At a moment in my life - back in the mists of time - I studied the social sciences. One of the main things we did to be ’scientific’ was to categorise stuff and name it. This was a fairly pointless exercise - most people can spot ‘ a deprived housing enviroment’ or a ‘bureaucrat’ or an ‘urban society’ yet lots of academics/writers spend their lives classifying and identifying things that are blindingly obvious. I noticed a piece in the Mail the other day which insisted on classifying different types of affair.
We have the ‘accidental affair’ can be anything from a one-off encounter to a full-blown affair - you are having coffee with an acquaintace and you fall into bed.
Thre is the ‘cry-for-help’ affair where the participants don’t bother to cover their tracks so that their partner can realise that something is going on.
This in turn leads to the retalitory affair where the cheated partner has a fling themselves.
Then we come to the ’self-medication affair’ ‘ Should I just stop the nonsense and accept my sexless marriage?’ i.e join loving links (I like this one!!)
Then they identify the ‘tripod affair’ which spreads the load across the main and extra relationship.
They also identify the ‘exploratory affair’ and the ‘exit affair’ which are fairly self-explanatory.
My question is this: Does knowing what sort of affair you are having actually make it more exciting/interesting/less guilty? Aren’t we over-complicating for the sake of spinning out a book/research grant etc? I know that most of my affairs were ‘exploratory’ as in ‘I just wanted to explore her body’