SEX IN THE SUBURRS—III Wives’ fantasies turn into realities

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33442, 25 January 1974, Page 14

SEX IN THE SUBURRS—III Wives’ fantasies turn into realities

By HELEN HOWARD)

Recently, the 34-year-old wife of a highly successful London property developer sought a consultation with a marriage counsellor, Mrs Susan Proctor.

Her two children were at expensive boarding schools, her house was in the $BO,OOO range, her social life apparently satisfying, her husband attentive.

“And now I’m about to throw all this away,” she told Mrs Proctor. “I’ve fallen in love with the local greengrocer. He wants me to live with him.”

The story she told was familiar enough: the attractive young man called with the week’s deliveries, she invited him in for a cup of tea, and one thing led to another. Yet to Mrs Proctor, a counsellor with 20 years experience, the tale -seemed too neat and tidy. At the second consultation she pressed the woman for more details and finally she confessed. There wasn’t a word of truth in the allegations.

Extra-marital sex “There’s been a definite trend over the past few years for apparently-happy, married women to grow increasingly orientated towards extra-marital sex.” Mrs Proctor told me. “And if they can’t have the real thing, they have fantasies about it.” The latest research shows that the average woman aged between 18 and 40 thinks about sex every 20 minutes during her waking day.

For men, it’s every 25 minutes.

And for many men and women there comes a time when thinking is not enough. That’s when illicit sex in the suburbs rears its often-welcome head. I interviewed 28 married women living in the suburbs who agreed to tell me about their sexual experiences as long as they could remain anonymous.

Regular fantasies

Taking into account exaggeration and wishful thinking, the stark fact remained that 20 out of the 28 confessed either to sexual encounters since their marriage, or regular sexual fantasies involving people who often had no idea that they were the object of sexual admiration. One woman, married 14 years with two sons, told me: “I have fancied my husband’s business partner for over 10 years and have had countless dreams about him. I know he is happily married and I would never dream of making the first move, but he is certainly my ideal man.” A shy wife of 24, who said that her husband was her first and only lover, confessed that she had become obsessed with an 18-year-old boy who lived two doors away. The obsession had reached the stage where her entire day was arranged around the times he left the house in the morning and returned in the evening. “I stand at my window and watch him,” she told me. “I know it sounds pathetic, but what can I do? “He’s young, happy and carefree. All my husband thinks about nowadays is saving enough money to get another car.

“I’m only 24, but I might as well be 70 for all the romance I get in my life.”

Common daydream

The fantasy of the goodlooking visitor arriving at the house, being invited in and becoming a lover, is the most common suburban sexual daydream. But it is not always fantasy. Service engineers of a major washing-machine firm

claim that at least once a week some bored, lonely wife will make tentative advances.

“The chaps say that mostly they just want some-one to talk to,” says the service manager. “They get cooped up in a new house on these vast estates, the old man is at work all day, and they’ve just got a toddler to talk to.

“And most of them are still young, attractive women. It’s not a natural life for them, is it?”

Jane, 31, an economics graduate now married with a small child, has lived in the suburbs for four years. Her husband, an area manager for a car distributor, is often away one or two nights a week. “Bored silly” She told me: “We bought this house in a cul-de-sac — and that’s what life became, too. I was bored silly. Then I became friendly with a girl who lived around the corner and had a daughter the same age as mine. “Her husband is a graphic designer who works at home and I found myself very attracted to him. He would give me a lift from the shops and that sort of thing, and I was certain he fancied me, too. “One afternoon I just took the plunge and asked him in for coffee. From then on, things developed into a fullscale affair which has now been going on for two years. “He won’t leave his child and I know my husband would go berserk if he knew what I was doing. So we just meet two or three afternoons a week and the occasional evening. “Keeps me going" “It’s the only thing that keeps me going. When he’s not there, I daydream about him. “My husband says I’ve been" much better to live with lately — and boyfriend’s wife says the same about him. So we’re not really doing any harm, are we?”

None of the women I spoke to thought that extramarital affairs were any substitute for a really happy and sexually-compatible marriage. “I have had about nine affairs in the past six years,” one 29-year-old wife told me.

“But they were all forced

on me, because I just can t get either mental or physical satisfaction from my husband. When I find a man is interested in me it adds, a new dimension to my life.”. Psychiatrists say there’s nothing wrong with suburban sexual fantasies—we all have them, we all seem to need them, but most of us are happily able to get some of the real thing, too. “Recently I have been imagining that the milkman is a masked lover bounding up the path ready to ride off with me to his lair,” one wife told me. “But. do you know. I don’t really fancy the milkman at all.

“If anyone’s going to ride off with "me. I’d much rather it was my husband.”