SKIRMISHER

“In America, 30% of people coming in for treatment for sex addiction are female,” says Don Serratt, director of Life Works, which offers sex-addiction treatment in the UK. In this country, few women present themselves as sex addicts, but that doesn’t mean the problem is less prevalent. “They’ll come for help with alcoholism, drug addiction or depression and, in the course of treatment, the sex addiction, the root cause of the other addictions, will be uncovered,” Serratt says.

Valerie was unaware she had an addiction, even when her friend’s fiancé rejected her advances and threw a drink over her, telling her some unpleasant home truths for good measure. It was only as she got older and her friends started to settle down that she began to question her behaviour.

“I was embarrassed to find myself aged 35, with the longest relationship on my romantic CV lasting only three months,” she says. She went to counselling because she wanted to stop going for the wrong men. “That’s when I realised that I’d been living in a fantasy world. What I loved most about sex wasn’t the act itself. It was lying in bed together afterwards, talking into the small hours, feeling that sense of connection. I often convinced myself I was in love with these guys, but it would soon wear off.”

Susan Cheever, a self-confessed sex addict who has just written Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction (Simon & Schuster), agrees that this blurring of the lines between the compulsions of love and sex is common among women. “If there is a difference between sex and love addiction, I don’t know what it is,” she says. “Sometimes people say they just fall in love too frequently. Are they saying they don’t want to have sex with those people? Love addict sounds nicer for sure.”

As Cheever recounts in the book, there were times when every man who crossed her path was fresh prey, from removal men to bookshop reps — taking in three husbands and her mother’s oncologist on the way. “Whenever there was a crisis,” she admits, “I found a man to take the edge off the feelings of helplessness and pain” — regardless of the upheaval she risked unleashing on her husbands and two children. “Adultery is the drink-driving of sex addiction,” she observes.

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{Image: The Spinal Tap}

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