Losing It
Love and reading
Cupid is armed and dangerous
Passionate and penniless in Paris
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BY DAVID HUDSON | Jacqueline, an attractive woman in her mid-30s, leans back into a smooth leather sofa in an office in downtown Berlin. "My husband's job keeps him on the road most of the time," she says with a disparaging wave of her hand. "And when he does come home, maybe two weekends a month, he plops himself down in front of the TV or goes about his own business. He just doesn't care about me or the kids anymore." So here's Jacqueline's life: a part-time job in a bank, a 10-year-old marriage gone stale and two children, ages 8 and 9. She loves her kids, and they love her back, but they're already old enough to be caught up in their own lives. There's no reason in the world Jacqueline should waste away the rest of her days like this, and she knows it. Jacqueline has started seeing other men. A lot of other men. "I don't count them," she laughs, "but I'd guess 12 or 13 in the last couple of months." But there's one in particular she sees about twice a week. Just talking about him, she flushes with excitement. "It's really turned into this wonderfully hot affair." For secrecy's sake, she carries her own cell phone. He'll call, they'll meet, take in a show, go dancing or even leave town together. Fortunately, Jacqueline's mother lives in the same apartment building, and the kids are all too happy to spend the weekend with their grandmother. Recently, the couple escaped for four whole days of extramarital bliss, and Jacqueline felt more alive during those four days than she had for years. Her illicit lover is also married and has one child, but neither he nor Jacqueline have any intention whatsoever of breaking up their marriages. And both continue to spice up their lives with secret encounters with other men and women -- in part, perhaps, to keep from getting too serious about each other. A few years ago, Jacqueline simply wouldn't have had the time or the chutzpah to strike up a conversation with a stranger and then cultivate a full-blown affair. But last October, she ran across an ad in the newspaper for the Erster Berliner Seitensprungagentur. Seitensprung is the German word for "affair" -- literally, "a leap to the side" -- and the ad that jump-started Jacqueline's life all over again was for the first agency in Berlin that specializes in arranging extramarital flings. There is a precedent for this unique service in Munich, where an agency has been in the dalliance business for 15 years, and another in the United Kingdom. But Christa Appelt didn't have Munich or any other model in mind when she created Germany's second such agency in Berlin. In fact, she hardly set out to arrange clandestine trysts at all. Appelt, a sharp, smartly dressed professional in her early 40s, originally set up shop as the Appelt Dating Service in 1993. She expected her clientele to be made up of the usual gamut of singles and the recently divorced of all ages, looking for Mr. or Ms. Right. But when more and more of her customers requested absolute discretion for all too obvious reasons, she realized she was peering into a niche of opportunity -- and leapt into it. Still assuming it'd be a nice little division running alongside the mainstay of her business, she created the Seitensprungagentur in 1994. It took off immediately and hasn't stopped since. The dating service is still rolling along nicely, but the agency for dangerous liaisons is now front and center. Currently, Appelt has between 600 and 700 married Berliners on file, stored in her computer, eager to pair off with each other, even if only for just one night, and she plans to branch out soon into Dresden and Leipzig. (When told that her agency was being profiled by a San Francisco Web magazine, Appelt flashed her eyes with entrepreneurial gleam. "San Francisco! I'll bet no one's created an infidelity agency for gays ...") With a recent survey from a research institute in Munich showing that 58 percent of all married women and 48 percent of married men in Germany dream of taking that "leap to the side," Appelt's market yawns wide open before her. Yet her business model reflects that while more women may fantasize about a little something on the side, it's the men who are more likely to act on those fantasies. "The women are always a little more shy on the phone," she says, "more discreet, more hesitant to meet a stranger." Appelt has taken several precautions to ensure the comfort and security of the female half of her database. The first encouragement she offers is free membership. While men pay 350 marks (about $195) for six months worth of access to Appelt's files, or 270 marks (about $150) for three months, all a woman has to do is call. She'll need to answer a few questions about her age, hair and eye color, her interests, hobbies and so on, and the sort of man she's looking for ("smoking or nonsmoking?"). Once the card Appelt or one of her five assistants fills out is complete, all that's left for her to do is wait to be called in return. That call will come from a man Appelt has deemed a good match. And the man, in turn, has had to go through an entirely different set of hoops to be able to make the call. "Every male applicant must come down to the office," insists Appelt. "That's a hard and fast rule." N E X T+P A G E: Rubber boys
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