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.