Postmortems

by Simone Westfall — May 10, 2007

"Weren't you terribly hurt when you didn't hear from this guy?" a friend asked when I told her the Sam story. Yes, of course I was, but I've been through so much with men in my adult life that bad behavior almost ceases to surprise me, or it doesn't surprise me for long.

Besides, six weeks or so, once a week, for dinner and sex, is really not long enough for a woman--or for me, at least--to get seriously attached, especially when there are boundaries at the outset. You never reach a point of day-to-day intimacy, a sense of his smells and habits. You never sweep his socks from the floor to throw in the laundry, or pick up one of the shirts he's left behind and sniff it to remember his presence. Because he has left no shirts or socks on your floor...

I was never even sure how he liked his coffee, because he always bought it on the way to the gym.

And thus ended, for the time being, my brief experiment with married men.

Soon after Sam, I posted another ad on Craigslist, this time presenting my unattached self up for grabs. I got about 30 responses, among them at least five from married men! The general import of these was, "I know you're looking for a more solid relationship, but perhaps you would consider me in the meantime." Intrigued but slightly weary of the whole cheating-guy syndrome, I queried a few of these would-be philanderers on email. "Why are you doing this? What's so unsatisfactory about your marriage?"

To my surprise, a few of them answered, and the responses by and large approximated the explanation offered by Daniel the lawyer, the one who kept writing me while on vacation with the wife and kids. "Our marriage has turned into a business partnership. There's no sex anymore. She's not interested." One wrote: "If my wife were an alcoholic harridan, I could probably justify my unhappiness. As it is, I simply feel I'm missing some connection and I don't know what it is."

Of course, I was getting only one side of the story. I've been in a long marriage, and I know the way spouses can finely hone sex into a weapon, choosing to withhold or deny, to punish or forgive. Couples also go through "dry" spells, when they're just not sufficiently interested or the day-to-day demands of raising kids and minding the store are too overwhelming. Still I'm not sure "triangling" is the way to go (though the French have an expression, "Marriage is so difficult it takes three to make it work"). Perhaps men are better at compartmentalizing their affections, saving their good-provider, family-man selves for the home front and taking their roaring libidos elsewhere.

I thought it might be fun to be the mistress, to be the recipient of all that pent-up lust. Turns out it was more confusing than gratifying. About the only conclusion I can draw from the Sam experience is that adultery is never going to go away, and has probably remained more or less a constant since the dawn of time, but manners are surely getting worse in every arena of contemporary life, even love affairs.

Simone Westfall is the pen name of a novelist and critic in New York City. To read all of Simone's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.