Columnist Jana Hocking on Thursday wrote about a torrid summer affair with a French man and used the experience to examine the contradictions of being a mistress — a role she said can offer intense romance while also delivering secrecy, emotional strain and long‑term dissatisfaction.
Hocking, writing for the Daily Mail's Femail section, described meeting a tall, dark Frenchman through a mutual friend during a recent trip to France. She said he swept her into hidden rooftop bars and lavish gestures, at one point removing her sunglasses to "look into my eyes" and telling her how much he adored her. The intimacy, she wrote, felt immediate and consuming.
The idyll ended, Hocking wrote, when a request from the man not to be tagged in social media prompted her to check with their mutual friend and learn he had a partner and a child. When she confronted him, he told her his partner had become pregnant early, they were "practically separated" and that his situation justified secrecy — explanations Hocking called the "classic script."
She used the episode as a starting point to interview women who have been in similar situations and to probe whether mistresses get the "best part of the deal." Some interviewees described affairs as intensely pleasurable escapes from mundane relationships. One woman told Hocking she had been with a married lover for more than a year and felt she received the man's "sweetness" without the domestic friction of long‑term partnership. "The dates are like something out of an erotic fiction novel," that woman said, recounting hotel encounters and clandestine meetings.
Another woman described repeated short‑term getaways with a married colleague after her own 20‑year marriage ended, saying the affair felt like "pure escapism." She told Hocking she even enjoyed the power she felt in knowing she could disrupt the man's family life, although she said she never acted on that possibility. "He has to sneak away, risk everything, just for a few hours. That kind of intensity makes you feel irresistible," the woman said.
But other accounts Hocking gathered emphasized the emotional costs of secrecy. One friend admitted the secrecy "gnawed at her," saying the inability to hold hands in public or to be acknowledged as a partner transformed excitement into humiliation. Mistresses, several interviewees told Hocking, often become confidantes and unpaid therapists for men who complain about their wives and domestic burdens while withholding public commitment.
Hocking wrote that the pattern she and her interviewees described is common: men who reserve their polished, seductive selves for outside relationships while family life carries day‑to‑day responsibilities. "He saves his best self for me," one woman told Hocking, adding that a spouse often receives "the grumpy leftovers." Another consequence, the column noted, is the persistent anxiety over discovery, the sting of seeing a social media photo of a happy family and the cancellations and silences that accompany a relationship premised on concealment.
The column placed these personal stories in a broader, cultural frame, arguing that affairs endure in part because they offer a fantasy contrast to routine relationships. Hocking wrote that the mistress can become an emblem of desire and freedom — the version of a man that still seeks to impress — while also acknowledging that the role is inherently marginal. "A mistress will never be a princess," she wrote. "She'll never be the main character in his story, just the subplot he'll deny if anyone asks. That's not enough for me."
Hocking's piece combines first‑person reporting with interviews to highlight the tension between the thrills of clandestine romance and the long‑term emotional toll of secrecy. The column does not quantify how common such arrangements are but illustrates recurring themes reported by the women she spoke to: passion and indulgence alongside loneliness, instability and the risk of being reduced to a private consolation rather than a public partner.
The Daily Mail column joins a long line of cultural commentary that examines infidelity not only as private moral failing but as a social dynamic shaped by desire, gender roles and the logistics of modern relationships. Hocking concluded that while affairs can feel intoxicating in the short term, the secrecy and secondary status they entail often leave those involved wanting more than a hidden chapter in someone else's life.