Sex and the Married Man

by Simone Westfall — April 5, 2007

There surely can be no hell quite like the hell of midlife dating. Though I’m not sure, at age 50, that I truly qualify as a swimmer in the sluggish currents of “midlife.” Wouldn’t that mean I’d have to live to be 100 or so? And at the rate I’m going, I may not even make it to my sunset years (especially since the thought of walking alone into that sunset sometimes fills my soul with quaking terror).

Be that as it may, and to return to our initial premise, dating at my age is not for sissies, and it’s certainly a strange place for grown-ups. After being dumped by the Evil Phillip about a year ago (and more about him later), I returned to the cesspool of online matchmaking—you know the sites: Nerve.com, Match.com, LastChanceSaloon.com—and managed to scare up a few dismal prospects. One was a beet-faced recovering alcoholic who lasted a few weeks but soon began to bore me to death with tales of his dysfunctional son. Another was a pasty-faced recovering alcoholic who dragged me to a grungy dive bar on the Lower East Side and kept me up till 2 a.m. to hear one of his favorite underrated Zydeco bands (trust me, they were understandably underrated and, trust me again, I’m more of a Café Carlyle kind of girl).

And there were others, best consigned to the deepest recesses of memory, including one who was happily pre-alcoholic and showed signs of intelligent life and lasted through Valentine’s Day—until he suggested I get the appropriate serum from the vet and euthanize my ailing 16-year-old dachsund at home (and what was I supposed to do with the body, for pity’s sake, in a Manhattan apartment? My building has no recycling bins for dead pets).

Then one lonely Saturday night I had a eureka moment: If all the good men are gone, if there are none left for a woman my age, well, hey, why not borrow one? Or two? Or three? What precisely was I looking for, anyway? Not a husband, most likely, as I’d already had one of those, and maybe not even a “boyfriend.” (Honestly, can’t some cunning linguist come up with better terms than “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” for attached people over the age of 25?) My attempts at live-in arrangements had failed miserably since my divorce 10 years ago. But I still wanted the ardor, the flirting, and, oh god yessssss, the sex. What better stomping grounds than the well-tilled fields of the miserably married?

So at around 10 o’clock on that Saturday night I turned to Craigslist, that great free forum of the unabashedly horny, and posted a personals under “Women Seeking Men.” My headline read “Willing to Consider a Married Man,” and I described myself a bit (tall, brunette, fit, smart), adding that I was not looking to bust up anyone’s happy family but simply game for a little amusement on the side. (Remember, please, you righteous moralists out there, I’m not the one who’s betraying any vows.)

I turned in early, awakened around 6:30 the next morning, and promptly tuned into my email. There were 59 responses, and the petitions were still rolling in—plonk, plonk, plonk—dropping into the top of my in-box as I began to read from the earliest on up. (What were these guys doing on CL at 6:30 on a Sunday morning?) This is totally out of control, I thought, and promptly shut down the listing. (But now I wished I’d kept it up and running just to see what the sum total would be….my record was 178 for a previous ad that was headlined simply “sex and conversation,” in which I advertised that I was in search of both les délices de l’amour and serious têtes-a-têtes….By contrast, an invitation I posted to join me for a concert of classical music drew precisely four responses, two of them from younger guys looking for employment as a “walker.”)

Well, it was easy enough to weed out the dross—the yearning 20-and 30-somethings who probably had visions of me as a stateside Catherine Deneuve, the guys who sent pictures of their weenies, the bozo body builders from Queens, and the ones who were seriously spelling-challenged. In time, I winnowed the list down to about eight or ten possibilities. And some sprightly correspondence ensued.

Simone Westfall is the pen name of a novelist and critic based in New York City.