Must your life be ruined just because you had an affair?
So love is hard, and love makes you different. That should be celebrated. For if love is indeed the most blessed aspect of life, then those costs are cheap. If loves makes you a better person, I welcome the admission price.
The world, when considered rationally, is frightening and lonely. Love makes life bearable. Love makes life joyous amid the dark.
Love is a candle burning in a distant window on a dark night as you walk alone; it lets you know there's someone out there for you, and you just need to make straight for that flickering flame.
In its perfect form, love is a transcendental dance, a mystical ritual almost. It takes you out of yourself, your ego ebbs, part of you dissolves into another's soul. It's two earthly creatures made of flesh melding the sublime part of themselves.
But we make love so bloody hard. Look at the stories we tell ourselves: Adam and Eve, Paris and Helen of Troy, Romeo and Juliet.
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Each couple would have been happy, would have died smiling in the arms of their adored, if other fools had not trampled all over their love.
God wouldn't leave our biblical lovers in peace. Helen and Paris couldn't find a hiding place secret enough to protect them. Romeo and Juliet were cursed by tyrannical, hateful parents.
Today, just look at how we hem in love. Desire and courtship are now mostly found in some hellish digital marketplace, on apps where you decide the possibilities of love and sex with a finger swipe. That's damnable.
Dating apps are, in effect, limitless Lonely Hearts pages. As so many now seek love through an app, then so many of us must be desperately, painfully lonely. I find that very saddening, but it doesn't surprise me.
The avenues of modern love have been bulldozed. Not so long ago, we fell in love at school, university, at work, or in pubs and clubs. These were the places were love was sought and found.
Only a minority ever really find their partner for life at school or university. First love, even second or third love, is mostly experimental, a testing of the form as we seek to understand our heart and the hearts of others. Early romance trains us for the real thing.
So few people go to pubs and clubs any more that love through the ancient chat-up line – through the lost art of socialising with strangers – seems nearly extinct. GenZ so often mourns its inability to connect with the unknown other beyond the limit of the screen.
That leaves work. But workplace romance is now all but banned.
I'm not in the business of feeling sorry for rich CEOs, but I found the story of "the kiss-cam" couple both extremely modern and therefore extremely anti-human in its treatment of love.
In short, married Andy Byron, chief executive of a digital company called Astronomer, was filmed with his arms around the firm's HR head Kristin Cabot on what's known as the "Jumbotron" camera at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts.
I don't know what is worse.
Getting caught cheating or getting caught at a Coldplay concert.pic.twitter.com/hcAsUlS0fi — Eric Matheny 🎙️ (@ericmmatheny) July 17, 2025
They ducked, and hid their faces, to escape the lens, and the internet exploded in gales of laughter at the pair seemingly caught in an affair before the world.
Astronomer issued a vinegar-faced statement saying 'our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability'.
The story was splattered across every newspaper and TV channel on Earth. Both were placed on leave; Byron later resigned.
Perhaps I'm some moral bankrupt, but I find it very cruel and absurdly puritanical to condemn anyone for being either in love or in lust. I would say: let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone.
We should, of course, pay mind to any wounded parties and betrayed spouses. Yet the sad truth is that there are millions of affairs happening in every corner of the planet right now.
Affairs may be cruel and dishonest, but they're simply about love at the end of the day, and love cannot be constrained. It won't be constrained. To constrain love is to kill a part of yourself.
Evidently, there are problems with workplace romances if any power imbalance is exploited, but to try to outlaw love is like trying to ban the breeze. Try catching either and putting the handcuffs on.
I see nothing that instructs or amuses about this story. People were betrayed. There's nothing funny in that. People were in love and they hid it. There's nothing funny in that. People's careers have been ruined for the simple reason that they loved each other. There is certainly nothing funny in that.
A world which cannot be soft and forgiving when it comes to love is by definition dark. If love brings light into the world, then trying to extinguish that light is profoundly anti-human.
Love is our greatest asset. No other creature feels as we do. It's our emotions which raise us up, far beyond the mere animal, towards an existence as a creature bearing what some call a soul.
Love is the best, and most perfect, of those emotions. Mock love and we mock ourselves. Deny love and we deny ourselves.
Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer-at-Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.
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