Hannah* married her husband, eight years her senior, when she was 27 years old.

While she says that he is kind and she was relatively happy in their relationship for a long time, she acknowledges that over the years she came to recognise that her husband loves her more than she does him.

"I often find his intensity overwhelming and exhausting," she writes. She dreams often about leaving him but she is deeply concerned about the consequences this could have for her children.

In 2000, three years after she was married, Hannah met a man through work who she became good friends with and, although nothing romantic was ever pursued at the time, Hannah says that in hindsight there was always a spark between them. After he returned home from a stint working overseas in 2014, the pair began to meet for lunch regularly to chat about their jobs.

For a long time, it was not a romantic relationship – until one day it was.

"At a conference in 2016 we happened to end up alone at the end of a function. He confessed feelings for me and this woke me to feelings I had previously suppressed," she writes.

Hannah has now been having an affair with this man for approximately eight years. She says that it is "all things – joyful, fulfilling, amazing, but also frustrating and sometimes sad."

Watch: The Mamamia team debate on the difference between physical versus emotional affair. Post continues after video.

While her coworker divorced his wife several years ago and the pair had an opportunity to pursue a relationship, Hannah says that she was still apprehensive to break up her family.

"My affair puts a spring in my step. He is constantly in my thoughts. We see each other approx [sic] every six to eight weeks, speak occasionally on the phone and rarely text."

Her coworker remarried a few years ago and Hannah says that she feels for his wife but their relationship remains "meaningful, positive and complicated".

"I don't have the bravery to take a risk and leave my comfortable life but I do often wonder what my life would be like if I did," she says.

Infidelity is extremely common, with most research finding that approximately 60 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women admitting to cheating in some form, whether it is an emotional or physical affair, during their marriage.

Approximately 70 per cent of marriages will experience some form of an affair at some point and if these numbers seem high, it may be because only around a third of people admit their cheating to their primary partner.

In fact, cheating in long-term relationships and marriages is so frequent that one 2020 paper stated it is "hard to imagine romantic and committed relationships devoid of transgressions of some kind. Despite the best intentions not to cause any harm or disappointment to one's partner, breaking rules and promises are largely inevitable in long-term relationships."

Perhaps due to the enduringtaboo of affairs in the face of their commonality, they have long been a fixture of cultural fascination.

They are the focus for countless works of fiction, with books and films honing in on the risks, passion, and complications of affairs. There are also narratives where cheating is an ancillary detail on the road to ultimate romantic fulfilment – think The Notebook .

Madeleine Gray's Green Dot, one of the most acclaimed Australian fiction releases of last year, centres around an affair narrative when the narrator, Hera, a floundering woman in her early 20s, meets and falls in love with Arthur, an older married colleague. Gray says that she wrote the character of Hera with a lot of empathy for her character and the bind she finds herself in, as somebody enamoured with a married man.

"She can't see her way out of the predicament that she's in – and that happens in all relationships where love blinds you," Gray explains.

"In this particular situation, you can feel that it's kind of like the 'sunk cost fallacy' in that you'll get involved in this relationship, you think you want to be with this person so you just have to wait a bit longer and because you've already been waiting, it feels like it would be a waste to stop waiting, so you keep going until you're further and further down the rabbit hole."

Listen to Sealed Section where Chantelle answers three anonymous questions from listeners, who are cheating, or being cheated on. Post continues after audio.

Gray tellsMamamiashe chose to write about an affair because of the extreme emotional experiences that tend to propel them.

"I think affairs in general are just the juiciest possible vector of emotionality because it's like love, but on steroids. You're breaking all society's moral rules, to pursue desire and potentially love. And I just think with anyone who makes that choice, there's got to be some interesting, emotional stuff going on there," Gray says.

However, when it comes to our appraisal of affairs in the real world, overwhelmingly, these reactions contain little nuance and there is little interest in what is happening underneath the surface.

Although common, affairs are broadly and steeply criticised, with one sociologist referring to infidelity as the "lone area of adult sexual practice that is disapproved of under any circumstances". One 2013 study of over 1500 American adults found that 91 per cent considered infidelity to be morally wrong – a higher percentage than people who looked down on human cloning, suicide, and polygamy.

Disapproval of cheating also seems to have increased as divorce has become a more acceptable option over generations: after all, if you're unsatisfied in your marriage, why not just separate rather than cheat? More often than not, people report that they would rather see the end of their relationship than be betrayed within it.

This is likely due to generational differences in the way marriage is conducted. For previous generations who married earlier, "struggles" including fighting within the relationship, or infidelity outside of it were more expected. For younger generations who are getting married later, infidelity has become less acceptable.

Journalist Hugo Schwyzer referred to this shift in relationship expectations in a 2013 Atlantic article as the difference between "capstone" and "cornerstone" marriages. "Cornerstone" marriages are the ones that you build upon, while "capstones" are the crowning achievement of a well-ordered life.

"The 'capstone' model presumes, as one of my friends puts it, that you only should get married 'after you've got your sh*t together'. The capstone model is much less forgiving of sexual betrayal because it presumes that those who finally get around to marrying should be mature enough to be both self-regulating and scrupulously honest," Schwyzer writes.

The effects of cheating can, of course, be profound and destructive, both for those who have been cheated on, the partner who cheated, and any children or family that may bear witness to the consequences. Reactions to the trauma of being cheated on can vary but research suggests that there can be immense emotional, psychological and cognitive dysregulation after being cheated on, including lower self-esteem, lower self-confidence, and a lack of trust in others and strong fear of abandonment in future relationships.

However, while an extremely important consideration, if the negative ramifications of affairs and moral disgust that follows them are the only aspects of affairs that are seriously inspected and fore fronted, then we will continue to miss the answers to some equally important questions: Why do people have affairs? Why do they continue in marriages if divorce is relatively less stigmatised now than in previous generations? And is there any way to repair a relationship following an affair?

As for why people cheat, the answers can be rather complex and difficult to unravel.

Affairs can occur in relationships that would otherwise be considered perfectly happy and healthy – a confusing concept that psychotherapist Esther Perel addressed in her 2015 Ted Talk 'Rethinking infidelity… a talk for anyone who has ever loved.'

Watch: A snippet of Esther Perel's TED Talk on why happy couples cheat. Post continues after video.

Perel states that affairs are less about anything to do with the quality of relationships or contentment with primary partners and more a result of a personal desire for different types of fulfilment. She says that there is a misled assumption that perfect marriages can "innoculate us against wanderlust".

"Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of loving and loss. At the heart of an affair you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy… It isn't so much that we are looking for another person as much as we are looking for another self."

Perel also posits that the forbidden nature of affairs makes them inherently alluring, leading even people in non-monogamous relationships to break the rules and cheat on partners.

However, beyond these desires for individual escape or reconnection, there are other reasons that people pursue affairs – reasons that are born out of dissatisfaction.

One analysis published in 2021 revealed that anger, self-esteem, lack of love, and neglect are cited as common motivators for infidelity. And while most affairs involve sex, sex is less commonly cited as the primary source of motivation, with most people who have had affairs admitting to becoming emotionally attached to the person they have cheated with and claiming that sex was an expression of affection for that person.

Dee Tozer is a relationship counsellor and psychologist who specialises in helping couples to repair relationships following infidelity. Tozer tellsMamamiathat there are different types of people who cheat in relationships.

One type of person she refers to as a " serial cheater" and says that they receive an ego boost or a sense of conquest from having an affair. Tozer notes that there is little chance of reform with people who cheat for these reasons – however, they seem to be the minority. Tozer says that, more often than not, people will cheat when they feel a gap in their pre-existing relationship.

"The non-serial-offending cheater is somebody who’s been attracted to somebody else, often in the workplace or in a sporting group, and the main reason that they’re attracted is because something’s been lost at home that makes them feel disconnected.

"They don’t feel heard, they don’t feel like th