An affair has none of the dreary baggage endemic in a long-term relationship. You can devote your time together to sex and romance rather than dealing with the kids or talking about taxes. There’s the excitement of secrecy and stolen moments together. You can indulge in wanton passion as you take a break from the real world, in a bubble that only you and your lover inhabit. The sex can be electric in a way you had never experienced before, better than you ever thought possible. If sex was ever anything like that with your spouse, it was too long ago for you to remember. How could there not be an addictive quality to that kind of lovemaking?

Nevertheless, often that magical sexual zing will evaporate over time as the affair progresses and the pair become more familiar with each other. Sometimes a man will leave his wife for the mistress, move in with her, and then find that the sex becomes as ho-hum as it was with his wife.

Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, chocolate. They all can be addictive. Yes, chocolate—according to researchers at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research in Madrid, Spain, it apparently contains alkaloids that are also found in alcohol. Anything that stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers can be both psychologically and physiologically addictive.

In 2014, the BBC reported on the Orgasmatron, a pleasure-inducing device patented by Dr. Stuart Meloy that can give you an orgasm at the touch of a button. The device, a small box implanted onto the spine, was originally developed more than a decade ago to treat chronic back pain. But Dr. Meloy wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of installing a pleasure switch in humans. Back in the 1950s, Robert Gabriel Heath, a doctor at Tulane University in New Orleans managed to control violent behavior in patients by administering electrical signals to specific parts of the brain along wires through holes in their skulls. This caused a rush of pleasurable sensations. So if you’re having trouble reaching orgasm, maybe you should try drilling a hole into your skull and have a go with Heath’s method yourself. He reckoned that it was a great improvement to lobotomies, a popular treatment at that time. Patients were able to control their mood swings themselves at the flick of a switch. Apparently only one of them went overboard, administering 1,500 doses in a three hour period, but the rest showed great restraint. Test rats given the same procedure did not fare so well—they “self-medicated” to the point of exhaustion.

The TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation touched upon this issue in an episode entitled “The Game,” first broadcast on TV in 1991 (Season 5, Episode 6). A video game stimulates the pleasure center of the users to trap the crew of the Enterprise into total addiction to it so that an alien race can take over the ship. However, Data saves the day by finding a way to free his crewmates from the mind control.

Addiction to sex in general rather than with a particular person is something different. According to an article written by Matt McMillen for WebMD, such people may have other underlying psychological issues, such as anxiety, depression, shame, obsessive compulsive disorders or brain chemistry imbalances that are the root cause of sexual craving and risky behavior. Doctors in the field tend to refer to it rather euphemistically as “hypersexual disorder” rather than talking about sex addicts.

Nevertheless, addiction to sex per se is most likely far less common than the popular press would have you believe. Nymphomania was a diagnosis developed in the Victorian era, when most of the medical profession held that it was abnormal for women to experience sexual desire. Thus, for example, women caught masturbating, flirting or having children out of wedlock might find themselves committed to a mental asylum, possibly enduring strait-jackets, bloodletting, and even barbaric clitorectomies.

Actor Michael Douglas has publicly claimed to have a sex addiction problem. However some might say that he was just highly sexed and as is true for many celebs, had no shortage of willing babes to bonk.

It seems that men are far more likely to suffer from hypersexual disorder than women, but this may be just because men are biologically designed to be more promiscuous than women. After all, they only have to spread their seed far and wide, and can quickly move from one partner to the next, while women must invest many years into rearing the children that result from all that bonking.

So is your horribly horny husband sexually addicted to that other woman or women, at least maybe psychologically rather than physiologically? That’s something you’ll have to work out for yourself, but you may not even want to know the answer to the question.