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Intramarital Affair

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At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion, and endless curiosity—all these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot. They are also the ingredients of thriving relationships. It is no accident that many of the most erotic couples lift their marital strategies directly from the infidelity playbook.
Esther Perel, The State of Affairs

The Forbidden Fruit nature of infidelity ensures that it has — and will forever have — an allure. From there, sometimes people get the idea, "What if we could capture the sexiness of infidelity and apply it to a sanctioned relationship?"

This takes two common forms:

  • A couple LARPs having an affair for fun and spice.
  • A couple has an affair with each other, not knowing their affair partner is actually their spouse. Sometimes uses Acquainted in Real Life. It highlights the point that what is being sought is not another partner, but the experience of an affair — the novelty, the thrill of transgression, an escape from chores and from family life.

Also see Two-Person Love Triangle and Mistaken for Cheating.


Examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • In the French comic Les Crannibales (about a family of modern cannibals, played for food-based puns and Black Comedy), one strip has both the parents put out singles ads and end up paired with each other. Not because they intended to cheat on each other but as a way to get new victims (and they share a laugh on reading each other's descriptions in the ads).

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Face of Another follows Okuyama, a man whose face was burn in an accident and his relationship with his wife became strained as a result. He receives a flawless latex mask that allows him to interact with the world as a regular person and decides to use it to seduce his own wife, posing as a stranger. After having sex with her, he becomes enraged at how easily she cheated on him and rips his mask off to reveal his identity. She responds by telling him that she knew it was him from the very beginning and thought they were role-playing.
  • Mitr My Friend is an Indian film about a woman in an Arranged Marriage who, after moving to the USA, begins a close relationship with a "mitr" (Sanskrit for friend) in an internet chatroom. When she meets "mitr" in real life towards the end of the film, he turns out to be none other than her own husband.
  • True Lies: Harry Tasker learns that his wife Helen is seeing someone on the side, a man who tells Helen he is a spy, but is in fact, a car salesman. After using an interrogation to learn that Helen hadn't actually had sex with the other man, and was merely looking for a thrill, not knowing that her husband was a spy and believing him to be a computer salesman, Harry decides to give her an "adventure". He tells her to help them with surveillance on a subject, with Harry himself standing in for the object of interrogation. Of course, this leads to the both of them actually being captured, and Helen learning what her husband really does for his day job. Their marriage is much stronger after they escape and rescue their daughter from the terrorists, with Helen now joining Harry on his missions.

    Folklore 
  • Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, tale type 891, "The Man Who Deserts his Wife": A prince has a row with his wife and orders her to produce a child whose parents are him and her, then locks her in a dungeon. Fortunately, the girl is resourceful enough to find a way out of her cell and goes to fulfill her husband's task: three times, she disguises herself as courtesans and seductresses, makes love to her husband without him knowing and gains a token to mark the sexual congress, then returns to her cell each time. The prince returns to gloat to his wife of his "affairs", which she takes in stride. At the end of the tale, she introduces the prince to their children, each holding a token given to prince's "mistresses".

    Literature 
  • Dave Barry in Cyberspace has a section explaining what cybersex is, culminating in the guy saying "[orgasming] feels like breaking a tie vote in the Senate" (revealing himself to be Al Gore), and the person he was cybering with furiously saying he'd claimed to have important meetings that day, revealing herself to be Al's wife Tipper.
  • G. K. Chesterton's 1912 novel Manalive concerns the Blithe Spirit Innocence Smith who breathes life and happiness into the Beacon House boarding establishment—partly by wooing the spinster Mary Gray and agreeing to elope with her. The newfound happiness is threatened when Innocence is arrested on various charges. In particular, he's accused of polygamy and desertion of a spouse, as there are reports that he's eloped with numerous other women in just the same way he offered to with Miss Gray. At the trial, Innocence Smith is naturally enough found innocent of these charges (and all others): Mary Gray and all the other women he's eloped with are actually his wife in various different aliases, as they've been reenacting their original whirlwind courtship for fun.
  • Terra Ignota: Bryar Kosala and Vivien Ancelet are Happily Married. They also LARP having an affair for fun. Due to various contrivances they thought they were genuinely cheating on each other at first; it took seven months for them to realize who they were "cheating" with, and decided to carry on with it afterwards.

    Live-Action TV 
  • All in the Family: In "Black is the Color of My True Love's Wig", Gloria buys a black wig as a surprise for Mike. He likes it a bit too much for Gloria, who is unhappy that Mike apparently wants to "mess around with another girl without cheating on your wife!"
  • Big Love's Bill and Barb (his first wife) have one. As he's not supposed to sleep with her on days designated for his other two wives, their behavior takes on all the hallmarks of typical cheating—sneaking around, lying about where they're going and/or who they're going to be with, meeting in hotel rooms, etc. To the point that his second wife Nicky thinks that he's truly having one and is ironically actually pleased as she hopes that a fourth wife will be an ally in her clashes with the other two (she's The Un-Favorite among all three). She's very hurt upon learning what's really going on, as it just further cements that he loves Barb more than her.
  • Boy Meets World: Cory and Eric are horrified to learn that their mom's Wednesday night bowling league has been over for six weeks and that she's been smuggling a sexy dress and pair of heels out of the house in her bowling bag on the same night their father has a weekly managers' meeting. It turns out they're meeting each other; Wednesday night is the night they sneak around behind their kids' backs.
  • Columbo: Subverted in the episode "Sex and the Married Detective". Dr. Joan Allenby disguises herself as a high-class prostitute and solicits her longtime lover, David Kincaid. Kincaid recognizes her but assumes that it is kinky roleplay and plays along, agreeing to "hire" her. But when the two of them are alone, Allenby murders Kincaid and fakes evidence that it was a case of a prostitute killing a john.
  • CSI: NY: Subverted in the episode "Who's There?". The team discover that a murdered man's wife had been catfishing him. Before they figure out her reasoning, Mac asks Jo, "What kind of woman makes up a fake persona to have an online affair with her own husband?" Turns out, he had a history of cheating and she was trying to prove that he was still doing so in spite of promising never to stray again.
  • Several Law & Order episodes throughout the franchise have found the detectives confronting people about their supposedly adulterous behavior, only for it to turn out that they were actually engaging in this.
  • Modern Family: In order to spice up their marriage, Phil and Claire occasionally role-play as the adulterous couple "Clive Bixby" and "Julianna". They check into a hotel and pretend to be having an affair with each other. They especially like doing this on Valentine's Day.
  • My Family: In one episode, Ben and Susan set out to roleplay an affair to spice up their marriage. They check into a hotel and pretend to meet each other for the first time. However, this doesn't go as planned — Ben is questioned by the hotel staff on suspicion of credit card fraud (he checked in under a different name), another guest starts flirting with Susan, and due to a mix-up with their key cards, Ben is arrested after the other male guest finds Ben in his room on the bed in a Ready for Lovemaking pose. The next day, Ben receives a card from him saying that seeing Ben naked made him realize something new about himself...
  • The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer: President and Mrs. Lincoln are having a telegraph affair with each other without knowing their real identities.

    Music 
  • Kate Bush: "Babooshka" is about a wife testing her husband's faithfulness with pseudonymous love letters. Ironically, he agrees to the affair because "Babooshka" reminds him of how his wife used to be before Dead Sparks set in.
  • Rupert Holmes: "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" is about a couple with Dead Sparks. The man is reading personal advertisements in the local newspaper and sees one that catches his eye, so he arranges a meetup with that woman. Upon meeting, he discovers it's his partner. Through this, they discover that both are yearning for more, that both have a previously unknown spontaneous side. It rekindles the spark in their relationship.

    Poetry 
  • In one of Jean de La Fontaine's libertine poems, a husband returns from the wars where he was knighted and learns his wife has become a Hard-Drinking Party Girl in his absence. He disguises himself as a priest to hear her confession, and is enraged to learn that her bed has seen her husband, a knight and a priest (cutting off the Long List then and there). However, she gets out of it by explaining she'd recognized him and he was all three men (but it's implied she did repeatedly cheat on him).

    Radio 

    Religion & Mythology 
  • The Talmud: Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi is in a Sexless Marriage. His wife dresses up as Haruta (the name of the quintessential prostitute in ancient Babylon) and goes to him while he's studying. He's interested, and they have sex. He comes home feeling horribly guilty and tries to burn himself. His wife intercepts him and asks what he's doing.
    Wife: What is this?
    Husband: Such and such an incident occurred. [explains he has sex with a prostitute]
    Wife: It was I.
    Husband: I, in any event, intended to transgress.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The adult game Monogamy has the task of meeting up with your partner, perhaps for dinner, while pretending you are having an affair with your partner, encouraging you to be furtive, secretive, and feel that your partner is Forbidden Fruit.

    Theatre 
  • Saturdays Children: Bobby gets fed up with her incipient Awful Wedded Life and runs away from her married home. A few weeks later, her husband Rims tracks her down to the boarding house where she fled to. She persuades him that they should not live in the same house again but carry on their lives as if they had never been married and see each other only when they really want to, because familiarity breeds contempt. Divorce is mentioned, but it's implied that they don't actually get one because they still love each other. As the play ends, Rims is re-entering Bobby's apartment through the window past the curfew hour and screwing in a bolt to keep the Drop-In Landlady out.
    Bobby: Do you know what I think a love affair is, Rims? It's when the whole world is trying to keep two people apart—and they insist on being together. And when they get married the whole world pushes them together so they just naturally fly apart. I want my love affair back. I wanted hurried kisses and clandestine meetings, and a secret lover. I don't want a house. I don't want a husband. I want a lover.

    Webcomics 
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The 2009 Valentine's Day special concerns a couple attempting to break up by confessing to cheating on each other in increasingly unsettling ways. As it turns out, however, they have only ever "cheated" with each other, rekindling their relationship through a better understanding of each other's kinks.
  • Kevin & Kell: In one storyline, Kevin joins a wolf chatroom due to homeschooling Coney in Predator Studies leaving him with predator instincts he doesn't know how to express, and ends up having an internet relationship with a wolf who says she's missing a "predatory mindset" in her homelife, who turns out to be his wife Kell. They don't learn the truth until they appear on The Jerry Springer Spaniel Show, and are fine with it.
  • Ennui GO!: While channel surfing, Noah describes to Izzy and Hashim the plot of a telenovela where a wife is having an affair, unaware of the fact that the woman she's with is actually her husband who had recently transitioned and is using their new identity to find out if she's faithful. Izzy can't tell if that's a brilliant plot point or highly offensive (or both).

    Western Animation 
  • Futurama: In "Bendless Love", Bender seduces his own girlfriend Angleyne while pretending to be her ex-husband Flexo to test her faithfulness. This, unsurprisingly, just ends up reigniting her feelings for Flexo.
  • The Simpsons: Played for Laughs in the episode "Rome-Old and Juli-Eh". The ending scene involves Homer pretending to be another man and LARPing an affair with Marge.
    Marge: Ooh, I don't know, [my husband] might come home any minute.
    Homer: Then I must flee! (jumps out the window and re-enters the room as himself) Where is he? Where is he? I smell his aftershave!
    Marge: I don't think we're doing this right.

    Real Life 
  • As recounted in this 2005 article, two users with the handles "Adnan" and "Jamilia" who had an online affair turned out to be Bakr and Sanaa Melhem, who were married. When they found out, they got divorced over the dishonesty.

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