IF YOUR wife or girlfriend didn’t come home last night, you are not alone. More than one in four women between the ages of 30 and 59 claims to have had an affair, according to a new study of middle-class women’s sexual secrets.

One in 20 of the women also claimed to have joined the “mile-high club”, suggesting an unexpected side effect of the boom in cheap air travel over recent decades, while one in eight of those asked described their sex lives as “kinky”.

The study was commissioned by Condé Nast, the magazine company, to establish the potential readership of its new publication, Easy Living, launched this week. For the sex and relationships section of the study, about 1,200 middle-class women were questioned via e-mail.

While the study reveals generational differences in women’s attitudes towards sex and relationships, it also highlights a number of constants. Across all the age groups surveyed, a steady 15% of women said they had had an affair “just for sex”.

However, stark contrasts were apparent between generations in their propensity to have dabbled in lesbian sex, with younger women much more likely to have tried it.

Of respondents in their thirties and forties, 15% had “never experimented with someone of the same sex”; among twentysomethings, the proportion was 21%.

Women now in their twenties and thirties were more likely to have lost their virginity before it was legal for them to do so than women in older age groups. The study shows that the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the explosion in promiscuity that followed it, had bypassed a significant proportion of women.

A fifth of women aged between 50 and 65 had had only one sexual partner, but among twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, the figure was 14% and 7% respectively. Of twentysomethings, 27% had had more than 10 partners, compared with 15% of those aged 50 and over.

The study suggests answers to the question: “Are other women having more sex than I am?” — 39% of twentysomethings have sex more than nine times a month, compared with 22% of women in their thirties and forties and 11% of over-fifties.

Among divorcées 25% said the split was due to “his affair”, 9% said “my affair”.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s world
• Believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend