Relatively Safe Liaisons

Welcome to part two of my three-part exploration of infidelity and polyamory.

Before I begin, I want to reiterate how unscientific this process has been.  I placed an ad on Craigslist—my go-to website for all things odd—asking men who have been unfaithful to their partners to share their stories with me.  Amazingly, men responded.  My similar (and belated) attempt to find some women to do so hasn’t garnered any responses yet.  Funny, that.  Should some women eventually reply to my request, I will post on this topic again.

After all was said and done, three men allowed me to ask them all kinds of potentially embarrassing and difficult questions and I am immensely grateful for their honesty.   Seriously guys, you’re wonderful.

Geoffrey is in his forties and is presently in a long term relationship, but not married.  He has been married before, but that ended some time ago.  The first time Geoffrey cheated on a partner he was 15 or 16 years old and it was motivated, mostly, by loneliness.  There was the girl he had at home and the girl he had at school.  But in the times that he’s been unfaithful since then, at 19, 24 and 40, there has been a recurring theme:  the inability to communicate with his partners regarding significant issues in their relationship.

With his girlfriend at 19, it became clear early on in the relationship that she was basically a snob who looked down her nose at him.  But he found it too difficult to talk to her about her attitude and too difficult to break up.  So when a co-worker made it clear that she was looking for a little something, he obliged.  At 24, Geoffrey was in a marriage in which the intimacy stopped cold after the wedding night.  Once again, finding it too difficult to communicate with his spouse about the issue, he looked for intimacy with a co-worker.

(Can I just interject here and say that that there is no one in my office that I can actually imagine sleeping with?  I don’t know where Geoffrey’s been working but clearly the general hotness level in his work places has been higher than that of mine.)

While in his present relationship, Geoffrey has spent some time on massage tables and chatting with people online.  Though he hasn’t begun a secondary relationship with anyone else, the communication issue continues to plague him.

Geoffrey remarked that he perhaps just doesn’t have the genes for fidelity, though he was quick to point out that he doesn’t see this as a justification for his actions.  He does feel like what he’s doing is wrong.  However, I don’t get the impression that Geoffrey is necessarily losing sleep over this either.  He seems to have found a way to compartmentalize this so that his life doesn’t spin terribly out of control; he’s never been caught by a partner, so he’s managing this somehow.  When we chatted, we talked about this overall communication issue and the fear Geoffrey has around it.  As a lifelong conflict avoider, I can relate to a degree.  Sometimes the fear of what might happen in a conflict becomes so overblown in my head that it turns into a mountain—when the actual conflict is much more of a molehill.  It also seemed to me like Geoffrey keeps ending up in relationships that lack a basic level of overall compatibility.  This was not the case, though, with Sam.

Sam is 27, engaged to be married and has been with his fiancée for about five years.  In this time he’s been unfaithful twice.  The first time didn’t last very long but the second time, with an ex-girlfriend of his, lasted about a year.  He has never been found out.  Now that he’s moved in with his fiancée he’s pledged not to stray again.  When he was answering questions about his motivation to cheat, however, it came to light that while he and his fiancée are great together in a lot of ways, they do not seem to be sexually compatible.  Relentless beotch that I am, I wouldn’t let this issue go.  So we had a little chat on msn.

Speaking of his ex, Sam said “she’s one of those woman [sic] that when you kiss its [sic] like your souls are kissing…”

Given that kind of connection, which he says he just doesn’t have with his fiancée, I wondered why he wasn’t going after a relationship with his ex at this point.  I assumed that they just didn’t get along well enough.  But I was wrong.  Sort of.  They get along now (they didn’t before) but they are in different spaces socially and financially and Sam now feels too invested in his present relationship to leave.  He recognizes that he and his fiancée are sexually incompatible—he likes to try new things, his fiancée does not—but in his own words:  “I feel like my fiancé [sic] is the woman I want to be with for the rest of my life, when and if I get married.  I will still have [the desire to have my sexual needs met] but… I won’t act on it because marriage is special to me.  Especially, eventually when I have kids.  I want to set a good example.”

When asked if there was anything more he wanted to add, Sam made an interesting comment—actually it was a piece of advice.  Something that seems pretty basic but clearly isn’t:  that we should make sure our partners have everything we want before we get too involved or we’ll be tempted to look elsewhere.  I know you’re thinking “duh” right now, but Paul, my third interviewee, articulated this superbly when I asked him about his situation:

“Before I got married, I had a very real sense that the sex wasn’t what I needed it to be, but I felt like it was childish to think that was important when everything else was fine. In retrospect, that was stupid. It was a legitimate priority, you know?”

When I read that I wanted to scream “bingo” from the rooftops.  It’s a completely legitimate priority but in our culture it tends to get poo-pooed when we’re looking for life partners.  And that’s hard social programming to get past.  I’ve nearly embarked on two relationships in which there was at least the potential for sexual incompatibility and I just let it slide both times.  I was lucky to get dumped early on in both situations.  I’m crossing my fingers that I won’t let that happen when I do come across someone who looks a lot like Mr. Right, but I understand the difficulty.

When I thought about writing this post I really was hoping to talk to people who felt zero ambivalence about their infidelity; people who embodied the adage of “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her” or its male corollary.  But I’m starting to think those people don’t actually exist.  One man I had hoped to interview—someone who referred to ideas around fidelity as “Hallmark social mores”—seemed to be spurred into thinking more about his actions when I sent him my basic interview questions for this topic.  He decided he needed to answer these questions for himself before he did so for anyone else.  That’s completely reasonable, but I just figured that if he was so sure of the silliness of the social mores surrounding fidelity he’d already have answered some of these questions for himself.  Another man I had hoped to interview once asked me if I was “disappointed” in him for cheating.  He had always struck me as so certain that what he was doing wasn’t a big deal that I was surprised by the question.  Another man’s insistence on attacking my character because I wasn’t calm, cool and collected about turning down his offer of sex, suggests he has a real need for someone to affirm his reality.  He certainly doesn’t come across as a man who is absolutely sure that he’s doing the right thing.

Paul is the only person I found who comes close to appearing to truly believe that what his wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her; and he doesn’t even quite fit the expression because I’m 99% certain his wife knows full well that he’s cheated.  However he is as close to “okay” with his actions as I’ve come across.  Paul is 39 and has had cheated more than once but there’s one significant relationship that he’s had outside of his marriage for about the last two years.  I have been known to call his mistress a monster who feeds on drama rather than food, but this is actually part of the draw for him.  Paul was not only bored in his marriage, but he is married to a woman who is utterly disinterested in sex.  He has made it clear to her several times over a five year period that this is important to him, but she continues to go on for unholy year-long stretches without doing the deed.  Obviously, I only get Paul’s side of the story, but he feels that on this and other issues he has made every effort to get his marriage back on track.  And so, having had an affair fall squarely in his lap, at a relatively unlikely place to meet any woman besides a booth bimbo—a gun show—he doesn’t really feel any guilt about it.

In terms of his own head space, he says “It’s hard not to feel at least somewhat strange about it. It’s definitely an odd thing when you have to regularly segregate your mind when speaking to people because you have to remember (a) the lies you had to tell about where you were and what you were doing and (b) among friends, who is aware of the relationship and who isn’t.  That’s strange.  It feels like you don’t own your own life, and I guess you don’t when you’re married.  That bifurcation is strange.  It’s also strange when things of some consequence happen and the person you most want to be there can’t be.  I’m thinking of when my father died.  That was a hard time, and I would have liked Janice to have been there.  She was as supportive as she could have been, but she obviously couldn’t have just shown up at the funeral.”

So yes, it’s strange.  But guilt—not so much.  (In fact, all three of the men in this post have had little to say about how their infidelity affects them emotionally or psychologically which, I guess, flies in the face of my argument that lying a lot probably does something bad to a body.)

Paul also feels like he’s found about as close as one gets to a soul mate in Janice.  She’s married though and has no intention of leaving her marriage, so Paul feels no great inclination to leave his own.  Paul’s wife very likely knows about the affair (though if questioned, she’d probably deny it), and she hasn’t asked him to pack his things, so there appears to be some strange functional thing happening here.  Something I wouldn’t have thought of as functional.

If I seem somewhat restrained in my writing of this post there’s a reason for that.  Given my biases I wanted to make sure that I told the stories that were shared with me with as little personal intrusion as possible.  Which is hard.  But the men who responded to my call for stories made it somewhat easier.  I thought I’d have a really hard time having people tell me about their infidelity without wanting to jump all over them.  However, the honesty and humility shown by the people I questioned made it really easy to just be interested and curious rather than enraged.  Given their honesty, their reasons for infidelity made some sense to me; sense in a way that I think almost all of us can understand.  We don’t have to agree with it, but in many ways it’s ceased to be this incomprehensible black hole for me.  Will I feel interested and curious the next time a married man propositions me? Likely not.  But for this space and time I feel like I kinda get it.  Hopefully, you kinda do too.

Affairs of the Heart

In the past six months I have been in bed with a man when his wife called; I’ve gone out for a really pleasant evening with a guy only to find out that he had a girlfriend; I’ve received an e-mail from a married fan asking to spend an “erotic afternoon” with me; I’ve posted an ad online in which the very first line was “Do not respond to this if you are attached” and had at least one married man respond anyway.

I’m just getting warmed up.  I could post weekly for at least three months simply regaling you with stories of attached men who’ve made a play for me in the past year.  My theory is that it’s my age.  Maybe men my age are just starting to figure out that their starter marriages are just that, but they haven’t divorced yet.  Even if it’s not my age, it would appear that single men between the ages of 30-40 simply don’t exist.  All that’s left are married and otherwise attached men.

As if being nearly exclusively approached by attached men isn’t irritating enough, these men tend to be both brazen and unapologetic.  They seem to think I should be thrilled to the point of soiling myself to be their third wheel.  And a good number of them think that stepping out on their partner is a given just because they have penises and not vaginas—as if there are no men on the planet who engage in long term monogamy.

If you haven’t surmised, the idea of infidelity bugs me.  Actually, it turns me into a walking wall of rage; and I don’t hesitate to let these men know that most of the time.  But given the sheer number of attached men I’ve attracted of late, I figured it was time for a more thoughtful response:  a wee bit of blogging.  This isn’t journalism, so I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a massive bias, but in a bid for fairness and all that good stuff, I’m going to at least talk to people coming at this from different sides.

I’m going to do this in three posts with the following three themes:

It’s Just Wrong

What She Doesn’t Know Won’t Hurt Her

What She Does Know Doesn’t Bother Her

And this week, you guessed it:  it’s just wrong.

Now to clarify, I’m not talking about drunken one night slip ups.  I honestly believe those are best kept to oneself.  If you fuck up one time and you feel bad about it and probably won’t do it again, you get to bear the burden of it all on your own; it just doesn’t seem worth it, to me, to hand that burden to your partner as well, over a one-nighter.  But if you’ve been stepping out with someone else (or lots of someone elses) for weeks, months, years—in my opinion, that’s something all together different.  The men I’m being approached by are not novices at this.  And that’s the type of behaviour I’m talking about.  I also want to state for the record that while I talk about this in terms of the men approaching me, I’m talking about women too.  Long term infidelity is just as icky to me when women do it.

Full disclosure, I have knowingly had one affair with a married man.  It was my firsty, first sexual experience.  We had been friends for years and I knew his wife, babysat their kid, the whole nine yards.  He was one of my best friends, but I was really naïve (and a religious virgin) and had no clue that he was really interested in screwing me.  Enormously long story short: we had a brief affair, he confessed (under some pressure; an acquaintance of mine threatened to out us), his marriage fell apart, and the manifestation of his guilt was that I was called a whore and basically blamed for everything that had happened.  Sweet.  However, we did try to end it before we were forcibly made to own up, because we both fundamentally thought it was wrong.  That was never a doubt in our minds.

That little walk down infidelity lane was enough to leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth.  So even though I’m not breaking any vows, I still do my best not to sleep with attached people.  Because I play the field, I have to be diligent about trying to get attached men to own up so that I can weed them out.  But sometimes I forget and that’s how I end up lying next to someone whose wife is on the phone.  This is not to say I’m never tempted.  I’ve come across some incredibly charming mother fuckers in my time.  Attached men generally have more game than their single counterparts.  Years of being around a woman seems to give them greater insight into how to approach a woman and a certain ease in doing so.   In addition, there is very little emotional risk, for them, in approaching other women; when you have a partner waiting at home, rejection doesn’t have quite the same sting.

Because my personal aversion to ongoing infidelity is not really a compelling argument against all on its own, I came up with three others.  The first:  you promised.  If you’ve stood before friends, family and an official of some sort, even if he’s dressed in an Elvis suit, and committed to a life of faithfulness, you’ve committed, dammit!  Even if you realize 10 years in that this is really fucking hard to do, stepping out on your partner when your partner has no clue is a contravention of that commitment.

Even without the bond of marriage, the promise of commitment is generally a given.  In most hetero long term relationships (and a significant number of gay and lesbian ones) there comes a day when the couple becomes exclusive.  This is made clear either by way of an explicit declaration, or it’s implied when you get a dirty look from your significant other for flirting with a co-worker at the staff Christmas party.  If the exclusivity clause has changed for you, it’s only fair that your partner has the opportunity to decide if a non-exclusive arrangement works for them too.

Secondly, if you get caught, it will likely suck.  When the married fella and I ‘fessed up, it was all kinds of awful.  Doing something really stupid is a great way to figure out who your real friends are, but it was still pretty painful to be written off by some folks.  I can’t say for sure what happened to the other parties, but I hear single parenthood is no walk in the park and that growing up without a father at home can be hard on little girls.  And everyone goes home with trust issues after a situation like this.  It’s pretty clear that no one came out of this situation unscathed.

“But I don’t have kids and I’m not stupid enough to get caught,” one might retort.  So my last argument is this:  lying 24-7 is bad for a person.  When I was in bed with the man whose wife called, the lie rolled off his tongue pretty effortlessly.  That was when I found out he was attached and I gave him hell and threatened to out him.  Later he sent an e-mail in which he said that sometimes when you’ve been doing something wrong for a long time, it starts to seem normal.  Cliché much?  Now, he likely only said this to convince me that he does possess a soul, so I should leave things alone out of compassion, but there is a bit of truth in most clichés.  He’s gotten pretty good at deceiving his wife about something pretty big.  If you’re lying about that sort of thing all the time, I find it hard to believe that the deceit doesn’t balloon into a general emotional dishonesty.  If it stops feeling bad to be deceitful, that just seems problematic to me.  Admittedly, I can’t provide even anecdotal evidence on this one, but I think a lot of people would assume that lying to one’s partner a great deal of the time about something as charged as sexual exclusivity probably wears on the person doing the lying after a point.

I don’t think most people—women or men—grow up thinking of marriage or a committed relationship as possibly being an open arrangement.  Most people grow up thinking you settle down with one person and it’s exclusive.  Even people who end up adding a degree of openness to their relationships tend to get there over time—it’s not often a talk they had on the first date.  I think that most any relationship can get through an isolated case of infidelity but I don’t think anyone should expect applause from a spouse or the rest of us for keeping years of infidelity successfully hidden.  Managing to make sure your own needs are met for a really long time, in secret, is a great skill if you want to be a spy, not a spouse.  Or is it?  That question is the topic of the next post.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about long term infidelity so please do weigh in and beat up on each other (or me) in the comments section of the blog.  I beg of you, don’t e-mail me directly with your opinions—just say what you think in the comments section (you can do so anonymously).  It gives us all much more freedom to say what we actually think without ending friendships or coming to fisticuffs; and that’s the whole point.  If you haven’t commented before, I have to approve your first comment but after that it’s a free for all.