I Don’t Regret My Affairs
A philanderer explains himself
Recently I read an article by Karin Jones in The New York Times entitled What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity. I found it impressive for several reasons.
First of all, simply writing the piece under her own name (The New York Times does not allow pseudonyms) required a rare level of bravery. Being the ‘other woman’ is no one’s idea of a heroic role, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary notwithstanding.
Secondly, her thesis, although somewhat ambivalent, was that many men who have affairs are not the selfish bastards they’re typically made out to be. Rather, they are often individuals trapped in difficult circumstances who feel they have few other options. While I don’t agree with everything she has to say, hers is a voice not often heard that deserves to be listened to.
I have to add that her message is not simply of academic interest to me. As a man who had two long affairs during a 26-year marriage, mine is also a voice that’s not often listened to with sympathy or understanding. Not that I’m whining, but if you’re interested in the institution of marriage, you’ll want as many perspectives as possible.
I thought it might be useful to enact a conversation with Karin Jones by responding to quotations pulled from her article.
“What surprised me was that these husbands weren’t looking to have more sex. They were looking to have any sex.”
It will surprise no one that lack of sex is a big motivator of affairs, but it’s rarely about slight differences between what these men want and what they’re getting. In my experience, it’s about huge differences.
As Jones states, many of these men were getting zero sex. I can’t speak for the women involved — and believe me, I’m not judging them — but there are very few men who will not go to extraordinary lengths to make up for that deficit.
And this isn’t just about the physical act of sex. It’s about all the things that accompany it — a chance to be your unguarded, fully embodied, most generous self with a partner who is both empathetic and enthusiastic.
In my situation, the problem wasn’t that I was getting no sex, but that the twice a month I did get was not even close to satisfying my natural drive. Was that an unreasonable expectation of me?
Eight years into my current marriage, we average about twelve times a month … and I’m fifteen years older now, with a presumably diminished sex drive. It turned out that my expectations were not unreasonable, I was just dependent on the sex drive of the wrong partner. That 600% disparity between what my ex-wife wanted and what I wanted was clearly a recipe for marital disaster.
It was also the cause of a lot of self-doubt. I was not perfect, but I did cross out most of the reasons commonly claimed by sexually unresponsive women. I did lots of work around the house, was very involved with the kids, brought in a good income, never raised my voice, complimented her daily, and took fastidious care of my appearance.
For all that effort, I got hardly any sexual affirmation. I didn’t know how to make her want me.
“What if you said to your wife, ‘Look, I love you and the kids but I need sex in my life. Can I just have the occasional fling or a casual affair?’ He sighed. “I don’t want to hurt her…if I asked her that kind of question, it would kill her.”
Jones captures nicely the moral reasoning of the kind of man usually assumed to have no morals. Now, I am not trying to suggest that the typical philandering husband is a saint. In fact, the opposite is probably true.
However, all husbands are not the same. Sometimes decent men find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances that they did not foresee, and they struggle to take care of their needs with the least harm possible.
My ex and I had dated since high school. Her strict religious beliefs, and her repressed struggle with her sexual identity, left her deeply conflicted about sex.
She also had very strict boundaries around what was acceptable in the bedroom. To pick just two examples, oral sex was not permitted, and I was never allowed to see her have an orgasm (these happened for her, I was told, only in private).
If she wasn’t comfortable with receiving oral sex, or masturbating in front of her husband, was I wrong to think she wouldn’t be open to giving me permission to explore non-monogamy? I believed that asking her would only add a layer of suspicion to an already tense relationship.
“…(women) are simply more complex sexual animals. Which is why men can get an erection from a pill but there’s no way to medically induce arousal and desire in women.”
This collection of words, unfortunately, is steeped in misunderstanding.
First of all, assuming that women are more sexually complex than men plays into the lazy stereotype of the mono-syllabic, knuckle-dragging, power-tool-obsessed male. Anyone with open eyes knows that men are as much a bundle of emotional and physical contradictions as women.
Second — and this is strictly a scientific matter — erectile dysfunction medications do not induce “arousal and desire” in men. Viagra (or Cialis, or Levitra) will make it physiologically easier for a man to have an erection, but if he isn’t already turned on his penis will not enlarge by even one percent from taking a pill.
“What these husbands couldn’t do was have the difficult discussion with their wives that would force them to tackle the issues at the root of their cheating. They tried to convince me they were being kind by keeping their affairs secret. They seemed to have convinced themselves. But deception and lying are ultimately corrosive, not kind.”
Everyone is comfortable with choosing between good things and bad things in life, but sometimes the way forward is not so clearly delineated. The “difficult discussion” Jones suggests is not a simple exchange of opinions. It involves saying things that cannot be taken back. While there is a chance that it could make things better, there is also a chance that it could make things worse.
How do I know? Because my ex-wife and I actually did have that conversation in couple’s therapy five years before our marriage ended. In the safety of the counsellor’s office, I had a chance to make it very clear that our sex life was not satisfying, and she vowed to try to give me more. Which she did, for a while, but the effort didn’t last very long. She just ended up feeling worse about herself.
It turned out that finding out her husband needed more sex was not enough to get her past whatever blocked her from actually having more sex.
So, the choice appeared to be between a deeply unsatisfying sex life and living a double life. There was no third option that I could see, because ending the marriage seemed like it would be a disaster for everybody, hurting my wife, my kids, my in-laws, and turning me into a part-time dad. On the other hand, putting up with a nearly platonic relationship for the rest of my life was not acceptable either.
After years of self-denial, sexual frustration, and feeling unwanted and unattractive, I concluded that having an affair was the only way to find fulfillment while keeping my family together. I’m not saying it was the perfect solution, but a perfect solution didn’t seem to be on the menu.
“In the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn’t face was something else altogether: hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them. It’s much easier, after all, to set up an account on Tinder.”
While it might be simple to fill out an online profile, nothing else about having an affair is easy. Anyone who has tried any kind of dating website knows that the process of searching and corresponding is incredibly time consuming.
But that’s just the beginning. Once you find someone, you enter the cloak and dagger world of coordinating secret meetings in out of the way places, constructing unassailable alibis, and hiding credit card records. Some might find this exciting, but I just found it stressful.
Deceit doesn’t come naturally to me, I’m happy to report. I imagine all that effort is the reason men who are only mildly disappointed with their marriages don’t have affairs — they are way too difficult for the typically slender rewards.
And what did I get for all that effort? I would say, on average, I had sex two or three times more per month during those affairs, beyond the twice a month I had with my ex-wife. If it was all about sex, the reward simply wasn’t worth the risk.
But there was more to it than sex. I got to feel lusted after. I had someone in my life I could freely discuss any sexual possibility with. Oh, and I was able to make a woman come, something that had never happened in my marriage.
I got to be my most giving sexual self, which meant a lot to me. And besides all that, I got to know two exceptional women in deep, meaningful ways. In other words, a tiny dose of all the things I longed for, yet couldn’t find, in my marriage.
“…the…husbands I met would have preferred to be having sex with their wives. For whatever reason, that wasn’t happening.”
Yes. Exactly.
Thank you for sharing our story, Karin Jones.
