wendyvarro: All this talk of fallen heroes is such rot. Having an affair is not a crime

The gossips and moralists should face the fact that there is no fixed relationship between private and public life

There can't be many people who know nothing of the pain that is caused by adultery. Even if it has not happened to us, we have seen it knock down our friends, our neighbours and, sometimes, our parents (my father married four times and, believe me, it wasn't always pretty). Failing that, there is always English literature, replete as it is with beautiful writing about this particular torture: Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove. When I met the man who is now my husband and he told me that The End of the Affair was his favourite novel, I burst into tears. Was he making predictions before we'd even started? I hoped not, with all my being. But of course, such icy perspective is not unreasonable. A third of marriages end in divorce, and a quarter because a partner has been unfaithful. Marriage is hard, and when someone else's ends, the only correct response is: there but for the grace of God go I.

Why do affairs happen? Who knows? These things are not straightforward, as Mrs Schwarzenegger will tell you. In Elizabeth Jenkins's 1954 masterpiece, The Tortoise and the Hare, Imogen's husband, Evelyn, turns away from her, a great beauty, and towards a stout, plain, older woman called Blanche Silcox. Poor Imogen. It's all she can do to sleep at night: "It was not till half-past one that she started up, broad awake and full conscious. Without a second's warning, images began to stream through her mind. They were of Blanche Silcox... It could not be! She sat up, pushing the hair out of her eyes with palms that were wringing wet. The pain was like a knife with a searing edge." The book's sly genius lies in the fact that the mistress has, on the surface of it, less to offer than the wife. For Imogen, this is inexplicable, bewildering, as humiliating as a slap. But the reader, though on her side, understands. The heart has its reasons.

I thought about all this last week, as the infidelity of Ryan Giggs was revealed to us via a sweaty-looking MP and those self-righteous, gossipy souls on Twitter. Setting aside the issue of privacy ? though my strong feeling is that, in the main, what a man does in the bedroom is between him, the woman he is doing it with, and his wife, if he has one ? I find that I'm almost freakishly out of step with public opinion on this. How am I judging public opinion? All I can say is that this mood has not only been cooked up by the tabloids. The smug accusations of hypocrisy and "disappointment" are everywhere: the blogs, the phone-ins, Starbucks. Last Wednesday, I appeared as a "witness" in a debate about public figures and private morality on Radio 4's The Moral Maze. Even allowing for the fact that its inquisitorial panel must, for the purpose of good radio, sometimes take up slightly preposterous positions, it was confounding to hear a man who writes leaders for The Tablet suggest that gossip is an excellent thing if it gives us an idea of a man's character, the better that we might judge him. This man, Clifford Longley, was sitting to my left. To my right, appropriately enough, was Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, whose expression and argument suggested both amazement and mild disgust at my quite appallingly blithe attitude to extramarital sex.

My attitude, though, is not blithe; it is merely realistic. Love hurts. But people will have sex, you know. It is something they are programmed to do. Many of them, perhaps most, will try only to have it with the person to whom they once, in a fit of tenderness and optimism, promised themselves for ever. But sometimes, for whatever reason, they will venture elsewhere. And as crimes go, I think this is a pretty small offence. Not a crime at all, in fact, so much as a symptom of the condition that is known as being human.

This talk of fallen heroes and role models is such rot. Giggs is not a fallen hero, except perhaps in the eyes of his family. He plays for the best side in Britain, and his dedication has seen him extend his career long beyond that of many of his peers. As for the concept of the role model, I'm baffled by it. When Giggs was, supposedly, the squeaky-clean family man (� the Sun) so beloved of his sponsors, there were still among his fans lazy good-for-nothings who gobbed and swore and sang dubious chants. Are they really any more likely to rush out and copy him now? Personally, I doubt the Wythenshawe branch of Relate is laying on extra marriage guidance counsellors.

Sex is a part of a man (or a woman). But it isn't ? unless there is something very wrong indeed ? all of him. It was a beautiful evening as I arrived at Broadcasting House last Wednesday and, as I approached, I looked up at Eric Gill's sculpture of Prospero and Ariel; with the falling sun upon it, it seemed even more than usually lovely, and I thought, not for the first time, about the unhappy disjunction between the ugliness of Gill's sexuality (he had, among other things, a sexual relationship with his sister) and the transcendent beauty of his best work. I know this is an extreme example, but still: the fact remains that a person's sex life, however complicated and busy, can co-exist with many other things. There is no fixed relationship between the private and the public, between sexual probity and professional probity, between the missionary position (or whatever you fancy) and judgment. In fact, I often wonder whether greatness and the tendency to affairs aren't inextricably linked; the fat biographies I read strongly suggest it.

When they stop wringing their hands for a moment and try to come up with a practical argument, the moralists talk of the "distraction" of sex; it is suggested that Fred Goodwin's affair with a colleague might have played some part in the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland. But is an affair really any more distracting than, say, an unhappy marriage? Even happily married couples have rows, and go to work with the sound of all the things they should have said ringing loudly in their heads.

You puritans: would you put a moratorium on marriage, too, in some circumstances? Or are your pursed lips simply down to the fact that you are afraid of your own confusing urges, and desperately projecting? My guess is that it's the latter. How else to account for the fact that every time I hear you, I can think only of Angelo, in Measure for Measure? It was Angelo, you will recall, who uttered the dread words: "Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to fall", shortly before he set about trying to sleep with a novice nun.

Rachel Cooke

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