. Some admit having found a lover or having had an affair that helped them see themselves again as special and desirable – something that had faded from their marriages.

Being married, building a life together, often has a focus outside the notion of desire, after all. You’re just too locked in to achieving that couple’s goal, whether that’s putting the kids through school, buying a home or any other challenging target.

So my friends took another path. They weren’t proud of their actions but they were pleased with the results: they did what felt honest for them.

It’s here that Bardot’s words sound startlingly modern. She wasn’t condemning fidelity – she was condemning duty without desire. It was a declaration of authenticity, a refusal to live in emotional hypocrisy.

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JEFF PRESTRIDGE: My affair sent a wrecking ball through my marriage and family

Belgian relationship therapist Esther Perel’s international bestseller The State Of Affairs claims that dalliances often show us how estranged we are from our own desires inside long-term relationships.

She does not insist cheating is a good thing, but suggests that ‘people stray not always because they want to find another person but because they want to rediscover themselves’.

Looking back, my own affairs happened not because they were the best thing to do but that, at that time, they were the only thing I knew how to do.

The downside is that exciting sex with an illicit partner can land you in the divorce court, losing your home and having to start all over again.

And yet . . . humans get bored. We often take for granted the stability and warmth of a life-long relationship. We want to be excited, to feel alive, giddy and turned-on instead.

When those feelings arise, being ‘faithful without wanting to be’ can be a corrosive waste of a good woman.