Affair  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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love affair

1. That which is done or is to be done; matter; concern; business of any kind, commercial, professional, or public; — often in the plural.

   a difficult affair to manage

2. Any proceeding or action which it is wished to refer to or characterize vaguely.

   an affair of honor, i. e., a duel

   an affair of love, i. e., an intrigue.

3. A material object (vaguely designated).

   He used a hook-shaped affair with a long handle to unlock the car.

4. An adulterous relationship. (from affaire de coeur.)

An affair may refer to a form of nonmonogamy. The term describes infidelity in marriage. It may be used as a euphemism and in some cases to add glamour to an illicit liaison. Describing a relationship as an 'affair' may be inaccurate or intentionally damaging. It may or may not involve either or both romance or sex. In the romantic friendship article are numerous examples of 'special friendships' in popular culture many apparently without sex. Some are distinguishable from an emotional affair.

Affair has the same word origins as affect — an affair implies bonds of affection, but not necessarily so. Some affairs are premeditatively cold. Some exploitative or designed to extract information by stealth. Some are entered into in order to provide the basis for later blackmail. And some are set up in order to provide grounds for divorce in jurisdictions that do not enjoy no fault divorce laws. That is then referred to as adultery. Affair, in lay and professional usage, does not require any of the parties to be married, though often one is in a committed relationship. Adultery refers more specifically to those in a legal married relationship.

Other uses include describing meetings or other functions, or tasks that need to be completed. For example, one might say, "I have other affairs to attend to at the moment." It may also refer to a particular business or private activity, as in family affair or private affair. In the most general sense, affair may be used to conote professional, personal, or public business. An affair, in the political sense, typically refers to any kind of involvement in illicit business by any kind of public representatives, such as in the Watergate affair. Like the earlier definition this is not always the case — for example the British Government has a Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, which is a perfectly legitimate (and usually honorable) position.