Cybersex: same as cheating?

So the passion has worn a bit thin in your marriage. The daily business of running a household, picking up the dirty underpants, preparing children's lunches, overseeing homework and keeping track of relatives' birthdays can conspire to make your partner a little less attractive than when the two of you first met.

It's not that you don't like each other: it's just that neither of you lights up when you see each other, and going out together can be tense and routine rather than regenerating.

Next thing you know, you're hooked on e-mailing some man on the internet. Perhaps it's an old boyfriend, or that flirty guy from work you do business with.

You're not alone. According to a study released this week by researchers at the University of Florida, more and more people are having e-mail love affairs and they are causing havoc to marriages.

'The internet will soon become the most common form of infidelity, if it isn't already,' says Beatriz Mileham, who carried out the the study.

First thing in the morning, during lunch break, or last thing at night, you rush to see the post from your new paramour. So how can a relationship that isn't conducted face-to-face become so compelling? How can a cyber-relationship take on such importance and become so exciting that ordinary life becomes boring?

In truth, such e-mail affairs usually stem from innocent curiosity, a private something that doesn't at first glance seem to threaten anyone.

The immediacy of e-mail contact feels fresh and alive, and the two people
involved feel light, emotionally nimble, sexy and open. The world starts smiling for them in a way it hadn't for a long while.

Very soon, the e-mailers each appear to have found someone who really understands them, listens to them, and with whom they have become fascinated.

The e-mail lover becomes the most important person in the other's life. Whether sharing the delights or indignities of one's day, the e-mail lovers describe them artfully, and is attentively heard.

What's more, it all seems so safe. Neither party appears distracted, as they might in normal life. In front of that screen, tapping those keys, e-mail lovers enter a world that is protected and special.

And yet, cut off from the strains of everyday life, the two people have created an intimacy that subtly endangers their marriages.

At first, it may not feel like a serious threat. After all, none of these marriages is really in difficulty; they are just in a boring phase.

Often neither person who enters an e-mail relationship is planning to sleep with someone else or leave their partner. But the private connection that becomes established gradually causes each person to withdraw from their partners at home - who now seem irritating and gauche.

On top of the fall from grace of the husband (or wife), there is guilt and concealment that warps what were once easy, domestic interchanges. So you see, e-mail loves are not so different from what occurs during an ordinary affair.

Like an affair, the e-mail cocoon feels like a truth about each person's deepest needs, but it isn't. It's a vehicle for the parts of them that feel parched in their marriages. And, insofar as it feels easy and wonderful, it's an exhilarating reminder of who they can be.

But, and here's the danger, the internet lets the individuals maintain fictions and fantasies in their e-mail relationship that wouldn't be sustainable in the flesh.

Each person projects and imagtouchedines qualities in the other that are kept going only because they remain unchallenged by the realities of daily life.

Even when e-mailers do encounter disappointment in each other, the internet acts as a brake, slowing down the natural responses of anger, withdrawal and contempt that can percolate in those live-in relationships, where one difficulty piles on top of another.

The e-mail relationship becomes magically idealised, like a long infatuation that doesn't have to come down to earth.

Take my patient, Jenny's, situation. An NHS manager of 45, her children were on their way to university and she was feeling neglected by Brian, her husband of 24 years.

She met Andy, a doctor, at a professional conference and they started e-mailing, first about professional issues. Then it became very personal.

She confided in him and imagined him as a perfect replacement partner. His wife had MS and he felt deprived of female intimacy. He'd had a few one night stands at conferences but was committed to his wife.

Jenny and he became very attached and yet they both could feel safe that nothing threatening would happen. Jenny and Andy could both fantasise about being free without going through the reality of leaving their partners.

But the closeness between them more than each other. It eroded both of their marriages. The e-mail love affair was too perfect. Their marriages were drained of energy and enthusiasm, but neither wanted to leave and disrupt their lives.

Before, their marriages had been in the doldrums, but both of them had recovered from that kind of phase before. This time bouncing back required a great deal more emotional energy. The immediate intimacy of e-mail was a hard competitor.

The relationship became so disruptive to her marriage that Jenny took the decision to pull away from e-mailing, a process in which she experienced tremendous loss.

Slowly, she detached from Andy, but it took longer than the two years she was 'intimate' with him to recreate her closeness with Brian. For the first year she felt empty and desperately lonely.

She kept comparing her rather mundane and ordinary marriage with the exhilarating moments she'd shared with Andy online. She couldn't easily see how to re-ignite her feelings for Brian.

As she said goodbye to Andy in her heart, some space opened up for her to reconnect with Brian. She took something she learned 'with' Andy. She risked being frank and thoughtful and playful with him once again.

She took this route gingerly at first but later, as he was able to respond, she found that her openness kindled passions and intimacy at home that she had long since thought dead.

Jenny was lucky. She wanted Brian and she found a way back to him. When things got knotty, she even started e-mailing her own husband as a way to talk about the difficult topics in their relationship.

She was on to something that many couples could find useful. Writing things down, sharing disappointments and sharing longings, can be a way of reopening intimacy where it might have been shut down.

E-mailing a husband doesn't have the obsessive qualities of writing to someone unknown who doesn't see you when you are grumpy, ill or mean.

It will, however, have a certain truth. It's a way to expose parts of you that have gone underground in your marriage that you want to connect up with again.

And, as an added bonus, there is something really sexy about sharing all one's parts with someone you really love.

Unlike the cyber affair that looks safe but turns out to be emotionally injurious, you will be rewarded with something infinitely more reassuring: a person who knows you in all your different moods, who gets to know you more deeply than ever - and still finds you lovable.

Susie Orbach's latest book is The Impossibility Of Sex (Penguin, £7.99).