For obvious reasons, marriedaffairssydney.com does not have that particular business name emblazoned across the door of its office in Sydney's CBD. Instead, the glass reads "Peoples Connection Network"; no apostrophe, no hint of adultery.
By strange coincidence, the building sits next to the apartment block where not so long ago I interviewed a glamorous callgirl who runs her business out of there, in white lace and hooker-heeled Louboutins, and was full of handy tips about the off-label uses of coconut oil. Perhaps it says something about the pervasive nature of secret desire that even this dull city precinct – home to migration consultants, real-estate agencies and language schools – heaves with undercover sexual activity.
Not that any actual sex takes place in the offices of PCN itself. The company is merely a broker, one might say, for orchestrated infidelity. It's like a dating agency, but for married people.
Infidelity, as we know, has become a commodity. PCN is one of hundreds of agencies in the world – most of the others operating online – doing their best to sell infidelity as an acceptable antidote to the trials and tedium of marriage. And millions of people around the world appear to have signed up. (Generally, men have to pay, women don't, although at PCN, both sexes are charged. Rates vary. At PCN, for example, a male client might fork out $5500 for 12 months of "unlimited introductions". More if he wants an Angelina Jolie lookalike, less if he's happy with a pre-loved matron.)
Today's consumer style of "fun" unfaithfulness carries bouncy new names like "married flirting", "married dating" or "affair dating", giving it a larky, naughty-but-nice ring that "committing adultery" always lacked. Companies shamelessly, and ungrammatically, parade their services on giant billboards and bus sides. "Your wife is hot but so are ours." "Life is short. Have an affair." Or in socially responsible France, "Unlike an antidepressant, taking a lover won't cost [the national health system] a thing." Home pages show pouting young women steaming thoughtfully in black lingerie, or young couples lost in erotic embrace on designer rugs.
Generally speaking, these are not the people on the books. Indeed, many of the people on the books online are not even people. A 2015 investigation by technology website Gizmodo into Ashley Madison, the world's most famous extramarital dating agency, revealed that eager male clients had been paying to be contacted by women, like "sexicindi", who the men thought were real but were in fact "fembots", web robots. Gizmodo said the reality of Ashley Madison, with its tens of thousands of fembots, looked "like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots". (In July this year, the new management of Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, admitted the practice had happened previously but claimed that bots were no longer being used, as of 2015.) Either way, testosterone-tinted hope springs eternal. Avid Life Media reportedly brought in $US115.5 million (about $150 million) in 2014, up from $US26 million in 2010.
So thriving is the industry that there are now spin-off sites that review the extra-marital affairs sites, warn about scams, or offer pointers on "affair strategy" (for example, don't send the dick-pics first up). There are also private investigators who will infiltrate the sites to see if your spouse is there … If you really want to know.
I've come to interview the managers of this particular agency because, one, it exists in the real world and, two, it bills itself as Australia's Number One. (That turns out to mean that it pays to be number one on Google listings.) On a weekday afternoon, the place looks deserted. It has the dreary, stained coffee-mug and cheap-sofa air of a business moving in or moving out. There's no sign of the busy consultants said to work there, aside from a pale young woman on the front desk who avoids talking to me any more than absolutely necessary.
The office has been stripped bare of computers and documents in preparation for Good Weekend's visit, explains Anu Mason, also known as Susan, who runs the business. Mason proves to be a tall, handsome and forceful Sri Lankan woman. She wears a businessy grey pants suit and a less businessy low-cut red stretchy top, paired with red heels and red lipstick. Joining us is a man she introduces as her business partner, John Graham.
While Mason, 51, is so bustling and volatile she seems in danger of igniting, Graham, 62, is a placid Aussie bloke with grey hair and glasses and the benign expression of an accountant, the kind of man who refers to women as "females". He doesn't seem to mind Mason jumping in to take over or correct him as soon as he attempts to speak. Sitting in Graham's barren office, the three of us are soon locked in a kind of mad, incoherent loop, with little light being shed on the nitty- gritty of the business.
Part of the problem is that Mason keeps stopping mid-answer to demand another explanation of who I am, where I'm from and what the story is about. Quite reasonable questions, only they're not usually asked six times. The few drinks she says she had at lunch are probably not helping, but neither is the high level of suspicion. What is it these agencies have to hide?
"So do you think she's legit, John?" Mason says, halfway through. At another point, her eyes suddenly widen. "Are you from Ashley Madison?" Clearly, the competition for wedded bedding is hot, which might explain why she thinks I'm an industrial spy. Certainly any comparison with the giant Canadian company sends Mason into a frenzy.
An affair is about desire, about attention, about reconnecting with parts of oneself you lost.
Esther Perel, therapist
"We are not Ashley Madison!" she says, making pouncing gestures with plump hands finished with red-lacquered nails. "We are not an online agency. We have an office, we do background checks and we have legitimate clients coming here, looking for certain services that we provide. You understand what we are saying?
"So can you explain to me," she says, flicking an invisible switch that turns the calm back on, "what are your questions you have for me?
Well, the "certain services" they provide. What are they exactly?
Mason leans back and laughs. Graham says: "That's the 64 million-dollar question."
Is it?
"The thing is, we have to be dis-creeeet, okay?" Mason says. "We provide for beautiful people like you, me, him, whoever, beautiful people, and we have to make sure it is dis-creeeet. Number one!
"If it is not discreet … Do you have any idea what happened to Ashley Madison?" (She's referring to last year's hacking scandal, which left a lot of people very nervous after a group of hackers leaked details of the site's 33 million members.)
Apparently, Mason has been in the people-connecting business for many years. The company also caters for ordinary singles dating, both here and in Asia. The scope of the business, however, never becomes clear. Mason makes vague references to politicians and hotels. Later she shows me a picture of a client who is allegedly looking for a nice man through their normal dating agency. The photo shows a long-haired blonde in a short black gown, perched on a sofa with what looks like a pole behind her.
"She's Russian," Mason says. "Very attractive girl."
The ratio of men to women in this business is about 70 per cent to 30 per cent, Graham says – and that's a generous estimate, one suspects. Many online agencies reportedly rely on escorts (not to mention fembots) to fill the gap. How can one be sure that isn't the case here?
"Don't you ever, ever say that to me!" Mason snaps. "Please put this in your record that you are actually upsetting me at the moment! The women we get are genuine ! … And married. Just like you and me."
That is when it really hits home what a bizarre moral universe these agencies inhabit, where best business practice is to guarantee 100 per cent genuine adultery.
Women have "urges", too, Mason says, they just don't know where to go to fulfil them safely. To build up the female contingent, she holds networking nights for women in "big corporate companies". She won't say how they're arranged or where. "So we meet women, women like you, who are sexually deprived … We give them nibbles and champagne and all that. To my surprise, there are so many women out there who are sexually deprived and they can't do anything! One woman, her husband never touches her, never talks to her.
"So these women want something discreet that doesn't jeopardise their marriage. No strings attached! Because women like you and me, we can't go to popular clubs finding a man, do you agree with me?"
So you don't have a problem encouraging infidelity?
"This is my business, so I don't have a problem." Pause. "Can I ask you a question? How long you been married? How long you been happy with your husband? How often you have physical connection with your husband?"
I settle on "enough".
"Enough?" she echoes, doubtfully. "Not many people are going to be you and me, so you can't put anything in a category, A, B, C. Some people aren't happy where they are and we help them."
It all sounds so simple, so painless, so logical; another service in the age of services. There's just one thing never canvassed in the glossy universe of consumer cheating, and that's the world of the betrayed partner, and possibly the couple's children. What will the discovery of an affair mean for them?
As far as anyone can tell, the pain is much the same whether it's generated by the new online/agency style of infidelity or the old-fashioned "someone at work who understands me" kind. In short, a black hole of misery.
"The most vivid thing is that moment when he told me he had been having an affair. I can see that so clearly. I was sitting in the back garden painting my toenails red and he was standing behind me at the back door. I remember just turning around and saying, 'What?!' "
Emily Patterson, a high-school teacher from Brisbane, was 50 when she learnt her husband had been having an affair. In hindsight, she is astonished she hadn't a clue, especially as their relationship had been in trouble for years. Little physical affection, virtually no sex, but companionable all the same. Not that relationships have to be in trouble for people to plunge into an affair, as we'll see.
"I should have suspected," Patterson says now, eight years on. "Looking back, there were all sorts of signs. But I never did suspect because I'm a self-centred princess and I thought, 'Oh, he wouldn't be having an affair.' It never occurred to me he'd leave me. I mean, I'm wonderful! So there was a huge amount of shock and disbelief when he told me."
Her husband did leave for "the other woman", but many people have affairs without wanting to leave a marriage or partnership. Melbourne businessman Martin Jarvis, married for 18 years and a father of two, refers to his past serial adultery as "outsourcing". "The thing is, I really, really loved my partner. I loved my home. I loved my family. What I've learnt in retrospect, or this is what my therapist told me – and it sounds like a shocking excuse, I know – is that, with men who have affairs, it's not exactly a 'cry for help', but it is a call for something within the relationship that they're not getting. Because other men just leave. They take up with the next model. I never wanted to leave."
With smartphones, chatrooms, porn sites, cybersex, and virtual worlds where you can fall in love with a like-minded avatar, there have never been more opportunities to "outsource". It's impossible to get accurate figures but Sexual Health Australia, a sex and relationship counselling service, cites the rather ambiguous figure that around 60 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women are "willing to report that an affair has occurred sometime in their marriage". The suggestion is that 70 per cent of all marriages experience an affair. Earlier studies settle for a more modest 26-50 per cent of men and 21-38 per cent of women.
It may come in newfangled ways now, but infidelity is hardly new. Everyone from Zeus to Madame Bovary to Khloe Kardashian has been on one end of it or the other. Even potential US president Hillary Clinton has had to make the best of being publicly humiliated. Hiding any private pain and weighing up the worth of her marriage. Turning it into a joke – or a truth she's willing to live with – that her philandering husband is "a hard dog to keep on the porch".
It might be common, but that doesn't dilute its power to devastate, says Sydney couple and family counsellor Jacqueline McDiarmid, on a wet afternoon in her Paddington practice. Outside, rain drums on the roof and dances off bare trees silhouetted against the sky. Inside, the multiple boxes of tissues suggest a different kind of torrential downpour.
Over her 20 years, McDiarmid has seen thousands of couples – and not always heterosexual – struggling to work through the fallout of an affair. She talks in terms of "the injured" and "the perpetrator".
"Apart from losing a child, or having a dangerously unwell child, infidelity is the biggest trauma for a couple; discovering this level of betrayal," she says. "The symptoms for the person experiencing the injury are much like PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. It eats away at you. It's very hard to get it out of your brain. It can make people very anxious, very unwell."
Individual, couple and family therapist Geraldine McKay wrote her masters thesis on infidelity. She agrees the trauma is profound. "Sometimes people say to me, 'I think it would have been easier if he'd died, or she'd died.' The hurt can be massive, grieving the loss of the relationship as they thought of it."
Like many therapists, McKay believes an affair is a signal of something missing in the relationship and it's not simply about the sex. "I see affairs as a bit of a conflict-avoidance technique sometimes. So rather than go to the partner and say, 'I'm not happy with the way things are' or 'I've got some issues happening with me,' they tend to think, 'I don't want to cause any trouble, I don't want there to be a fight and have her yell at me,' but then they end up having an affair. They might find someone at work who they think is sympathetic. Next thing you know, they're telling this person all about their marriage problems, whether they're real or not."
It is a mistake to think only men stray, McDiarmid says. "It used to be more men [among her clients] but I think it's 50/50 now. Women expect more these days. We think about our own needs more, so if we're not happy we start thinking about how to get those needs met.
"People assume that it's only men who complain about not getting as much sex as they want in relationships," she continues, echoing Anu Mason, "but, again, these days I'd say I get as many complaints from women in heterosexual relationships saying, 'I'm not getting enough sex' or 'I'm not getting the sex that I want.' "
McDiarmid has seen how the particulars of an affair, once discovered, become an obsession for the injured party. "The image of a partner having sex with someone else is haunting," she says. "It's a very powerful thing. Everybody I see talks about, 'Well, what did you do?' 'When he kissed you, what did you feel then? Was it different to the way I kiss you?' 'Where did you meet her? How often?' 'We had a good day and you didn't want sex with me, so why did you want it with him?'
"One of my clients said, 'Every time I think about him with her, it says to me, I'm not good enough. I'm ageing, he's not attracted to me.' "
McKay says a woman's imagination can often run riot about the allure of the mistress. "It goes back to their insecurity … Women are often quite shocked [when they see the other woman]. They go, 'Oh, she's not that attractive.' They have this view that she must be some glamazon … The reality is often quite different.
"But that doesn't actually help the person, because then it's like, 'Oh, okay, it wasn't about the physical side, so maybe there's something about me that's not enough.' "
Emily Patterson recalls feeling that she must have been "repulsive" to her husband. "I remember taking myself off to a lingerie shop after it all happened and I bought a whole lot of really expensive stuff … It was about self-esteem. Being a vain female, I thought, 'Oh, it's because I'm not attractive. I've got to work on this'."
But sometimes, as the saying goes, it's not all about you. New-York based therapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, is something of an expert on infidelity, both through her practice, her lectures and her TED talks delivering fresh perspectives on the subject. She's currently working on a book about "people who love each other but still have affairs".
Perel doesn't recommend affairs but she understands why they happen, especially in an age that celebrates having it all. Infidelity, she notes, used to be the antidote to the lifelong marriage that came without an escape clause. The question is, now that people can get divorced so easily, why are they still choosing infidelity?
"We don't divorce – or have affairs – because we are unhappy," Perel says in one of her TED talks, "but because we could be happier … 'I deserve this. I am entitled to this. I can have this.' It allows people to finally pursue a desire to feel alive.
"That's the one word I hear worldwide – alive! That's why an affair is such an erotic experience. It's not about sex, it's about desire, about attention, about reconnecting with parts of oneself you lost or you never knew existed. It's about longing and loss. But the American discourse is framed entirely around betrayal and trauma."
Perel argues that by viewing infidelity as something "done" to the other party, or as a reflection on them, we're missing a key point. "Very often we don't go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn't so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become."
Martin Jarvis, who had the serial affairs, says something similar. He and his wife agreed when they married that monogamy might be beyond them. "People don't own each other," he says. "I had this strong belief that my wife and I were sovereign, even though you create something unique and special between two people in deciding to live your lives together. But you don't forfeit your individuality, your secret desires and so on.
"Sometimes [you stray] because things aren't going well in your relationship and you seek comfort elsewhere. But sometimes it's about seeking difference. You find yourself sustained in entirely different ways by someone who sees you with fresh eyes, and you see them with fresh eyes."
Yet in Jarvis's case – where some of the adultery was open and some not – he found it "profoundly hurtful" when his wife set sail from the island of monogamy, off on her own voyage of self-discovery. "What was confounding about it was my shocking hypocrisy," he admits. "While she used to say she didn't feel jealous about my affairs, I did about hers. You can tell yourself it's wrong and a double standard but you can't control what's in your heart – and in my heart I was jealous.
"But it's also true to say that we used that as a source, in a way, of revitalising the relationship. We discussed my jealousy and it made me miss her more, want her more."
Can we humans change the way we feel? Can we stop seeing sex, or even love, with other people as "unfaithfulness" and see it as, say, "sharing"? Is the pain of infidelity a biological imperative, or a cultural perspective? And are we misguided in revering monogamy?
Last year, Lee Kofman, a lively Russian-born Israeli writer who now lives in Melbourne, wrote a book called The Dangerous Bride. It was a memoir but it also detailed her interest in "ethical non-monogamy". As well as chronicling her own racy encounters, Kofman interviewed everyone from swingers to polyamorists.
A growing global movement, "polyamory is not really about sex," Kofman explains. "It's about loving and being committed to more than one person. And a lot of the leaders and therapists, workshop organisers and so on, are women. There's emphasis on caring for children together, all that. It has rules and boundaries. Like, 'You can have a lover but you have to first tell me,' or 'You can't sleep at her house, or if you go out with a lover, check in with me first, so that I'm a priority.' "
Kofman says that, while she doesn't have the right "mindset" for polyamory, she isn't surprised so many women are drawn to it. "There's this myth that men want sex and women don't. If you look at research into female sexuality, what helps women the most to regain their desires is not that their husband will do housework or take a pill … It's actually for them to have a new lover."
Now a mother of two young kids, on her third marriage and having a crack at monogamy because that's her husband's inclination, Kofman says "ethical" non-monogamy means the affair is out in the open. There's no lying and sneaking around. "From my experience, my own desire, men and women want this base of love and commitment but also to have freedom. What ethical non-monogamists say is, why do we put so much stress on sexual fidelity? Let's talk about emotional fidelity," she says, then laughs merrily. "I'm talking about others, because I didn't manage to practise non-monogamy ethically."
She also learnt it wasn't enough just to take deceit out of the picture. "Both people have to have a fit between what they want. For example, in the first non-monogamous relationship I tried, my partner of that time was into things like group sex, swingers parties, the idea of going and finding a lover and bringing him or her into the house and having a sexual encounter.
"He wanted to do everything together with me, whereas I'm a romantic and a loner and I wanted a licence to go off by myself, do whatever I want and come back. I didn't want a committed relationship outside of him but I didn't want him involved.
"So it wasn't about being open and communicating. We could have talked about it night and day but we did not want the same thing, so it didn't work." She wanted to hear about his exploits. He didn't want to hear about hers. Like Esther Perel, Kofman feels we place a heavy load these days on one-on-one relationships.
"We have this romantic ideal that our spouse is supposed to be everything to us. They never are. Wanting somebody sexually beyond your spouse can be about variety. It's not necessarily about the spouse not being good enough. If you think of sex as an extension of your personality and psyche, [an affair] is not just about the sex itself. With different people, it fills my soul differently, expresses different sides of me." But the heart is the heart – wayward, irrational, tender – and Kofman has her own limits. "This is very adolescent, but what I cannot handle is if I go out and my partner shows an interest in another woman greater than in me. I want to feel I'm the most beautiful, attractive, interesting woman for him in the room and if I don't feel that, this is where I might leave … The relationship, not the room."
She bursts out laughing. "If I know I'm his first priority and he wants to go and have sex with somebody else, that's not a problem."
Her research has led her to believe monogamy and non-monogamy are almost equally difficult states of being. "Non-monogamy is difficult because, while it can be exhilarating, there's a lot to juggle, it's very time-consuming and potentially very hurtful.
"Monogamy is a different problem. It's potentially tedious and stale, and some part of you dies."
Does an affair have to spell the end of a relationship? "I think it would be a great shame for an otherwise good marriage, where there has been a great sense of history, mutual support and love, to founder at an affair," says Martin Jarvis, whose own long marriage eventually ended, although not because of the infidelities, he believes. "I know a lot of people who have come to regret the fact that they left because of an affair."
Esther Perel has studied thousands of couples post-affair. In her paper, "After the Storm", she identifies three different patterns among couples who stay together. One is they never move past the affair. "These couples endlessly gnaw at the same bone, circle and recircle the same grievances, reiterate the same mutual recriminations, and blame each other for their agony," Perel writes. "Why they stay in the marriage is often as puzzling as why they can't get beyond their mutual antagonism."
The second group decide to let it go and stay together, but more out of a sense of duty. They move past the affair but don't necessarily transcend it. For the third, the affair becomes a "catalyst for renewal and change". They work together to invent a new marriage, not simply perform CPR on the injured one.
But sometimes an affair is a way to move on. Emily Patterson recalls trying to find a way her husband could stay, after he said he was leaving for his mistress. "There were all sorts of things wrong in our relationship – we were both to blame for neglecting it – but it was comfortable and we had so much else going for us," she says now. "The things we shared, our history.
"I remember saying, on that evening that he told me, amid all the tears and talking that we did, 'Well, you don't have to leave. You could just stay here.' And he seemed quite hopeful about that. He said, 'Could I? Would it work?' Of course, it was a ridiculous thing to say but I was so desperate not to lose my friend."
* Some names have been changed in this story.