Other People’s Girlfriends I Have Slept With

Two years ago I went through a 12 month period where every woman I hooked up with save one had a boyfriend. I have never cheated on anyone I’ve dated, but that seems to shrink a little in importance considering what I’ve done with people in relationships of their own. It was easy enough to treat these short encounters as separate organisms. Whatever happened during the time I spent with each woman was only about us, and likewise, whatever existed between the women and their real boyfriends was theirs alone. These were non-overlapping spheres of fidelity.

I admit to secretly wondering in each case how it was that each woman could manage the stress of living in both worlds without suffering for it. I had the luxury of living in one world alone and not needing to keep two sets of books. My instinct would always have been to confess immediately, to not keep from my partner experiences that I was having in another world, even if that would have revealed a betrayal.

In “Married, With Infidielities,” Mark Oppenheimer struggled with the idea–distilled in a consideration of Dan Savage’s sex columns–that monogamy is a secondary concern to marriage. The expectation of sexual exclusivity becomes a placeholder in many ways, narrowing the number of uncertainties a person faces in life. “…life before her was so confusing,” Oppenheimer wrote of his wife. “In all those other relationships, it was never clear when there was an exclusive commitment or who would use the L-word first or when a Saturday-night date could be assumed.”

If this is the best case that can be made for monogamy–that it filters out the confusing parts of one’s love life for a little bit–then my instincts for confession were utterly wrong-headed. When the core of monogamy is giving your partner pretext to filter out the most confusing parts of the sexual subconscious, then the illusion of faith is far more important than the act itself.

In a Daily Mail story in 2009, Maureen Rice argued that while men are slightly more likely to cheat in a relationship (20% to 15% of women, according a Manchester Metropolitan University study), women are far more likely to carry on long-term affairs that their partners will never find out about.

“There is something particularly humiliating for a man about being made a cuckold,” Rice wrote. “So [women] lie to protect ourselves from the judgements of others, and because sexual ‘reputation’ still matters more to women, whether we lie it or not.”

“But we also lie naturally and instinctively, as a way to manage and control our relationships, to protect our partners and our families, and to keep our options open. In fact we lie so much and for so many reasons that often we don’t even think of it as lying at all, but as ‘relationship management.’”

It’s with an ironic chill that Oppenhemer opens his story by questioning his wife whether she’d be more hurt by discovering he’d been having an affair or that he’d been emailing pictures of his penis to strangers. The emailing of pictures is, of course, the more offensive option to her. “An affair is at least a normal human thing,” she answered.

I have been capable of great moments of sexual obliviousness in my life, to blinker out all the sublingual energy floating through a conversation. This trick of thought has made it possible for me to say I’ve never cheated on any of my own girlfriends. It’s not that I declined any specific offers but that I have a knack of turning parts of my brain off for extended periods of time, living in a world of perfect literalness. Even a direct offer–”What say you and I slip into the bathroom and fuck right quick?”–would have seemed like a joking impossibility no more serious than an offer to ride through Central Park on a herd of elephants. Sure, totally, let’s do that.

One of the betrothed women I fooled around with was insistent her partner never find out. There was nothing especially romantic about our dallying–we’d get drunk and kiss into the early morning. We never had sex but a few times we ended up naked together, as mucha  goofy play session as anything else. It seemed ridiculous that anyone might have felt hurt or threatened by these interludes, which had all of the romantic intensity of going to a movie with a friend on a Tuesday night.

I fell in love with another woman during this period. She never told me she had a boyfriend but I knew almost from the beginning from a mutual friend. I had the impression some mornings that she was staring through my apartment window at something that wasn’t there. Was I something cruel she was doing to him? Or was he the unsheddable weight holding her back from me? Or were both of us needful puppies nipping at her heels with casually intrusive text messages read in the private shelter of her purse folds?

On another occasion I met a friend who’d been seeing another man for a few months to have a drink and catch up. We stayed out till last call and ended up kissing against the wall outside the bar until people started hooting at us. Finally, a group pranksome kids came up and scrawled on my back with a black felt pen and ruined the mood in full. There was another time when I slept with an old friend visiting from out of town. In the hungover confusion of morning I remember trying to parse my own feelings for her (over-extended by sex) from the guilt I felt for having played a part in her infidelity. I asked her if she was going to tell her boyfriend, thinking maybe this could be an opportunity for them to get even closer by first confronting a real challenge. “There’s no point,” she said.

In the beginning I’d taken all of these experiences as isolated quirks of probability. We will all reach a test of faith in our various ideals and wind up failing, or playing some part in another person’s moral wandering. After a year this was less a hiccup of romantic fortune and more an emotional defect, a willing pleasure taken in situations that had no future. The larger pattern was not that everyone I was interested in had boyfriends but that I was interested in people who would inevitably leave me again and again and again.

Without this certainty I was romantically ossified. I wouldn’t have sex with the one single woman I dated during this period. I’d carefully insured all of our time together had been in bars or walks through neighborhoods, coming up with excuses when invited over to her place for cooked dinners and never inviting her over to mine. After a night at a bar she asked me to come back to her place and I backpedaled, saying I had to work early in the morning and it would be too much to spend the night. This wasn’t untrue, but it was by that point clearly not the reason I was declining. “You just don’t want to have sex with me, do you?” she asked, addressing to obvious truth.

“No, it’s not that,” I lied. “Maybe this weekend or something, but I really can’t afford to be lousy at work tomorrow.”

We spent the next half an hour sitting on a grimy curb in the lower east side with her trying to talk me out of my dishonesty, while I kept trying to spin the gears of logic into some configuration wherein my lies would seem viable. She was a very beautiful woman, a bootstrap philanthropist and former beauty pageant contestant. I realize now I probably have the distinction of being the only man in the world who has purposely talked a beauty queen out of wanting to have sex.

Philip Larkin once described sex as a process of trying to get someone to blow your own nose for you. It’s a juvenile kind of self-trickery to make a relationship hinge on such a lowly and absurd act. This is embedded in the words we have to describe our relationships. We are boyfriends and girlfriends, turned back into children by our having fallen in love with one another. There would be no meaning in being a manfriend or womanfriend. We would know by instinct that men and women do not operate on the same simple ideals that children do. Men and women are compromisers, with welded joints and broken bits that must carry the ever increasing–and increasingly incoherent–load of experiences on has in life.

While addressing ourselves as children we fall back on the obscure latinate “monogamy,” a word whose literal meaning goes unknown by most people but which can still stand in as an answer for the question of what it means to be in a relationship. If a boyfriend or girlfriend is not mongamous, how can they be a boyfriend or girlfriend? Is the persistence of childlike faith carried in the word not completely unbound the concession that it will inevitably be broken?

My fellow men, I have slept with your wives and girlfriends. I have seduced them. I have let them revive their imaginations and physical curiosities in the bars and secret bedrooms of my past. In some cases they lingered a while, but none of them stayed. They all left and returned to your company, and for reasons that were their own, the result of a private gravity that existed only between you and them. It was lucky too. I don’t think I could have handled it if any of them had stayed.

*Images via pb-n-james and Joe Shlabotnik (edited by author)

** “Married, With Infidelities” (via New York Times)

“Think men are the unfaithful sex?” (via Daily Mail Online)