When the Benefits Aren’t So Beneficial – Part 2

Last year a fella I don’t speak to anymore accused me, rather zealously, of being a sex addict (amazingly, that is not why we stopped speaking).  So far my life doesn’t look like anything that would show up on an episode of Intervention, so I begged to differ.  I haven’t yet bankrupted myself or put myself in physical danger to have sex, so I think I’m doing alright.  But an accusation like that, if you’re me, makes you think.  That’s, in part, because I always take the opinions of others too seriously (don’t all bloggers?).  I had to admit though, that the other part of the reason his accusation rankled so much was because I was feeling a certain level of conflict around the sex I was having already.  When I had a good long think about it, I decided to take a break from sex, just to see if I could, because I did feel like the sex I was having had an edge of compulsion about it.  I made a deal with myself that I could have sex again whenever I wanted to, but it had to be due to actual horniness and not because of anger, boredom or loneliness.

The break I took wasn’t terribly difficult after the initial terror of having to be celibate; I haven’t gone more than about a month without sex since I became sexually active seven years ago, so the whole idea of going without was kinda scary.  After that initial period of time, I realized that I was never that horny (likely because I’m on the pill).   In fact, I concluded that the lion’s share of the sex I’ve had in the past four years or so has probably been entirely about anger, boredom or loneliness.  I don’t drink a lot because I can’t handle it, I didn’t touch weed until the ripe old age of 30 and I go without it for pretty long periods of time.  Sex and food are my drugs of choice.  The forty pounds I’ve put in the past four years is a pretty good indicator of my compulsion around food.  And the sex, well that’s what this post is all about.

When I splashed onto the casual sex scene seven years ago it was probably not ideal timing.  I had just left church, faith, flock and the first man I’d really felt anything for had just dumped me.  I was on the verge of clinical depression for about two or three months.  I basically had sex to fuck all the pain away.  Even though I was pretty crazy for a while, the casual sex I was having was just that—entirely casual.  I wasn’t emotionally invested in anyone and pretty quickly I settled into trying to find a boyfriend.  But that didn’t work out so well (two boyfriends pulled disappearing acts rather than actually breaking up), and all those MSN chat rooms and sites like Adult Friend Finder were still bookmarked on my computer waiting for me.  So I jumped back into the ring.  After three years of this, give or take, a pattern developed.  I’d try to date for a while and that wouldn’t work out and I’d just go back to having sex.  Sex became my consolation prize for the relationship I couldn’t seem to make happen.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t made some valiant efforts at dating.  People who can’t understand why I’m not in a relationship assume that I put more energy into fucking than I do dating.  Not so much.  When a fuck buddy is working well, it’s no work at all for me.  Dating is like being in a chain gang in comparison.  I’ve tried every site you’ve tried:  Plenty of Fish, Lava Life, Yahoo Personals back in the day, CraigsList (where I tend to have the most success—it draws out the literate in the pack) and a bevy of others you’ve never heard of.  I even swallowed the vomit in my mouth over their advertising and tried eHarmony.  I’ve paid super big bucks and used LifeMates (avoid if you are not Caucasian).  I bought the popular book (at the time) The Surrendered Single and spent weeks walking around smiling at random men and handing out my number.  It never got me a date—just a lot of awkward moments with guys who were utterly disinterested.  At one point I was on three different dating sites and on a date every weekend.  I had a plan to go on a date every week for an entire year.  You get the point.  I have made a great deal of effort to date.  And for whatever reason I have been thwarted.  I’m sure the problem lies with me blah, blah, blah, but for the moment I have no idea what makes the opposite sex entirely immune to me.

I’m kinda done with being single and as my friends get married and have babies and generally set up their nuclear families, it gets harder and harder to ignore how much I want to have a partner.  I think that has a lot to do with why my sexual relationships have become more intense (for me) over the past few years.  The consolation prize has to get better and better to stand in for what I actually want.  Unfortunately, it seems to become self-perpetuating.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still trying to date, but I think my efforts have become less and less hopeful.  And it gets increasingly easier to just go back to having sex so that I don’t feel lonely.

This doesn’t even take into account the biological clock ticking loudly in my ear.  Lately, I’m finding babies a whole hell of a lot cuter than I’ve found them in past.  I get that babies grow up into annoying teenagers and then angsty bank-account-destroying university students, but it doesn’t make the desire to see what a mini-me would look like any less compelling.  I’ve got six, maybe eight years until I stop having the choice to have kids of my own without it meaning a lot of risks I don’t want to ponder.  That’s not really a lot of time when there’s no relationship on the horizon.  I don’t know for sure that I want children—I just know that I want the choice and I don’t want to have to make that choice ten minutes into a long term relationship.

A while ago I decided I’d have to stop having fuck buddies if I was ever going to deal with my issues around loneliness and stop being compulsive about sex.  So, in anticipation of cutting off my present fuck buddy, I got a cat—which was an utter disaster.  She was an adorable kitty but Viv and I had to part ways within two weeks because I’ve come to enjoy sleeping in my 34 years and she wasn’t really into allowing that.  I also realized that no cat was going to make me feel less lonely—no cat is that damn powerful.  Instead, she became yet another obligation and I managed to start resenting her within a week.  Back to the Humane Society she went and I had just rented a cat for two weeks to the tune of about $350.00.  Lesson learned.

This particular downside of casual sex is far more specific to me than the problems I brought up in my last post.  However, I can imagine that there are some women for whom sex is their drug of choice, whatever it is that they’re avoiding feeling.   If you’re one of those women, hopefully my admission of guilt makes you feel like you can fess up—at least to yourself.  It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it, but awareness is always better than a lack thereof.  Admittedly, awareness of an issue over a long period of time can only turn out two ways though—you deal or you go back to being unaware.

At the moment I don’t even know what this new found awareness means for me.  So far all I’ve figured out is that I have to get rid of my present fuck buddy.  Unless of course, he pledges undying love.  But given my track record, the odds are kinda stacked against me.  And on that depressing note, ‘till next time.

When the Benefits Aren’t So Beneficial – Part 1

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for over a month. That’s the explanation I’m going with for my extended absence from the blogosphere—not perhaps the fact that I’m a couch potato who can’t multi-task.

I’ve been mulling the idea of doing a post about casual sex for a while, but all my attempts so far have sounded like bad LiveJournal entries or Mars/Venus rants, so I‘ve kept them to myself.  But I think I might have a handle on this topic at long last—might. So here I sit being a wi-fi hobo on a Second Cup patio because it’s too nice a night to be indoors. For those of you reading this from outside of Canada or inside British Columbia, Second Cup is like Starbucks but with less pretension and cup sizes that are comprehensible in English.

After a few attempts at writing this post, it occurred to me that part of the trouble was that I was trying to talk about a lot of different aspects of one topic. Hence, a two-parter on the perils of casual sex.

Those of you who know me personally might be surprised to see me take this position—pun fully intended. Well, I‘ve surprised myself. I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few years in defense of casual sex in general and long term fuck buddies specifically and have always been a staunch defender of the practice. But my own experiences of late and some of what I hear from friends has caused me to take pause and now I’m not so sure I should have been mounting such a defense.

This is not to say that I think casual sex is all bad all the time. I don’t think that at all. I think one night stands can be amazing. A number of great relationships are one night stands that stuck.  Apart from the obvious risks of STIs, if you have a lot of one night stands that are fuelled by booze or drugs, I actually would venture to say that one-nighters are about the most harmless form of casual sex you can have because there just isn’t the potential for a lot of emotional hoopla. It’s the fuck buddy thing that I’m starting to question. And I question it specifically for women.

Clearly I’m speaking mostly from my own experience here, colored with a bit of the experiences of people I know, so please forgive my massive generalizations. I just think that maybe my experience might be more common than not.

First off, I’m going to go ahead and call a spade a spade here and not use the term “friend with benefits,” title of this post notwithstanding. I dislike the term because I think it has a way of obscuring what’s actually going on. I have never really been friends with the person that I was casually fucking. Maybe everyone else in the world is best of friends with their fuck buddies but that has never been my experience. It’s always been pretty clear to me that while my buddies and I would have a very mutually beneficial evening once a week, I wasn’t going to be invited out for drinks with their friends. The one time that I did have drinks with a fuck buddy’s friends, it only served to severely muddy the waters. With the exception of one of my fuck buddies, I have not maintained anything akin to a real friendship with any of them—at most a pleasant acquaintanceship. So, fuck buddies. That’s what gay men were calling it long before we straights caught on and tried to make it sound like more than an entirely sexual arrangement.

But there’s also probably a reason that this has worked so well for gay men. They’re men. A friend and I were talking about the whole difficulty that it seems we women have in compartmentalizing our sex lives and she mentioned a line from a Candace Bushnell novel. I spent about 20 minutes sitting in the public library scouring for the quote in the book, One Fifth Avenue, because I refused to read the entire novel:

“This is one of the disappointments one learned about life: yes men loved sex. But great sex didn’t mean they wanted to marry you. Great sex held no larger implications for them. It was only that: great sex.”

Now this is not to say that I’ve never had great sex with a guy more than once and was clear on the fact that I didn’t want to marry him. But if I keep having great sex with a guy for a really long while, eventually an attachment forms. I used to actually try hard to make certain that any man I was thinking about having sex with long term had some sort of fatal flaw that would ensure I’d never really fall for him. But somehow, more times than not, when I’ve thought the dude had some fatal flaw, I’d still fall for him. With one it took a year; with a couple other ones, it was on its way to happening before things ended for other reasons. And with the latest one, the one I’m fucking now, it happened in about 43 seconds. I wasn’t even sure I was attracted to this guy when I first met him and lately he’s the last thing I’m thinking about when I go to sleep at night.  I have spent the last two months of our four month arrangement agonizing over something or other when it comes to him and it’s driving me mental. And I’m about 95% sure he is not losing a wink of sleep over me. This guy turned down a two-day non-stop sex romp at a B&B with me during his vacation time. I’m not even sure he’s as invested in the sex as I am. Though, to his credit, he does make me dinner whenever we meet at his place.

Years ago I read a book by sex therapist, Ian Kerner (author of She Comes First) called Be Honest—You’re Not That Into Him Either. One chapter in the book that always stuck with me was entitled “You’re Not That Into Him Either, But You Thought You Could Have Sex Like a Man.” I’m not going to explain all of his reasoning but the point of the chapter is that the way that women are built emotionally and sexually makes sex for women just different than it is for men. And while we’re busy trying to have sex like men—without too much attachment—we just don’t seem to manage it very well. So that guy that you never meant to have any feelings for, that guy you knew was just a casual hook up, suddenly has you on an emotional roller coaster that should be a paid ride at Wonderland. Ultimately, men can have emotionally connected sex but it doesn’t seem to come as naturally to them as it does to women.

And all this emotional investment has further consequences. The first is only a problem if you are interested in a long term relationship. It’s really hard to be emotionally open to the Mr. Right who might be smiling at you on the subway when you’re caught up in the guy who really doesn’t think of you as a lot more than a mobile and responsive vagina attached to a reasonably agreeable personality. And there’s no fault in him thinking of you as that. Initially, he was just a mobile and responsive penis attached to a reasonably agreeable personality. The problem is that it all changes for we ladies somewhere along the way and generally it hasn’t changed for him. Some dude could walk up to me with a diamond ring and a white picket fence in his backpack and I’d be all “meh” because right now I’m invested in some dude who likely does not feel the same way. So not only are you invested in a dude who isn’t producing a sufficient ROI, you’re ignoring guys who could.

The second possible consequence: confidence annihilation. While I’m busy falling for every reasonably nice guy with whom I have great sex, the same thing is not happening for the men I’m sleeping with. And I’m simultaneously missing out on potential real relationship prospects while I get all invested in these fellas so I‘m not getting the feedback loop from guys who might actually dig me. I think, if you’re not possessed of some pretty amazing self-esteem, it’s hard not to let insidious little ideas about your own desirability start to creep in. If I of great skin, cute smile, sparkling personality and renowned sexual prowess (I kid) can fall for these less-than-just-what-I-wanted guys, what’s so wrong with me that they never feel the same way?  The constant feedback loop that I’m getting because of the number of these relationships I’ve had is “good enough to fuck but nothing more.” I think, for me, it has started to feel like a bit of a referendum on my desirability, even while I know it’s not rational to think of it that way. But since when are humans rational?

Now there is a possible solution to all of this and it’s a way of giving women the tools to fuck like a man: fuck many men at once. I like to call this keeping a harem. It’s a lot harder to get emotionally invested in one man if there’s a roster of men to choose from. It’s time consuming and hardish work to start and maintain a harem though. I’ve tried it and never got to the established stable of four to five studs that I wanted. It’s not that damn easy to find compatibility with that many people at one time. You’ll notice that even people in open relationships don’t often have multiple side partners, as much as one main partner and one on the side. But if any of you manage to ever procure and maintain a harem I want to hear about it and I want to hear about whether or not it’s had the intended result of keeping you from becoming overly attached to any one of the men in it.

Let me reiterate, I love sex, you should love sex (unless you’re asexual) and everyone should have some sex with no strings attached at some point in their lives. But maybe, unless you’re a dude, you might have to put a cap on how much of it you have.

Poly-what?

I wanted there to be fixed lines, clear rules and no ambiguity.  I wanted polyamory as experienced by my interviewee Janelle, to be an orderly, bloodless thing.   The notion of meeting someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with is very important and dear to me.  So the chance that I could finally stumble across someone willing to have me and then potentially have the entire thing blown apart by infidelity freaks me out so much that I think I started searching for some foolproof way to avoid it.  And polyamory was supposed to be my ticket to paradise.  But what Janelle described was anything but neat and tidy.

I met Janelle nearly a year ago and over the course of time became aware that she’d been in an open relationship with someone I knew.  So when I decided to do a post about polyamory I had to get in touch.

Janelle’s first foray into open relationships happened in her early twenties.  She met a man she thought she might like and basically wanted to suss out if he was single or not.  It turned out he wasn’t, but then he explained to her that he wasn’t really into monogamy anyway.  While they never dated, through that first man she met one of his polyamorous friends and that’s how she was fully introduced to the concept.  She wasn’t necessarily big on the idea of an open relationship at the time, but most of her relationships after that were “porous” if not entirely open; sometimes because she was being cheated on; sometimes because she wasn’t interested in being monogamous.  As it happens, Janelle also describes herself as “pan-sexual” which means she likes women, men and all the permutations in between.  So, being in open relationships works for her given the fact that one gender may not work for her all the time.

It was some time before she had her first officially open relationship, which occurred nearly a decade later.  At that point she went looking for a relationship in which polyamory would be a definite part of the mix.  While she and the man she eventually met and dated for a year were monogamous for the major portion of their time together, they did eventually open the relationship.  By the end, however, Janelle was heading towards more openness and her partner was heading the other way and this difference of priorities didn’t last long.  Also, she and her partner had specific rules around what they were and weren’t to do with other people and she broke those rules.  She ‘fessed up when it happened, but over time these confessions put too much strain on the relationship.

That’s one of those inconvenient things about open relationships—if you break the rules of your particular open relationship, you’re still cheating.  When we did the interview Janelle was in a new relationship which was also open.  She and this man have since parted ways, but at the time I asked her how that was working.  And she said the one word I was hoping not to hear: jealousy.

Despite the fact that Janelle was fucking other men, it still irked her that her beau fucked other women sometimes.  Especially if she wasn’t keen on the woman he happened to be fucking.  Which was the situation when we sat down to talk.

When asked how one copes with the jealousy, Janelle said it was mostly about dealing with the emotion on her own and not making it her partner’s problem.   The jealousy, as it is for people in any kind of relationship, was mostly about her own insecurities and fears around losing the relationship, and not about anything he was specifically doing.  During the interview, she fretted about her new love getting it on with some girl down at the pot rally that they’d attended earlier in the day.

I had imagined that polyamorous folks would all have an unworried Buddha-like zen about the whole thing, but not so much.  I kind of figured that while I might not be cut out for polyamory with my jealous and possessive streak, other people were just naturally suited to it.  Instead it would seem that even people who prefer to be in open relationships have to work at dealing with all the same destructive shit that monogamous people do.

One of the things I wondered is if there are really a lot of people out there who want to be in poly relationships? For the answer to this I turned to an e-mail exchange I had with a man who answered my ad on Craigslist.  Tom is 30 and he’s been in six relationships concurrently, each averaging about six months in length, in just three years.  He’s never felt like he had any trouble finding women who were open to the idea of an open relationship.  I have to admit I found this kind of surprising given that I’m a woman and I know how my brain works.  I certainly wasn’t socialized to think of an open relationship as an ideal and I sort of tend to assume that my experience is that of most women.  Apparently I’ve been wrong twice in one blog post.

When I first started writing this post, the Hot Docs documentary film festival was in town and I stumbled upon a film about polyamory called Quandrangle.   I don’t want to give anything away because some of the power of the film is the element of surprise and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I will say one thing about it: the situation and the outcomes depicted in the film were rather messy.  So while lately I just keep making the flip remark that some people just aren’t cut out to be monogamous and that those people should be in open relationships, I realize it’s just not as easy as that either.

This whole connecting with other human beings thing is pretty dangerous no matter what kind of relationship you have—perfectly monogamous, imperfectly monogamous or polyamorous.  Perhaps there’s a lot more to be said for remaining single.

Further reading and watching that might interest you:

The Ethical Slut:  A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt

The Myth of Monogamy:  Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton

Daddy’s Girls directed by Lilly Sheffy (a film about a man who maintains relationships with several women who don’t know about each other…sort of)

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.

Preferences?

Many moons ago, I almost had a blind date.  But when I e-mailed the guy saying “I’ll be the black girl in the red scarf” things came to a screeching halt.  With seemingly very little hesitation, he e-mailed back that he wasn’t attracted to black girls but made an offer of friendship.  How kind.  Perhaps, not surprisingly, I declined.  Generally, when I deal with men online, I try to get the race card out of the way as quickly as possible to avoid this very situation.  Either I post a picture, if it’s on a conventional dating site, or I choose a user name that might be a tip off.  The Star Trek inspired Uhura76 or the not so accurate nubianqueen794 have both been part of my repertoire.

I don’t wake up every morning, stare in the mirror and see my skin colour per se.  I see the puffiness and dark circles under my eyes, I see the bad hair day I’m potentially about to have, I see that I need to floss, I see that I need to have my eyebrows done.  I don’t wake up thinking to myself that the texture of my hair, the colour of my skin, with its range of tones throughout the year, the shape of my nose and the hue of my lips is going to make me unpalatable to a significant portion of the male population available to me.  But that’s the reality.  And I can’t tell you how shitty it makes me feel when this reality is thrown in my face.

If you were to ask my almost blind date whether or not he’s racist he would tell you unequivocally that he is not.  He would say that he simply has “preferences.”  This is what most people will say when they are about to declare an entire ethnic group unattractive to them.  It’s a preference.  I simultaneously accept and reject this claim.

I accept it as someone who found it hard to find men of specific ethnic groups attractive for a long time.

I reject it as someone who has finally bedded at least one person of just about every major ethnic group.  After a point it starts to sound absurd that everyone on this planet couldn’t find at least one person of every other ethnic group that they find attractive.  Probably more.  After much reflection I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all about familiarity.

I grew up in the super white bread suburbs outside Halifax, Nova Scotia.  While Nova Scotia does have a significant population of blacks, that population does not reside in Lower Sackville where I mostly grew up.  A quick survey of my class pictures from kindergarten through sixth grade shows that I was almost always the only visible minority in my class, apart from one or two Aboriginal kids.  I remember when the one black boy came to my elementary school and we appropriately dated for an entire two weeks.  He told me that his mother pointed me out at a spring concert later that year, long after he’d dumped me for my blond haired, blue eyed best friend, and asked him why he wasn’t hanging out with me.  I don’t hold this against him.

Given what I had to choose from—one black boy and a school full of white boys—I became accustomed to white boys.  I became accustomed to pale skin (the paler the better), Roman noses, silky hair, and thinner lips.  This is not to say I didn’t find boys of other ethnic groups attractive; I did.  But even when I got older and moved to a diverse city like Toronto, I picked out white men who were attractive to me faster than I did with any other ethnic group.

What I’ve found to be the game changer has been sex. While the majority of my sexual experiences have been with white men, there’s definitely been some variety.  Once I’ve had one positive sexual experience with a particular ethnic group, I start noticing them more in general and, as a result, I become aware of a lot more of them that I find attractive.  The first time I realized this was after a short term sexual relationship with a man who was half East Indian, half Filipino.  After him I felt like every brown man on the subway just seemed a hell of a lot more interesting to me; I found myself noticing their presence much more and wanting to jump an exponentially higher number of them than I ever wanted to before.

Ironically, the one group of men that I have not yet managed to enjoy sex with is black men.  Oh it’s happened, it just hasn’t been enjoyable.  I was seeing someone when I wrote the rough draft of this post, but as I was unceremoniously dumped via e-mail two days ago (stay classy, dude), I am now able to put some effort toward my goal of finding a black man who can make me happy in the sack.  I see no good reason not to broaden my horizons.  In fact, I kind of think I should.

As much as I’ve tried to unpack this idea of preferences, I have to admit it’s still a concept that really pisses me off, especially when I’m handed the short end of the preferential stick.  Knowing that people have such a propensity to gravitate towards the familiar, it freaks me out that I have that working against me when I’m looking for love.  I feel like I’m going to have slim pickings if a significant portion of the population where I live can simply write me off, sight unseen, because I’m not like them.  Recently, I heard someone describe an entire ethnic group as “disgusting” because he finds them unattractive.  The more I’ve thought about that, the more it’s irked me.  Somehow that seemed to cross the line of preference into something else entirely.  But if so, what was it, and where does this line lie?

It simply strikes me as so much more productive and enlightened to try to work against these utterly inane preferences rather than just accepting them as unchangeable.  I wonder how an offhand comment about preferences sounds to a child—do they make the distinction between a “preference” and what probably sounds like an arbitrary barrier between them and another group of people?  I know this has the potential to sound like a screed for political correctness—and a vaguely hypocritical one at that, given my history with men—but I really do think there’s a real danger that preferences can morph into something else that isn’t so innocuous.  Something less than racism, but more than just about who you do or don’t want to fuck.  Personally, I’d prefer never to hear the term again.

PSA

Now that I no longer have cable TV, I’ve been listening to early episodes of the fantastic radio show This American Life.  While there’s an irritating 90’s angst to some of the writing that was featured on the show back then, most of the old content is rather relevant.  Stories about people kind of always are.  A couple weeks ago I listened to a show from March of ’96 that was simply called “Liars.”  It was an hour chronicling the wreckage left in the wake of a compulsive liar.  One woman recounted the story of a boyfriend who had claimed to be an Earl and then proceeded to cheat on her and leave her $65000 in debt.  He purchased a car for her on a credit card he’d fraudulently taken out in her name.  She thought the car was a gift.  Listening to this story, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my “Earl”—George David Marks (not his real name—just the name he gave me).  A friend has dubbed him the Talented George Ripley; the name is a reference to the Matt Damon film The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which he first impersonates and then kills his friend/object of desire.  While I’m pretty sure my life was never at risk, the name is oh so apropos.

For some reason, George has come up a lot lately in conversation; probably because ‘tis the season.  For two years after we broke up he would call me right around Christmas time.  So this year when the lights went up and the radio stations started playing holiday music 24-7, he got into my head and wouldn’t get out.  So I’m doing what I do when I can’t get something out of my head:  I write about it.  Frankly, I consider this a public service announcement long overdue.  Beware of George David Marks.  This is his story.

I met George in January of 2006.  I was 45 minutes late for our first date because I’d forgotten to set my alarm before a rare afternoon nap.  I have a feeling that this immediately put me at a disadvantage.  I went into that date already apologetic and trying to be agreeable.  I spent the next eight months being agreeable to utter madness. 

On our first date, he mentioned twice in the same conversation the life expectancy of a male in Lesotho.  I told him that he’d repeated himself and he made an embarrassed comment about going senile.  At 42, he was 12 years older than I was, but still a long way off from senility.  Of course that’s assuming he wasn’t lying about his age.  I now think he was probably closer to 50—it would explain his complete retardation around a computer and just how damn old he looked.  But since he never once produced a piece of ID in eight months, I had no way of verifying this.  He didn’t carry a wallet.  He didn’t carry a driver’s license, though he drove everywhere.  I assume he’s pulled this con before because he seemed to know that he’d be able to rent a parking spot at my apartment building without ever producing proof of his identity or of ownership of the vehicle sitting out there.  I’m pretty sure he didn’t keep the registration for the vehicle in the car either.  Or at least nowhere I could find it.  And believe me, I looked.

His alleged back story was thus:  he was born in South Africa during apartheid and became some sort of activist for equality.  His activism, however, got his young common-law wife and their unborn child killed by letter bomb.  I know what you’re thinking, but there’s more.  He married later in life and then his second wife died of cancer.

Writing this down now, I realize I wouldn’t be able to suspend my disbelief if I read this in a novel or saw it in a movie.  Who ends up twice-widowed by 42?  But there it was.  The story was so tragic that I didn’t dare question it.  And because of his great tragedy I immediately cut him an enormous amount of slack.

Next quirk:  George paid cash for everything.  Not once in the time that we dated did he pay for anything with a credit or debit card.  I guess that stands to reason since he didn’t carry a wallet.  He offered to buy me an $800.00 couch one day—in cash.  I’m only sad that some sense of what’s appropriate caused me to decline.

I never met anyone he knew.  He basically said that his friends were oldish, married and busy with their kids, lives and various extra-marital affairs.  When pressed, a more compelling reason was introduced:   that he really didn’t have any friends.  He was such a rude, anti-social bastard, that in a way, that made plenty of sense.

George rarely spent the night—maybe three times in nearly a year.  That was another sticking point.  Rather than stay over, he’d drive home half stoned at 2:00am sometimes. 

During my birthday, he told me that he’d be in Torino, Italy.  This was during the winter Olympics in ’06.  This man brought back not one souvenir of his trip and I still believed him.  Another time he told me that he was in Alberta looking at property—his stated career was property manager—but when he called me one night during the trip the number had a Toronto area code.  When questioned he said that he was having the calls route back through his home phone number.  When I told him the number on my call display was that of a Bell phone booth and kinda started to freak out about why he was lying to me, he said he’d be happy to have me come and meet him at the airport if it would calm my fears.  But of course his imaginary flight was landing in the middle of a work day.  So I let it go.  I let it go despite a call to Bell Canada to ask if a call routed through your home phone number could possibly appear to be originating from a phone booth.  The woman I spoke to said no.

The biggest red flag though, was too big to even be called a flag; it was really more of an enormous crimson banner.  And sometimes I’m still pretty embarrassed that I fell for this.  He wouldn’t let me in his house.  I never set foot in the house.  I never even saw it—well not until a couple weeks ago when I took a look at the Google street view with some friends. 

His first excuse was a renovation.   I think that held up for about three months because I was too busy to think about it too hard.  And then we spent the next five months fighting about it constantly.  At some point he said it was an issue around emotional encroachment and expressed shame for feeling this way.   So for a while I’d let him off the hook, but then I’d get mad or sad about it again.

I knew his address.  I’ve sent mail to that address and he’s ostensibly received it.  I could have just shown up, but I wanted to be invited.  The street view showed a nice house; number 217 on a nice street in a rich area.  There’s a basketball net over the garage.  I assume he has children.

Amazingly it was not the house issue that was the final straw.  It was the European vacation—or lack thereof.

For months he talked about us taking a trip to Europe in the summer.  He’d pay airfare if I covered accommodation and he was happy to sleep on the cheap.  I booked two weeks off work in the summer and started looking at apartment swaps and various guest houses.  Then, with about a month or so to go, he nixed the whole idea.  The reason was some sort of legal wrangling over a property.  What’s ironic is that in my journals from early that year, I had written a note to myself to never actually believe that the trip was going to happen.  I guess I was working with a clearer mind back then.  I begged for a weekend trip together in lieu of our big European vacation and that never seemed to be a possibility either.  Then, not one day after we’d had our last argument about the weekend trip being a no-go, he was asked by a friend to help sail a boat for two weeks.  Within 48 hours he had gone away.  Or not.  Maybe he just had two weeks of wife and kids to deal with.  I spent three days crying and when he “returned” we stuck it out for about one more week.  I gave him a list of demands—that I must meet one of his friends, that I must be invited into his house, that we must go away together—and he said he couldn’t comply and that was that.

Despite his calls to see me for the next two years I never did see him again.  The last time I laid eyes on him was when he dropped off my keys in September of ‘06.  And I think that was a good thing, because when his lies were confirmed, it didn’t hurt that much. 

Whenever George called me the number always came up as “Private caller” on my display.  On December 26^th of 2008, when he called me there was a name displayed and the number was different but the last four digits of the number were the same as the one that I had for him.  I asked him where he was calling from and he said home and I told him that the call display was indicating a name that I didn’t recognize.  And there was silence.  I said it again and the silence continued and then he canceled dinner for that night.  It took me a minute after he hung up, but I put two and two together, reverse searching the phone number and coming up with his alleged address.  I e-mailed him then and told him to stay out of touch or risk police intervention.  While there isn’t a crime I could charge him with, I’m sure he’d like to remain incognito, so he’s never contacted me again. 

During the radio show that I mentioned before, the woman who’d been duped by the Earl had decided that the man’s insistence on continuing to keep in touch with her after all the shit had hit the fan was about his love for her.  Even though he’d conned her and cheated on her and bilked her out of money, she was convinced that he must be keeping in touch out of love.  I figured that George was lonely when he’d do his post-break up calls but I didn’t even think he was in love with me while we were dating let alone two years later.  And once the jig was up, it was pretty clear to me that it was all about control—all about seeing how long he could get me to keep playing his little game.  One year, he called and wanted me to help him decide if a woman he was interested in was attractive enough.  Attractive enough for what?  For the con? 

When I first found out, I watched my credit cards for a while—he’d had access to one of my card numbers.  I sort of reeled for a moment over the fact that he might have given me an STI while we were dating.  I assumed I was the more sexually active of the two of us, so I was the one who went and got tested as we started dating.  In reality, I was probably the one at risk.  All’s clear, but that was creepy.  I think what’s irksome at this point is not knowing exactly what he was up to.  He was probably just married with kids and I was likely just his mistress, but you wonder.  This dude managed to make a goodnight call to me every evening and I couldn’t imagine a married man getting away with that.

I once heard him refer to himself as David, rather than George, on a phone call.  We were walking up Roncesvalles on a nice spring night shortly after I’d moved to that area.  When I asked him about it he fought me on it for about five solid minutes, insisting that I had not heard what I’d heard.  When he finally realized that I wasn’t going to let it go, he made up some bizarre excuse about his first name actually being David but preferring his middle name, George (his actual first name was David).  The funny part is that his excuse was overkill.  It was more fishy than the incident itself. 

He caught me once looking through the contacts on his cell phone.  He walked into the door of my apartment, back from a smoke, and caught me red-handed before I had a chance to put it back down.  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more stupid.  We were pretty close to breaking up then, but it was sort of horrifying to see my bad behaviour reflected back at me.  I can only imagine how much worse I would have been if we’d stayed together for another year or two years.  There’s something about engaging with someone who is constantly dishonest that starts to make a person crazy.  The cognitive dissonance—the reality of the situation versus what you want to believe about the situation—makes you do some fucked up stuff.

I learned two major life lessons from my time with George.  Never date Mr. Right Now.   You’ll likely fall for him even though you know he’s unsuitable.  And never feel like you have to prove a red flag.  People are inclined to believe that they are being told the truth, which already makes it difficult to suss out a liar.  People like George have a leg up on the rest of us because human nature causes us to give the benefit of the doubt when it hasn’t been earned at all.  But when your gut is telling you something’s off, just listen to it.  When there are so many red flags that you could start selling them to family and friends, don’t worry about being able to prove the reasons for your strange inventory—just get out.  It could have all been a lot worse—and I’m just lucky it wasn’t.