Poor Lily Allen. As she sings of the heartbreak of her ex-husband’s affair on her new ‘revenge album’, I couldn’t help feeling – with all the smugness of middle age – ‘Another open marriage bites the dust!’

Because I’ve been there and done that.

Lily and David Harbour may have thought that establishing ‘rules’ around bringing other parties into their marriage would protect them, but I could have told them the writing was on the wall the moment they signed up to it.

Like Lily, I once thought I was so clever when I agreed to my first husband’s proposal to see other people, that we were having our cake and eating it too.

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Isn’t infidelity fun? Isn’t kissing strangers on a train just so cool? Why wouldn’t we choose to have lust as well as love?

After all, lust is wild and dangerous and anonymous. Love is about supporting a partner through thick and thin: when a parent dies, through a long illness, when unemployment looms.

In other words, isn’t marriage about as unsexy as it gets?

That’s what we thought, anyhow. With the naivete of youth, we were quite sure we were brave and edgy, going against convention, embracing the spontaneous.

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We thought we could fly. And we did… before we came crashing down, leaving our rulebook, marriage and three small sons in our wake.

When my husband – a man-of-the-world from a bohemian family, compared with my religious upbringing – suggested just six weeks into our relationship that we also see other people, I didn’t need much persuading. Then 19 to his 22, I knew I didn’t want to become like my parents and their boring friends.

Three years later, we married – but our commitment to being ‘open’ continued.

Like Lily, we tried to protect ourselves, enjoying an evening devising our ‘rules’ over a bottle of wine. I was allowed to kiss ten different men a year; as I said to my husband: ‘I want lots of kissing, but a proper love affair sounds a bit heavy.’

Meanwhile, I gave him permission for a two-week affair once a year, providing it took place in another country during the course of his work reviewing foreign hotels for travel magazines.

Just as Lily told her husband he could only have sex with sex workers – who falls in love with a sex worker, after all? – I assumed that even if I allowed my husband to have a proper holiday romance, wouldn’t that just wear itself out when they were no longer able to see each other?

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But then I imagined our rules were stormproof.

I remember the first time my husband called me, from America, to let me know he’d met a woman he wanted to sleep with and to confirm he had my permission.

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Go ahead!’

In our first year of marriage, I used up all ten of my kissing vouchers eagerly, in libraries, lifts, trains.

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But within a year I’d become a mother and had little time for kissing other men – though I did still enjoy the odd frisson.

There was one poor man – who seemed like a good law-abiding civil servant who had never had an adventure in his life – who had the misfortune (or fortune?) to be sitting opposite me on a train.

An uncle had died and I was heading home after attending his funeral alone in the West Country. With no small person requiring my attention for the first time in a long while, I experienced a heady sense of freedom.

So addressing this unknown man, I simply said to him: ‘I’ve always had this fantasy about kissing a total stranger.’

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He looked appalled and kept his head in his newspaper for the rest of the journey.

Yet when we disembarked at Paddington station he took me in his arms on the platform and kissed me passionately, like in a soppy film. It was just perfect.

But though my entanglements with other people waned to almost nothing post-motherhood, my husband still continued enjoying our arrangement.

In fact, the one and only actual lover I took over the course of our marriage came at his instigation. It was four years into our marriage and, by then, we’d had another two boys and our life had lost its bohemian edge. I had recently given birth to our third son; our older boys were still under four. Our house smelt of nappies, with toys scattered everywhere.

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Perhaps my husband thought: ‘What happened to the girl I married? What happened to that romantic life we envisioned for ourselves?’

Whatever his motives, he suddenly said: ‘You look like you could do with an affair.’

I laughed. I was lying on the sofa in my baggy maternity clothes. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ I said.

‘It would do you good,’ he insisted. ‘You look terribly mumsy, if you don’t mind me saying.’

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‘Who exactly would I have an affair with?’ I asked him.

‘Look in your address book,’ he suggested. ‘There must be someone.’

So that’s exactly what I did.

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I sat on our bed and searched through my address book looking for a possible lover.

The man I hit upon was Peter, someone I’d kissed at university. I remembered an Italian boy, with huge, expressive dark eyes and a swarthy complexion. That very night I rang him. Remarkably, he picked up.

We chatted a while, he told me about his life – he’d married, had a son, separated – and I told him about mine.

We arranged to meet in the summer. We could rent a cottage on the Suffolk coast. We both agreed it would be a lot of fun.

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I had four months to prepare for our ‘family holiday’ (we took our boys along, who were around the same age, and far too young to understand what was going on). It would only be for a week, miles from anywhere – and my husband could veto it at any stage.

Peter and I had a wonderful time. Walks along the beach hand in hand, sunsets… the full works. And then, at the end of the week, I returned to my life – and my marriage – as agreed.

I never saw Peter again. In all honesty, I can’t say what we did made me happy beyond the moment. It was not as easy as I believed to have a fleeting love affair – perhaps a warning of what was to come.

Even to this day, I believe that my husband and I loved one another and that our marriage was no sham. But the lure of the new is so powerful. We all desire what we do not yet possess.

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We had been married for seven years when my husband broke the rule that his sexual affairs would only take place while travelling abroad. And he did so with my permission.

‘Just this once,’ he said one February day.

He was still reviewing hotels, and this one was in Wales. He had met the woman in a bar and he just needed to know what it felt like to have sex with her. At the time I thought, Oh well, just a one-night stand.

‘OK,’ I agreed. I was reluctant, but he made me feel I still had the power of veto.

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‘You’re just wonderful, Olivia, to let me to do this,’ he gushed. ‘No other wife would, you know.’

I remember glowing with pride when he said this. What levels of trust we had. What a wonderful marriage we had! I thought we could sustain anything.

What I didn’t know was that he had been seeing this woman for six months. In accordance with our rules, he hadn’t yet slept with her, but I hadn’t laid down the law about candlelit dinners or walks on the beach. I hadn’t told him he couldn’t swim with her in a rough sea off the Welsh coast.

I had inadvertently given them both a long and romantic courtship. I had made them wait for sex – and when it finally took place, the sex was as powerful as it could be. A stay-at-home wife with her stay-at-home family didn’t have a chance in hell.

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The most painful thing that happened in the aftermath was that my husband stopped loving me. He did try to wean himself off her. He never even asked for a second night with her. But he was a man obsessed.

I know he didn’t see her behind my back but, in a horrible sense, he was gone.

We no longer shared jokes. We no longer went out on our date-night once a week. He was present in body – we even carried on having sex – but completely absent in mind and spirit.

The truth is, he broke my heart. We split up that same year. He told me, frankly, that he couldn’t live without her. They are still together now, 36 years later.

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So if someone reading this is tempted to put a few rules in place to ‘liven up’ their marriage, I beg you, don’t go there. Enjoy the same old, same old, till death do you part.

Peter’s name has been changed

Why Sex Doesn’t Matter by Olivia Fane is out now (amazon.co.uk)