Yes, pop star Shania Twain and her best friend swapped husbands, as a new documentary reminds us. But psychologists say having an affair with a friend’s partner is not only a common scenario, it’s “devastating”.
surfaced that he’d had an affair with Rupert Murdoch’s then-wife, Wendi Deng, which reportedly ended her marriage. In part, because it’s so taboo, says Lauren Rosewarne, a gender expert at The University of Melbourne who has written a book on infidelity.
Such affairs have long made for salacious plot points in books and films from the 1960s and 1970s likea way for the main characters to jazz up their staid, suburban lives. It’s also why people do it today, says Rosewarne.“It’s the idea of people cheating with people who are within arm’s reach,” says Rosewarne. “It’s why politicians have affairs with their secretaries.”
a certain intimacy sort of cocoon that can come about, that leads to various sort of intimacies,” she says. “Generally, that does happen because you have [already] registered that that person is attractive to you.”“Personally, I’ve more often seen the big mistake type of affair, where it blows up the friendship group, and you don’t necessarily partner with that person [you’re having an affair with],” says Shaw.
But this is assuming that having a relationship with your partner’s friend, or your partner’s ex, is actually taboo, says Dr Jessica Kean, a gender and cultural studies expert at The University of Sydney.“I often research queer communities or unconventional relationships where people are really outside of social norms already and pretty open to negotiating [different relationship configurations],” says Kean.
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