MIDLIFE INFIDELITY
What I learnt about cheating husbands – by having affairs with them
I was too raw to want to date anyone looking for a relationship. Instead, I looked for no-stringsattached company.
It's not possible to justify my liaisons with married men; I won’t even try. I’m not proud that, for a few years while living near London, I entered into casual relationships with married men. But I don’t regret it. What I learnt from these men warrants discussion, even though I’ve recently been publicly condemned for doing so in The New York Times.
I want to know the wife’s perspective. But what I have is the story told by their husbands. It’s an issue we might all want to talk about, say, annually, the way we get the yearly MOT [annual vehicle safety test] to keep the family car from breaking down.
I was adrift when I separated from my husband of 23 years. We had been living in the UK for just over a year, so I wasn’t close enough to the kind of people you commiserate with after you’ve torn down the walls that once sheltered you both physically and mentally. When I set up accounts on Tinder and OkCupid, I was too raw to want to date anyone looking for a relationship. Instead, I looked for no-strings-attached company. A fair number of men who responded were married; sometimes headless or faceless or insouciantly grinning from photos. But all of them came to me, first. I simply responded.
Sure, that makes me complicit, but I felt drawn to married men, perhaps because I instinctively needed what they were also seeking: affection and sex with someone uninterested in attachment. Just a few hours of levity.
Iknow this is dicey because you can’t always control your emotions when body chemicals mix, but I reasoned that because they had wives, children and mortgages, they wouldn’t go overboard with their affections. We were safe bets for each other.
I was careful about my choices. If I agreed to meet a married man, he couldn’t be waffling about his commitment to his marriage. He had to assure me he had no interest in leaving his wife or otherwise threatening the family.
I truly believed their fidelity was intact despite their decision to abandon their monogamy. And really, what’s more important to a marriage? The desire to sustain the partnership or the willingness to forgo sex with anyone outside the marriage? These men assured me they hadn’t fallen out of love. Believe it or not, if I was sleeping with your husband, he almost certainly adored you.
What surprised me was that they weren’t looking to have more sex in their lives; they wanted any sex. I’d always assumed the appeal of an affair was simply the clandestine thrill of it, the sexual freshness, the fantasy of leaving behind, for just a few hours, the domestic drudgeries. But what all five married men I slept with over those few years told me was that their wives didn’t want sex with them. And they had given up asking.
I came across a blog posted by a man who kept track of all the times he’d initiated sex with his wife; he was rejected nine times out of 10. Now, I have no idea what the dynamic was between them. Maybe he was a horrible human being. But the response to his post was to be shamed by most of the women who saw it, shamed for quantifying his interest in more sex with his wife. We women easily complain about how little help we get around the house. At a family gathering you can publicly give your spouse a hard time for not picking up after himself. It’s not so easy to let drop during dinner that you may be a lot happier if you got laid more often.
Imet a married man who was tall, silver-haired and a decade older than me, impeccable in speech and manners. We met at George’s Bar in St Pancras. Over wine he waxed lovingly about his wife’s best qualities, how she was passionate about her work and how they were happy companions, especially in the kitchen. But sex wasn’t a priority for her. She simply didn’t want it. He tried several times to reconcile the topic with her, until the day she told him she wouldn’t be surprised if he sought sex elsewhere. She didn’t want to know about it, nor did she want it to affect their social life. But she did essentially give him a pass.
He and I didn’t sleep together, but I was fascinated by his story of loving her but wanting to stray. By getting his wife’s implicit consent, they both, to some degree, got what they wanted without having to give up what they needed, which was to keep their combined lives intact. But he would have preferred to be having sex with his wife; he was clear about that.
I know what it feels like to go off sex, and I know what it’s like to want more than my partner. Many things confound our desire for sex: kids, work, The Crown on Netflix. Then there’s ageing. I was approaching menopause and wondered if I had only a few more years left of a robust sex drive. The men I saw were all in their late forties to fifties. Their wives were also hitting midlife and what I heard again and again was, ‘She’s just not interested any more.’ Men’s hormones don’t have that midlife drop, like the temperatures in winter. We women are literally drying up once our oestrogen takes a hike. If men are horny while we’re feeling homely, we’ve got an elephant-sized problem in our bedrooms, one so burdensome and humiliating we can scarcely muster the strength to talk about it.
This is simplifying the issue, sure. Some women remain just as randy as men. But I bet they aren’t the ones getting cheated on – they’re likely the ones doing the cheating. I read a few books recently that offered all sorts of findings and real-life stories about why people go off sex or have an affair. Esther Perel’s The State of
Affairs is a book every person in
Some women remain just as randy as men. But I bet they aren’t the ones getting cheated on – they’re likely the ones doing the cheating.
a long-term relationship should read, whether you’ve strayed or not. And Emily Nagoski’s Come
as You Are may be geared towards women but it’s every bit as helpful to a man whose wife has lost interest in sex because of its ability to explain the difference between desire and arousal. I met the Married Metrosexual at the bar at Hotel Andaz on Liverpool Street. He was High Street-meets-Harley Davidson, bald and brawny. He was cleanshaven and well mannered, with a little rebel yell underneath. When he reached for his beer, the sleeve of his well-tailored suit pulled back to reveal a geometric kaleidoscope of tattoos. After talking about our kids, his wife, the gorgeous home they’d created, we made out in the stairwell. It was the first time I’d felt a man’s erection through such expensive clothing.
The night I saw the full canvas of his tattoo masterpiece, we drank Prosecco, listened to the Violent Femmes (because we were children of the eighties) and, yes, had sex – with condoms! We stayed up all night, and between the tipsy bouts of shagging, we talked.
I asked him: ‘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 casual affair? I won’t let it affect what we have?”’
He sighed. ‘I don’t want to hurt her,’ he said. ‘She’s been out of the workforce for over 10 years, raising our kids and trying to figure out what she wants to do. If I asked her that kind of question, it would kill her, knock her self-esteem.’ He’d shown me her photo. She was beautiful and sassy-looking, with spiked hair and a big grin. She looked like a much cooler mum than I was. I felt curious to know her and wondered what she might tell me about why she didn’t want sex with her very sexy husband.
‘So, you don’t want to hurt her but you lie to her instead. Personally, I’d rather know,’ I said, emphatic with alcohol. Well, maybe I would rather know. My own marriage had never been subjected to an affair so I couldn’t easily put myself in her position.
‘It’s not a lie just because you don’t tell the truth,’ he said. ‘It’s kinder to stay silent.’
‘Well, I don’t think I could do that. I don’t want to be afraid of talking honestly about our sex life with the man I’m married to, and that includes being able to at least raise the topic of sex outside the marriage if one person isn’t getting any,’ I said.
‘Good luck with that!’ he said.
Call it curious or crazy, I continued to pepper him with questions while sitting on the toilet. ‘So, we go into marriage assuming we’ll be monogamous,’ I said as I peed with the door open. ‘But then we get restless. We don’t want to split up but we need to feel like we’re still alive sexually. And if someone doesn’t want sex,
I pulled his face to mine and kissed his lips. Then I opened my eyes. In his face I saw a man of sweetness and light, childlike, and I immediately felt relaxed.
why break up the family if we could just negotiate the occasional affair?’ He laughed. ‘How about we stop talking about it before this affair stops being fun?’
Ionce agreed to meet a mystery man from out of town. He hadn’t posted any photos of himself online because, he said, he had a high-profile job working with students who used the same dating sites. But he could string together a well-crafted sentence and I was a sucker for good prose. I told him to surprise me. After arriving at the British Library and walking to the far back of the gallery on the first floor, I texted him to come introduce himself. I closed my eyes and waited. After a few minutes a voice behind me said, ‘Karin?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’ I kept my eyes closed and turned. I reached out and found the far edges of his shoulders. I ran my hands up to his neck, then to his face, feeling the soft stubble of his beard, the outline of his delicate wire glasses. I pulled his face to mine and kissed his lips. Then I opened my eyes. In his face I saw a man of sweetness and light, childlike, and I felt relaxed. But as we walked along Euston Road to the restaurant for dinner, he had another surprise for me: he was married.
‘We haven’t had sex in five years,’ he told me. ‘Why not?’ I asked, as though this were an interview. ‘She has a brain tumour.’
My first reaction was to snort and say ‘yeah, right!’ But he didn’t strike me as insincere. And since I’d spent nearly 20 years practising medicine as a physician assistant, I decided to ask questions that he’d not be able to answer easily had he been lying. ‘What was her presenting symptom?’ I said.
‘She suddenly couldn’t smell one day,’ he said, without missing a beat. ‘But before that, her personality began to change. She became short-tempered. Everything set her off. She began yelling at me and the kids.’
Those were indeed signs of a frontal lobe brain tumour, so he was either telling me the truth or had done his research. We talked about his family life through dinner. His wife refused to sleep with him, even just sleep beside him. But he could hardly abandon her. They had two kids. He tried to look accepting of his situation, but his body slumped when he spoke. It was weighted with sadness.
I went back to his hotel. We undressed with the lights on. He trembled at first when our naked bodies touched. Then he just held me. I held him back, laying atop the hotel bed. Afterwards, he thanked me. I kissed him and went home. We never spoke again.
Ihad one married lover who lived close enough and was kind enough to come to my house during school hours every few months. He dressed like Tom Wolfe: bow ties, light-coloured suits with pastel shirts. And a hat. Always a hat. He had a mischievous grin, although he acted deferential as we sipped soda water and chatted. But as soon as our clothes came off he was wild. He pulled my hair and slapped my bum. He had sex as though his fury over having an afflicted wife, who couldn’t have sex, was a cruel joke played by the universe upon a man with an insatiable libido.
‘Your wife can’t have sex and you still won’t ask her if you can have casual affairs?’ I asked him during our pillow talk.
‘What good would that do? Just for the sake of honesty?’
‘I suppose, yes,’ I said, trying to sound curious but not pushy.
‘I don’t see the point. She’s nothing but lovely and I like doing things for her. She adores her job and knows she won’t be able to do it for much longer. She knows I have a massive sex drive, but she was never really that interested in sex, even before she got ill.’
I stopped challenging him. And he kept visiting. Just an hour or two every few months. And after I moved back to the US we kept in touch by text on occasion. When I told him I was writing a piece on infidelity he thought it was a great idea.
Do you still feel the same about not telling your wife, I wrote to him. Yes, he did. ‘I know my qualities and vices, and I sleep very well at night.’ There were several married men I simply corresponded with. I was curious to hear their stories. Their forays into infidelity felt like an affliction to me. Yes, I know, you’re thinking I had my own kind of affliction to be sleeping with husbands. Fair enough. Having been a clinician for so long, I couldn’t help but press them to tell me their problems.
If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilises us but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy elsewhere. Should we?
It was always a lack of sex and an uninterested wife. I didn’t go so far as to recommend they seek counselling, though had they been in my clinic office, I would have. It seemed absurd challenging them about keeping their affairs secret, when I was contributing to the secret. But they were mostly goodnatured about it, like the patient fathers they seemed to be when faced with the child who persists in asking, ‘Why, why, why?!’
The second night the Married Metrosexual and I spent together, he told his wife he had a meeting out of town and took the train to my place after work. The sex was fun, rambunctious, but didn’t penetrate my emotional barrier. Until the next morning when he buried his face in my chest and I cradled his bald head in my arms. That’s when it seemed clear this was about more than sex for him; he was desperate for affection. He said he wanted to be close to his wife but couldn’t because they were unable to get past their fundamental disconnect: a lack of sex, which led to a lack of closeness, which made sex even less likely. Then his resentment would surface.
‘She doesn’t want to have sex with me.’
‘Do you make her feel special?’ I asked, suggesting he might have responsibility in this disconnect. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes.’ ‘And she has sex with you. Sometimes.’ ‘F*** off,’ he said, then laughed. Maybe I was being too pragmatic about issues that are loaded with guilt, resentment and fear. After all, it’s easier to talk theoretically about marriage than to navigate it. But my attitude is that if my spouse were to need something I couldn’t give him, I wouldn’t keep him from getting it elsewhere, as long as he did so in a way that didn’t endanger our family.
Isuppose I’d hope his needs would involve fishing trips or beers with friends. But sex is basic. Physical intimacy with other humans is an essential element to good health and wellbeing. How could we deny such a need to the one we care about most? If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilises us but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy elsewhere. Should we?
I’m not saying the answer is an affair or non-monogamy, although the term ‘Monogamish’ is gaining traction in America among a subset of people. (The US, however, is far behind Britain in progressive attitudes towards sex.) Any type of relationship is at times difficult to navigate. Adding lovers to the mix can be rife with risks and unintended entanglements.
I’m a big advocate of honesty and dialogue, no matter how frightening. Dozens of people have told me that once they got raw and transparent about their feelings and desires, as long as their partner didn’t shut down, it was the most liberating thing they’d ever experienced. What if an affair – or simply the urge to have one – could be the beginning of a necessary conversation about sex and intimacy?
Should we women owe a cheater the willingness to comprehend why he’s strayed? Is it more important for him to keep his dick in his pants than it is for us to understand what drives him to take it out? According to these married men, having sex with me and not telling their wives was their way of respecting the marriage. To me, it felt like one of the only ways of filling their soulaching need to feel desired. 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 aren’t deception and lying corrosive, not kind? 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 disheartening to think it’s easier to set up an account on Tinder than talk to our loved ones about our pain. But what a friend said to me once, and I think is required in order to initiate this kind of dialogue, was: ‘People open up to you when they trust you not to act badly.’