For me, turning 40 was in many ways like turning 16. 

As I turned 16, I started noticing boys (and men) looking at me for the first time. Instead of feeling flattered, or shy and exposed, my overriding thought was: I have POWER. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful. As I started dating boys and having sex, the feeling of power grew. Their puppy-dog eyes, their pleas of love – all (of course) designed to get into my pants – made me feel high. I went through a stage of worshipping strippers, thinking that they were the most powerful women because they could quite literally look down on groups of men and toy with them. 

In the years that followed, I often blanched at my naivety. I had it all the wrong way around. Until I turned 40.

Because here’s the thing that no one talks about: women in their 40s are taking their power back, but on their own terms. They are having affairs. Lots of them! We spend our teens hunting boyfriends, our 20s hunting husbands, our 30s raising small children and hanging on to our careers. And then we hit our 40s and we realise we’ve been so busy trying to create the perfect white picket fence life that we’ve forgotten who we are. We have sprinted towards a finish line and once there, stand in front of an empty abyss that is the rest of our life. Is this really it?

Only now, unlike at 16, we understand the world. And we’re a little angry and very disillusioned. You see, women forget themselves the way no man ever would. We give every inch of ourselves to other people – our husbands, children, families. I spent the first few years of my kids’ lives feeling quite literally sucked dry, even when the breastfeeding ended. My body was not my own, my mind was not my own, and everyone demanded more of me until there was nothing left.

And then, slowly, the kids grew up, asked for less, needed me less. I started sleeping again, exercising again and life started coming back into focus. It was like a slow re-awakening. Except I wasn’t the same as before. And this, dear husbands out there, is the sweet spot. 

In my broad circle of friends, I have yet to hear of a man having an affair. They might be better at keeping it quiet, having decades of practice, but what is new is the number of women having affairs. I remember my mom’s generation and the whispers of husbands cheating with younger women, leaving their wives for their secretaries or women they’d met at work. 

How the tables have turned. 

As women wake up from child-rearing and nest-making and realise that they have at least a ‘good’ decade left, they are going for it. Replacing the practiced, comfortable ritual of marital sex with something unfamiliar and new is enlivening. As I heard from a friend recently, a good affair is like a trip to the Spa. It can be utterly and completely rejuvenating. My friend, in the midst of a tryst with a co-worker, told me that she’d never felt more beautiful in her life (she was 41 at the time). Another one, flirting with a yummy school daddy, said she’d never had more energy and felt like she could conquer the world. Someone else said that she felt a lightness of being for the first time in two decades. 

When you’re in your 20s on a husband-hunt, you’re on a mission: the excitement and fantastic sex of a(ny) new relationship is tempered by getting closer to the finish line – is this the guy I’m going to marry? What will our kids be like? How does my name sound with his surname? 

When you’re having an affair in your 40s it is entirely selfish. There is no finish line – because you’ve passed it already. But, I hear you gasp, women are not selfish beings. We are mothers! Wives! Sisters and Daughters! Yes, but we are also re-discovering ourselves again after decades of doing everything for everyone else. And if that takes some extra-curricular sex, so what? Women are judged extremely harshly for their indiscretions, and if found out, husband’s egos are often bruised beyond repair. But if we take a moment to level the playing field and put hypocrisy aside, if we separate the mother from the woman, and if we give women the grace to find themselves again the way we have been giving men grace to…’be men’, she might just emerge the better for it. An affair doesn’t have to mean the end of a marriage. But if handled carefully, it can be the start of a journey of re-discovery for women that have for too long put their own needs aside.