Kate Legge

I think that there are as many women having affairs as there are men and more so now than ever before because women are financially independent.

They no longer need, really, men to have children or to start a family.

The freedoms and independence that have...

delivered to women over the last 20 or 30 years have freed them up to behave in a way, you know, as much as men.

And they get bored in marriages as well.

I think there's less judgment now about having affairs, you know, because of the rules of change.

There's so much more fluidity in society generally.

And if you read Sally Rooney's book on conversations with friends, you know, she's very relaxed about it.

There's not the same level of judgment that there would have been.

You know, that was why, you know, years and years and, well, you look at Marie Antoinette, for example, who apparently had an affair and this new technology has unveiled redacted letters that she'd sent to her Swedish count who she was having an affair with.

Because, you know, in those days you faced penury, death, and if you look at all the women in literature who've had affairs, they all die at the end of the book, you know, as a sort of final moral judgment.

Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary.

It doesn't end well.

I don't want to spend too much time on this idea that it might be a gendered thing, but do men and women cite different reasons for having an affair, typically?

Well, there's a number of reasons that people give for having an affair, and I think they're probably the same on both sides.

I mean, the monotony of monogamy, drought in the marital bedroom, and, I mean, that's often a difference in libido.

And men often have thought to be more driven than women.

But I think that that's probably, again, a generalisation.

There's narcissism, neuroticism, a quest for the discovery of self.

And that's what Esther Perel talks.