Dear Economist,

I am 38 years old, rather bored with my husband, and for the past two months I have been flirting like mad with another man. We often meet up for a drink and the talk has started to get quite saucy. I’m sure I could take things further if I wanted. Should I?

Sheila, London

Dear Sheila,

When I heard of your dilemma I thought immediately of an old paper from the Journal of Political Economy, ”A Theory of Extramarital Affairs” by Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale.

Professor Fair modelled affairs as a time-allocation problem. That seems odd.

The theory of rational crime might seem a more promising starting point.

But on reflection, Professor Fair’s approach may have been perceptive: I suspect that affairs do take up a lot of time and that this mundane fact looms large in most adulterers’ lives.

That said, his approach to the problem could equally have applied if you had written to say that you were 38 years old, rather bored with your husband and were thinking of taking up badminton. One senses that something is missing.I think the omission is uncertainty. You do not know how much fun an affair will be. Nor do you know whether your husband is likely to become more or less tedious over time. A cost-benefit analysis is going to be tricky, but we can say for sure that your potential affair represents a valuable option. As with all options it may be best to refrain from exercising it until the option is ”deep in the money” - that is, until you are so thoroughly fed up with your husband that you think nothing can save the marriage.

Until then, why not enjoy the saucy talk? It may be a lot more fun than the affair itself.

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