Basic Trope: A Housewife has an affair with service personnel that visit the house.
- Straight: Alice has sex with the milkman while Bob goes to work.
- Exaggerated: Alice has had sex with the milkman, the mailman, the gardener, the ant exterminator, the poolboy and the maid while Bob was at work.
- Downplayed: Alice flirts heavily with the milkman, but it doesn’t go beyond that.
- Justified:
- Alice is unhappy in her marriage, and any one or more of these people pays Alice more attention than Bob does.
- Alice and Bob have an arrangement: while Bob’s at work with his Sexy Secretary, Alice has the milkman.
- Alice is in an Arranged Marriage and Bob is the man she's really in love with (and always was). The only way they can see each other is when he's on his rounds.
- Inverted:
- Bob has sex with his secretary while he is at work.
- Bob is a milkman who cheats on his wife while at work.
- Alice is a milkmaid who cheats on Bob with one of her customers.
- The milkman comes home to see his wife in bed with Alice (or Bob), the office worker who lives with them.
- The Milkman's had flings with both Alice and Bob, but having him as a mutual ex gives Alice and Bob the commonality to build a connection with and eventually fall for each other.
- Gender-Inverted: Bob has sex with the milkman (etc.) while Alice goes to work.
- Subverted:
- The milkman stops by with not only today’s usual delivery but a bouquet of roses as well. He confesses his feelings to Alice, who reminds him that she’s Happily Married.
- It’s a onetime fling that Alice regrets, not an ongoing relationship.
- The Milkman is Bob, he and Alice are doing a bit of roleplay.
- Double Subverted:
- But she secretly has feelings for the milkman, and Bob has been staying late at the office a lot lately … so she eventually caves.
- But she has to see the milkman every day, and both still have feelings for each other.
- Parodied:
- Bob takes A Day in Her Apron, and is propositioned by the milkman, the mailman, the gardener, the ant exterminator, the poolboy and the maid
- The milkman drops the bouquet he brought for Alice when he sees that he is speaking to Bob, who doesn't seem to get it.
- The Milkman milks the women with whom he has sex and then makes a living selling their milk.
- "Milkman" has become slang for the local male escorts, which often results in confusion when uninformed housewives order actual bottles from their services.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Alice doesn’t have an affair with any service personnel.
- No service personnel come to the house.
- Enforced: Rule of Funny, Rule of Sexy
- Lampshaded: “Hi, Alice! Today’s delivery will really do your body good!”
- Invoked:
- Alice feels attracted to the milkman, and feels sad that Bob has been working late a lot.
- Charlie becomes a milkman to attract desperate lonely House Wives.
- Exploited: Claire, the milkman's wife, uses her husband's affairs to justify her own infidelity.
- Defied: Alice doesn’t wish to cause a scandal or hurt Bob, so she keeps her interaction with the milkman friendly but businesslike.
- Discussed: “Oh, she knows the muffin-man, alright. Biblically.”
- Conversed: “If my wife did that, I’d divorce her.”
- Implied:
- After Bob goes off to work, Alice waits behind the front door nude.
- Bob comes home to find Alice nude in bed, the other side clearly having just been vacated, and he finds an Affair Hair there later on.
- Deconstructed: Affairs aren’t a solution to marital problems; if anything, they exacerbate them.
- Reconstructed: Alice and Bob work through their problems and become a stronger couple (so neither will be tempted to stray), or else get divorced.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is an Abhorrent Admirer to the milkman.
- Played for Drama: Bob finds out about the affair.
Back to Cheating with the Milkman
