Is it any of our business if Gordon Ramsay has or hasn't been having an affair with a woman who - and let's not dwell on this bit for too long at breakfast time - once slept with Jeffrey Archer?

No, of course it isn't. Ramsay is not a vicar or a morality campaigner. He isn't even a deputy prime minister. He's a chef who swears a lot and happens to write a column for this newspaper. So even if it is true, as the News of the World alleges, that he recently went to a London hotel for sex with Sarah Symonds who took along a tenner's worth of amyl nitrate (which is perfectly legal) then it concerns nobody but his wife.

That's the theory, anyway. But that is not how it is. The fact is that people, from the woman who served me at the Tesco checkout to office workers the country over, can't get enough of it (Ramsay has made no official comment on the claims). “Oooh, do you really think it's been going on for seven years?”, asked a gleeful friend who rang me on Sunday morning. She has a PhD and a weighty job in healthcare.

Proven or otherwise, this is a classic watercooler story. In a pathetic, dysfunctional and rather thrilling way it makes people feel better about their own lives. Why? Because often in interviews Ramsay has given the impression that his life and marriage are near-perfect and volunteered salacious detail to boot. Not only does he have the big house, the stellar career and the gorgeous kids, he goes and rubs our noses in it by saying of his wife that she is “the only woman who can turn me on. Tana is my wife, my lover and the person I want in my bed and in my arms every night”. He has told how she likes him to keep his chef's jacket on for sex, how they retire to bed every Sunday with a bottle of champagne, and that “cooking and sex go hand in glove like tomato and basil”.

Run that past us again? You can almost hear thousands of knackered, stressed ordinary couples for whom teatime is a mess-filled farce, wailing “with four kids?? FOUR bloody kids! HOW??” and perhaps regretting that the one and only time their spouse tried it on when they were cooking they'd shooed them away worrying that the white sauce might go lumpy.

But now there's a suggestion that all may not be idyllic in Celebrity-Family-of-the-Year Paradise, we seize on the detail, thinking that - ha! - perhaps we aren't so inadequate after all. Maybe it's normal not to grill fish fingers naked save for an apron and stilettos and instead spend all day Sunday in your turquoise candlewick dressing gown.

The thing about life is that everyone thinks everyone else is managing to pull off more romance/better parenting/tidier housekeeping/less bickering than they are, when the truth is that they're probably not. We are so used to being sold the airbrushed OK! magazine version of domestic life that we think we're abnormal for waking up and wanting a piece of toast rather than wanting to pull on a basque ensemble. The pressure on us via adverts and magazines to have perfect homes, fulfilling careers and never-a-cross-word marriages is plastic, insidious and spreads discontent like nits.

Personally, I've always been suspicious of couples who rave openly about their sex lives. Everyone knows one: the desperately sad duo who make laboured double entendres to each other within your earshot. Who flirt like dogs on heat but only when there's an audience. You want to tap them on the shoulder and say “Er, is it me you're trying to convince you're still ‘hot' for each other or yourselves?” but instead you just turn away and gag quietly.

The author Tony Parsons coined the phrase Darling Couples for people who incessantly call each other “darling”: “Don't forget you've got to get up early tomorrow, darling”, “Have you tried the salmon, darling?” How do they manage to be more faithful, more happy, more fulfilled, than the rest of us, he asked? The answer is that they don't: the higher the “darling” quotient, the more wretched the probable state of the relationship. “The happiest couples have a kind of easy humour about each other, a warm familiarity, an affection that doesn't need to be advertised,” he said. “They are not afraid to disagree.”

Modern celebrities have taken the Darling phenomenon up a notch by actually rating their sex lives for us. Aren't they worried about tempting fate? Guess who said in April this year that she had an “amazing” sex life with her husband? Yes! Madonna “quickie divorce” Ritchie.

Guess who enthused over his “great sex life” with his wife, under the headline: “I work 18 hours a day, I earn a fortune but I can always find the time to make love”? Chris Tarrant, who went on to have a fiendishly acrimonious divorce in which his ex-wife Ingrid claimed, in response to his friends' allegation that she'd imposed a sex ban, that he suffered from erectile dysfunction and “went out of his way” to make himself repulsive by coming to bed stinking of fish.

Victoria Beckham once described her husband David as “an animal” in bed and boasted that the reason she was so thin was because they “shagged all day”. This account was undermined somewhat when Rebecca Loos claimed to have had an affair with Beckham, though the Beckhams' marriage survived.

It all makes me worry a bit for 22-years married Richard and Judy. Richard said very recently in a newspaper interview that his wife had “more erogenous zones than any woman I've ever met”. Keep it to yourself, eh, Richard, it's safer that way.

If Gordon Ramsay is surprised by the huge interest in his alleged adultery then he should know that it is only because he committed the crime of appearing too content, hence the Schadenfreude. If any celebrity couple want my professional advice for future interviews, it is this. Give us the rows and not the raunch. It might not please your PRs but it's what we'd much rather hear.

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