Katy Ford is 45, and has been married to Ben, a City banker, for 17 years. They have three daughters, aged 10, 12 and 14. They live in Hertfordshire and, from the outside, look like your stereotypical upper-middle-class family. The children go to boarding schools. During their holidays, they ride ponies. Katy, who works in publishing, plays tennis on Saturday mornings with her friends.
Scratch the surface, however, and a different picture emerges. Ben has been made redundant a number of times, and is now depressed. Katy works not because she wants to, but through necessity. She says: 'My husband has retreated to the sofa. I'm a regular gym-goer, and like to keep fit. Ben hasn't taken any exercise since we met. And he's now depressed, and on medication.'
The last time they had sex was 10 years ago. Katy says she would have left a long time ago, but believes that 'it's best for children to have their parents together. Sounds a bit Victorian, I know, but there you go. The children should come first.'
For a long time, she was in a quandary. She wanted a sexual relationship, but, wishing to keep her family together, didn't know where to turn. 'I don't go clubbing, and I don't go out on the pull. I've got a busy job.' Then a friend saw an ad in a magazine for a service that promised to bring together married people for 'romance'. It took her six months before she called the number.
When she did, she found herself having coffee with David Miller, 52, a softly spoken, immaculately tailored businessman who runs lovinglinks.com, a London-based internet dating site for married people, which describes itself as 'Europe's leader in quality extramarital dating for thoughtful, attached men and women looking for romance. It is a genuine resource and not an escort service of any kind.' Miller also offers a 'bespoke' one-to-one service. Katy opted to go for the latter, figuring that meeting men through Miller's £85-a-go internet service would result in 'kissing a lot of frogs'. So she parted with £350 and Miller gave her a list of mobile numbers.
Over the past two years, Katy has had 'several liaisons'. Protected by her pseudonym, she is candid about the pros and cons. 'I have got a lot of fulfilment about being made to feel attractive. But I have been hurt a couple of times. You have to be tough to do this as a woman.'
Because of the pressure to keep up appearances, she has seldom managed to spend the night with any of her lovers, managing just the afternoon, or an evening. 'I always put in place a perfect alibi, too. I'm pretty sure my husband isn't aware, but he also chooses not to inquire.'
There are significant downsides, though. 'For a man, this kind of arrangement is like having all the sweeties in the sweetshop. I'd rather have a proper relationship, but also want to do my duty to my children. I couldn't last more than five years doing this. I'm an adulteress, after all.'
As we are talking on the phone, her other mobile rings. She breaks off the conversation. 'Hi darling,' she says. It's one of her children. She discusses travel arrangements, then says goodbye to her daughter. 'I'd certainly never reveal to any future partner that I've gone down this route,' she says to me. 'The potential to be regarded as a whore is pretty high.'
David Miller is in a growth business. In a nation plagued by relationship breakdown, a service offering married people the chance to cheat in secret was always going to be a winner. Websites abound, with new ones added almost daily: Google 'adultery' and scores of websites come up: meet2cheat.co.uk; rekonnect.com; illicitencounters.co.uk; philanderers.com. The latter not only promises to put you in touch with your perfect lover, but to help you 'have an extramarital affair without getting caught!', how to 'prepare for an affair', and how to 'handle guilt'. Rekonnect.com offers 'a sanctuary where you can escape from the problems of your existing relationship'. And illicitencounters.co.uk speaks to those 'in a loveless or dead-end marriage or relationship. Your partner no longer values you. Intimacy has long gone but for many reasons you do not want to upset the apple cart. Is this you? You'd be surprised how many people this applies to.' All websites promise to preserve confidentiality. Lovers use pseudonyms even with each other; seldom do they find out the other's real name.
Miller, who claims to have had just one antecedent in the business - 'a Thora Hird-type character in Edgware who ran a business called Additions, producing something pretty much like a church newsletter' - started up 13 years ago. A former TV-commercials producer, he was unhappily married. 'I couldn't get divorced at that stage, and I wanted a date. But the only thing available was the sex industry. And I didn't want that.'
Thinking there must be others in his position, he placed an ad in the Independent on Sunday: 'Are you married? Attached? Bored?' He got 60 replies, all from men. 'So I thought, right, I've got all these blokes, what am I going to do with them?' He phoned round female friends he thought would be interested, and put together a newsletter. Four years later he moved online. He's aware of the burgeoning competition, but says that 'no one offers the one-to-one service I do. If you came to me as a male client today, by the end of the week I could introduce you to five decent-quality married women who would date you. No one else could do that.'
'Quality', he says, is key. 'It's what we're all about. A quality person is someone who hasn't come to us through choice. They went into marriage with old-fashioned ideas. They never expected to be an adulterer. Then they got blown off-course. I deal with thoughtful people, who don't want to destroy their children's lives. They don't want to get into something random at the office, because that will just lead to disaster. They don't want to take unnecessary risks with their partner, or their children.'
This is a description that would seem to fit Tom Baxter well. Tom, 46, is married with three teenage children. He's a partner in a City accountancy firm. Listening to his story, it is hard not to feel for him.
'My wife has a severe depressive illness, to which there's no resolution,' he says. 'She is a real suicide risk. My best mate's wife made a suicide attempt, and it's something I'm desperate to avoid. Unlike many people,' he continues, 'I'm not prepared to walk away. And neither do I want to plough on in a monk-like way, which is what I've done for so many years.' Contemplating the idea of an affair, he realised that he didn't like 'the idea of middle-aged men preying on young women in the office, which you see all the time, and neither did I like the idea of having an affair with a neighbour, which also happens a lot.' There was also the fact of his wife's mental fragility. 'If she heard I was having an affair, she'd be certain to make a suicide attempt.' And so, like Katy Ford, he joined lovinglinks.com.
In July, he met 'a wonderful married woman' over lunch in the City. 'The lunch lasted for 11 3/4 hours, starting with us holding hands over the table, then snogging on every street corner. Take it from me, it was an intense start to an intense relationship.' They had much in common. Like Tom, she had 'a disturbed husband, whom she would never leave'. They're no longer seeing each other, however. 'The stresses of it got too much. We've both got families, we live some distance apart. But in seeing each other we haven't done any damage to anyone. In fact, I'd say that, without each other, we would have had grave difficulty in sustaining our families over what has been a very hard period.'
Like Katy, Tom is acutely aware of how he might be perceived. 'Most people reading this will think I'm a shit, but actually it's enabled me to be a better person, father and husband.'
Relate, the UK's largest provider of relationship counselling and sex therapy, is not so sure. According to Relate counsellor Denise Knowles, 'agencies in this market play on the old-fashioned and incredibly negative premise that couples will only find sexually fulfilling, romantic relationships outside of their long-term partnerships. For the thousands of clients we've helped over the years, rediscovering the excitement of shared intimacy within the marriage or partnership has been incredibly rewarding.'
She acknowledges, however, that it is a complex area. 'We know that people using these services have a variety of motives, but from the point of view of healthy, respectful relationships, web-based agencies like these are unhelpful and exploit the "virtual reality" of the internet.' Most affairs, she adds, 'happen for a reason. It's much more constructive to deal with the causes of the affair by focusing on the primary relationship. When both partners look honestly at their relationship, they can begin to move on - either together or apart.'
But what if, like Eve Hampson, you have no desire to move on? Hampson, 41, who lives in Harrow, says she has a 'brilliant relationship with my husband. It's great - everywhere apart from the bedroom.' She and her husband have four children, aged two to 15. And they do have sex, just at six-month intervals. 'That doesn't do it for me.'
The problem has always been present in her relationship, she says. Though her husband is the same age as her, 'he's always had a low libido. I suppose I should have known when we got married. The second reason is professional. He's got a very stressful job, and he's tired a lot of the time. I've talked to my friends about it, and it's the same for a lot of professional men. They're under so much stress at work. They just want to veg out when they get home.
'I've done everything I can think of. We've talked about it, gone away for weekends. But nothing worked. About three years ago, I reached the end of my tether. I thought: either I leave the marriage, or I do something proactive. So I looked around. There was no way I was going to have an affair with someone in my social circle; it's bad enough going down this road in the first place. So I did a web search under "adultery" and came across David Miller's website. It took me ages to sign up and then another year before I met a man for a coffee.'
Despite her doubts - 'I'm still quite dubious about having an affair in the first place' - she eventually met someone she liked enough to start a relationship with. 'I've met about five men. And had one affair. I'm very selective.' So far, her husband is in the dark. 'I live near central London; my boyfriend, who like me is married, lives further out. We use email, and text, never with our real names. It takes organisation. We meet up daytime, or evening. I'm not working, and have childcare, so it's just about possible. So far it's worked out well for me. It's saved my marriage. It's meant that the level of stress at home has gone. It has decreased my frustration.'
Now, it's no longer an issue if her husband never approaches her for sex. 'Being constantly rejected was a very bad experience.' The situation, however, does have its 'stresses and strains. With my man, right from the beginning it was very clear that we were not going to leave our partners. And certainly at the start it was built on sex. But after two years I love him. We are both very lucky to have met each other. We meet once a week, or every two weeks. It's not just meeting up in a hotel room, shagging away for three hours. If you look at it from an objective standpoint it can seem tacky, but you have to look underneath the superficial longer and see what's underneath. It's such an odd thing to do, I know. But it has worked very well for me.'
As well as running his internet business and one-to-one matchmaking service, Miller also hosts parties. 'Parties where you get to meet other adulterers!' Hampson laughs. 'They're seriously surreal.'
One of the regulars at these parties is Frank Goldman, 50. Of all Miller's clients, he's the only one who wants to be interviewed in person. We meet in a coffee bar in Covent Garden, central London. He's trim, unshaven, with an expensive grey suit. 'I could tell you so many stories,' he begins. 'If you made a film about it, you just wouldn't believe it.' He's been a subscriber to lovinglinks.com for the past four years. He runs a business organising sporting events, and lives in Hampstead. He's been married for 30 years, and has two teenage children.
'I was happily married for 18 years,' he says. 'Then one day I found out that my wife had been having an affair with one of my best friends for two years. I thought I was happily married, and all the rest of it. She ended the affair; I sorted my best friend out.' A while later, he began an affair with an Italian solicitor he met through work. When he saw one of Miller's ads, he thought, 'that sounds just the job'. He's since had '10 to 15 short relationships' through lovinglinks.com, and one that lasted two years. He's currently having three relationships with women he's met through the website. 'The women don't know this. They think they're having a relationship just with me. I see one of them once a week, the other two maybe once a month each. So I'm the ultimate bastard I'm afraid.' He grins.
According to Miller, it's often women who - contrary to type - 'run portfolios of men. Whereas some of the men are incredibly tight on time, with very stressful jobs, some of the women have a bit more time. It can be very annoying when you're a woman and you find yourself with a free Wednesday afternoon and your guy has to rush off to the Tokyo office. What's a girl going to do? That's why they run a portfolio. The sort of men who use us would be very happy to fit one woman into their life.'
If this is true - and there's something about it that sounds a bit like wishful thinking on Miller's part - then Goldman bucks the trend. He believes that many of the men signing up for websites such as lovinglinks.com are thinking, 'I'll give this a try. I might get a shag out of it. The women, on the other hand, are looking for a guy who's presentable, who hasn't got his arse hanging out of his trousers, who can spend a bit of money on them and see them every couple of weeks.'
He launches into a long story about his first date through lovinglinks.com. 'She was average-looking, I wouldn't say stunning, in her mid-thirties. We met at Waterloo Station, under the clock, had a coffee. And she made it very plain to me that she'd had a couple of affairs already and wanted to see me again. We agreed to meet near Bristol. The hotel I booked, though, was awful, and we ended up going back to her place. Her husband was away on business, and we ended up in their double bed. She told me her husband was in Australia, but for all I knew he could have been down the local pub. I was prepared, should he suddenly come back. I'd clocked where the window was, how it unlocked, where my shoes were.' He left the next morning, and never saw her again. 'I liked her, but it was so easy, there was no challenge.'
So far, Goldman - like the others - has managed to keep his affairs secret from his spouse. 'I travel a lot for work anyway,' he says. He claims not to be aware of any downsides, and stresses he doesn't have 'a guilt problem'. But, despite his good humour, his wealth of stories, and his cheery casualness, the scent of revenge hangs heavy over his tale. 'I probably would still be happily married if my wife hadn't messed around,' he admits, almost in passing. 'I probably wouldn't have gone down this road at all.'
· Some of the names in this article have been changed
Internet infidelity: are we all at it?
Internet access
A survey of 15,000 US internet users in 2004 revealed that 32% of women, and 13% of men believed the web encouraged adultery.
Virtual vs reality
Another UK study, published by the BBC, confirmed their fears: 30% of internet users who have online lovers admit to having had sex with their virtual partners in the flesh.
Sexual equality
The same BBC study revealed that younger people are more likely candidates for webultery, and women are as likely as men to be unfaithful.
Slipping through the net
It also revealed that 70% of women and 54% of men remained in the dark about their spouses extramarital activity.
Porn ratings
In the US, meeting a new lover online and an obsessive interest in pornography are the top problems cited in internet-related divorce cases.
Too much chat
Other reasons for the breakdown of marriages, a panel of Chicago lawyers say, include excessive use of the net and chat rooms.
Email evidence
Staying in the US, 22% of men, and 14% of women have strayed at least once during their marriages. Peoples' online activities are also being used against them in divorce cases. Almost 80% of US attorneys said that incriminatory emails had been part of divorce proceedings.
Privacy rights
This has raised concerns about privacy laws in the US including what legal rights spouses have to each other's communications.
Eva Wiseman