by Ali Adler
Also, the thing that repels you about a woman is the very thing, once you’re in love with her, that you kind of adore. It’s the special thing you treasure. The lumpy butt, the sandbag thighs; it’s the secret that you can’t discuss with your friends. But you appreciate your woman’s weakness, because it becomes a part of your territory. And you’re territorial because you’re a guy. Yes, you’d make fun of someone else’s lady with that same issue, but that shit’s not yours, so who cares?
Conversely, the things that drew you to your woman to begin with—that adorable way she eats, how she loves to stay up late, how she wants to show you all her loser boyfriends from her junior high school yearbook; all those things that made you fall in love with her in the first place—are the things that will cause you to clench your teeth, bellow with rage, complain inside your head. Everything you initially loved about her will shift with time-worn familiarity and turn into the grit in your spinach.
Why Men Cheat
A relationship is serious, tedious business. You are agreeing to fuck the same pussy forever. Squeeze only these tits. Kiss only this mouth. What a dire and dangerous contract. But even more than the sexual, you’re agreeing to talk to her before and after sex for forever. Till you drop dead. That’s what the contract says: “‘til death.” What an unsexy deal when laid out like that. People spend so much time working out fiscal realities in marriage, stuff like prenups, but no one’s talking about having to fuck this same individual forever. Where’s the fine print in the contract about that? You can change houses, make new children, watch all your parents die . . . but place penis in singular vagina—that’s the nonnegotiable. Ludicrous when you spell it out, right? Your penis just got a life sentence in prison. Your penis and her vagina are in lockup.
Not too long ago, I was listening to a newly engaged Adam Levine on Howard Stern while he was addressing this concept. I wondered what we’re all wondering here with this guy. Say it with me: “Why would Adam Levine ever get married?” Even to a professionally pretty person like Behati Prinsloo, a Namibian supermodel (I wish this were my description). And who knows, maybe she’s a super-nice-model, too. But won’t she—someday anyway—get old and tedious, too? Won’t someday all those vowels in her name start to sag and droop? And even if she remains as gorgeous and kind and juicily lettered as she was on the day they got married, she still possesses only the one original vagina.
Why, when you are a handsome and rich, relevant rock star, with such a terrifically square jaw, a bar mitzvah under your belt and a great five o’clock shadow, would you confine your choice to just the one? When asked this question by Stern, Adam very astutely admitted, “I don’t think as a man you ever stop being attracted to women, and it’s a turbo-fucked-up situation for me. Is it worth sacrificing? You make a commitment. You choose.” That’s a huge choice. I mean, if Adam Levine can choose, how the hell can you even consider cheating on your woman? Can you imagine the level of top-shelf ass he has to rebuff?
Now, as we know, most of these high-profile celebrity marriages (congratulations, Kevin Bacon/Kyra Sedgwick!) don’t wind up being very successful. And, beyond the de rigeur with-a-name-like-Levine circumcision, we really don’t know the truth about what the hell goes on inside Adam Levine’s underpants. But when you’re famous, there are only two ways you can guarantee that the women you cheat with don’t tell people that you’re secretly fucking. Either she disappears under mysterious circumstances forever, or she keeps quiet because she has just as much to lose as you do. Meaning that, when you’re famous, you should cheat with an equally famous person.
But how does a normal person last a lifetime without sacrificing his or her marital vows? Some sobering statistics: 57 percent of men and 54 percent of women admit to cheating on their spouse. That’s a huge amount of people fucking around on each other after a bunch of oral and written contracts swearing they won’t do so. So, why do people cheat? Answer: Because other people have different cocks and pussies than their husbands and wives, and don’t come with the same endless amount of emotional upkeep.
Do people cheat because they are sick of the same stories, positions, and private parts? Well, yes, probably. My own suspicion of why they cheat is because we are, ultimately, weird animals. We lose all sense of right and wrong in the moments when we are charged up with flirtation or the dangerous adrenaline associated with flirting. Once you get past a certain point, like the aforementioned boiling kettle, it’s pretty difficult not to do. Tip: try not to get to that point.
The 80/20 Rule in Relationships
Based on the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s principle, the 80/20 rule has also been applied to relationships. The rule says that in any given decent relationship, you’re going to receive about 80 percent of what you need from your partner. And then, because we are greedy pigs driven by animal urges and desires, when we meet someone outside our relationship, even though they may only provide the 20 percent of what we need (the exact percentage we are lacking in our primary relationship), we trade it all away for that little piece that we are missing. After things settle down a bit, we might realize that what we have left is only that 20 percent. We don’t realize how good we had it. By only focusing on the negative, we fucked it all up and lost a solid B for a big, fat F.
So why do men, in particular, cheat? There are tons of excuses: “She criticizes and nags me.” “She doesn’t look like the woman I married. Those three kids wrecked her body.” “Hey, she stopped fucking me.” “Men aren’t built for monogamy.” “It’s just sex; it’s not like I love her.” Maybe the really real truth is probably very similar to what George Mallory said of climbing Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.”
Men have the opportunity to do it more than they want not to do it. There are just so many vaginas out there in the world that go unfucked every day by faithful, married men. And, even if they are cheating, there are still so many new and extra holes walking around all the time, everywhere, unfilled by the penis in his pants. Men in long-term relationships are referring to new vaginas when they indicate wanting to go out to “get some strange.” The unfamiliar one versus their own, too-familiar one. But then there’s something else entirely: compartmentalization. Men lock it down, whereas women spill it out to dissect and process. Men love to keep a secret piece of self and soul. Something that is private and unhusked. They have a physiological need for internal privacy in a way that most women do not.
The Definition of Adultery
One guy I worked with, let’s call him the Masturbator, spoke of the tiny office he built for himself out of drywall in his home’s garage. The other writers in the room all referred to this place as “The Masturbatorium.” He was very good at satisfying himself and was extremely prolific. He had, and probably still has, a pathological addiction to online pornography. So when I asked him, thinking it was rhetorical, if his wife of ten years knew how often he was in the office garage jerking off to barely legal Norwegian amputees, he was no less than incredulous: “What?! Of course not!”
Huh? I was genuinely stunned. This masturbation stuff was such a key fact about this man’s personality. It’s just how one would describe him. His hair was baby blond like Rolf Von Trapp’s. He had a better-than-fine knowledge of power tools for someone whose trade was wordplay. And he was a YouPorn jack-off artist and citer of all things odd, disturbing, and sexually fetishistic contained within a computer. He was the guy who started the day with, “Hey, did you guys see . . .?” Our answer was always collectively, “No.”
With total authority, the Masturbator could teach a class on where to find the most interesting kink to self-stimulate to; some repellent, some intriguing, always informative. But his whack status was such a remarkable feature about him; it was the best way to describe this guy, and his own wife didn’t know this? (None of the men in the room wondered about this, while I was completely blown away.) Maybe his wife knew everything about him except his illicit self-pleasuring; maybe it only ended up amounting to a tiny s
hred of his interior soul. But his exceptional jacking off prowess was the thing he kept private. Except to a roomful of professional colleagues whose ability to overshare personal details of their lives provided an instant closeness and false sense of intimacy. Oh, and not just this comedy room. Since TV writing is a nomadic culture, many rooms knew this fact about this guy.
Was this adultery? Well. That definition is up to you, and whomever you enter into a marriage contract with. But the amount of time he dedicated to making love to himself certainly ate into his theoretical time with his wife and two kids, so the volume of secrecy adds up to something on the scale of infidelity. I’ve met so many guys in so many of these rooms. His name could’ve been “the guy who loves to take his kids mini-golfing,” “the one who tells dark stories about his violent, booze-saturated dad,” “the guy who knows every esoteric 1970s male tennis player,” or “the guy who cites the differences between Wednesday and Friday happy hour hors d’oeuvres at a strip club on La Brea.” Or “the guy who didn’t realize until it was too late that the prostitute who blew him in the back of his cousin’s Lincoln might’ve had an Adam’s apple.” I mean, we all knew tons of private things about each other. But the Masturbator’s wife didn’t even know his nickname.
We’d go around about the definition of cheating. It differed between the genders, differed amongst gay people. What is cheating? It basically breaks down like this: women believe that if you exchange unfaithful energy, it’s cheating. Men don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about. Guys are with Bill Clinton on this one; if you only come on her polycotton dress, you did not have sexual relations with that woman.
I’ll say something fairly obvious: if you cheat in your relationship, it’s pretty impossible to go back to the honesty and innocence of pre-cheating. Even if you never tell anyone, you know. Something major has occurred that leads you down a separate existence than your spouse. When you start out—unless you cheat on your honeymoon—the ingredient you have as a couple is truth. If truth changes for only one of you, then there is no more clarity. Your (quite differently wired) minds now see things from two separate vantage points, because one of you is missing big chunks of action. Some men have a “deny till you die” attitude that serves them well. Some men are so compartmentalized they actually believe their own versions of reality.
But just because they believe it, doesn’t make it reality. After all, they must know. It must affect everything, at least subconsciously. Wouldn’t all of life be tempered by particles of the secret? Like, aren’t you thinking of it, mid–tooth brush, mid–cereal pour, mid–tucking in of your kids, mid–fucking your wife, and want to blurt, “Oh, I fucked a different hole.” Doesn’t it put a different hue on it all? Like dropping a solitary anchovy into cake batter, doesn’t it make the entire cake taste like anchovies? And there’s no taking it back. That fishy taste will be in every bite forever.
There are two ways to go, in terms of infidelity. Either be willing to compartmentalize every single thing you do after that—tuck it in, lock it down, be willing never to mention it, even to yourself—or, just don’t do it to begin with.
I knew a woman who comported multiple clandestine relationships within her marriage for years and years, while her husband and kids obliviously lived with what they perceived as all she was capable of giving, emotionally and physically. They had no clue as to her secret, rich personal life. For the purpose of this story, let’s call her “Mom.” But you have to be the captain of Team Narcissism or part serial killer to do this successfully. It sort of shortchanges everyone’s experience, right? She assumed her husband (let’s call him “Dad”) didn’t have a right to know the truth about his own wife, or life. She assumed that her own truth was more important than everyone else’s.
Facts all fell out when she was “ready to be honest,” which gobbled up years of everyone’s perceived reality. And for their kids, it wound up creating a life they thought they had, but one that turned out not to be very real. In hindsight, what was true? What wasn’t ribboned with lies? Well, I have definitely figured out this part: even if kids don’t overtly know that one of their parents is cheating at the time, it models something absent for them; a disconnection.
If you cheat. It’s a cycle. You fuck, and it’s incredible. You confuse this fuck tonic for love. It’s so lava coated and toxic and sexy and crazy. But you are detonating everything you know. You hurt people. You hurt you. All in the name of the feeling of love. You stay with the new person because it feels like it’s true love. It’s amazing, I mean look how she made you feel . . . then as time passes, time heals. Your ex moves on. She’s happy, kids seem good. Better than ever. And then there you are, feeling the same as you used to, but lying next to someone new, wondering what the common denominator is in all of your relationships that make you so miserable. Hey, stupid! It’s you.
Tips and Tricks
I know you hate it when she’s needy. But she’s needy because she has needs. Some of these are bottomless pits that you had nothing to do with digging. Her daddy dug them or her mommy, or her lack-of or too-much of either or both of them. All you can do is not be reactive to them. Don’t trip in the hole. Take them at face value. If you can help her, do it. If you can’t, say that you can’t. Your goal is to communicate what you feel, even if you think it will “start something.”
Please try to say your feelings out loud. I know you think any normal human should be able to read the nonexistent cues you send out, but let’s imagine that she does not. I understand you have limited access to your feelings. You are still just a hiker in the emotional wilderness; I understand that. Just do your best. Simply sew together whatever feelings you can. “Meat good.” “Face pretty.” “Job bad.” “Body tired.” Whatever it is you can immediately discern and report on, in terms of what is happening inside yourself, say it aloud so she may have a clue as to what you are thinking and feeling. This is the only way she can know you.
She is not a detective, although over the years, she has learned to distinguish between the nonverbal cues you emit. A skin rash equals work pressure. Extra bathroom time means a need for privacy. Eating more means feeling neglected. Sleeping less, internal conflict from financial stress. Whatever the physical manifestations of your emotions, share them with your lady partner. I know you think you are sharing them by being in a bad mood or sighing, or yelling about stuff that isn’t the source of what is really bothering you, but that is not always super clear to women.
A bonus tip: administer physical affection to her without needing it to turn into sex. I understand that this is counter to everything your testes want and your soul comprehends. You see sexual relations as relating, and she sees sexual relations as a culmination of having related. But please take my advice, even though it is contrary to your nature. Just take her hand and hold it. Don’t put it atop your dick a few seconds later because your physical proximity makes you feel close, which your body equates with sex. She needs this time to feel close to you, even though you are already feeling it. Slow it down, champ. It’s the only way she can catch up. Just hold the goddamn hand without the expectation of anything more. Give without desiring to receive. In doing so, in sex and in life, you will eventually get everything you need.
Chapter 5
How to Stop Fighting and Start Fucking
“You wanna avoid a fight with her? Think things you never thought you’d think and say things you never thought you’d say.”
The terrifying thing about having a fight with your woman is that you never know how it started. You have stormed out of your own house, keys in hand, with no destination in mind. You have no clue how it devolved to this moment. You were just minding your own business, up there inside your own head—not thinking, talking or communicating in any way. But she’s been carrying something around with her all day. She lays it out there for you. You literally don’t know how to respond. You take a beat, weighing how best to avoid conflict here. You speak. No matter what you say, it always seems t
o bounce the wrong way. You feel like there is no right answer to stop this impending war. But there is.
You must remember, not only women’s genitals are different from yours: we are different. How we think, talk, and feel are different. We are not the same as you. Feminists have not done women a great service by proclaiming that we are. We’re supposed to be gender blind. Post-gender. And obviously we should be, in things like equal rights, equal pay, and the size of the steaks we eat. But men and women are different. It’s not like overly big people, where we’re all the same on the inside. We’re not. And, sure, yes, physiologically we’re not. XX, XY—this is pure science!
But, emotionally, our wiring is totally different, too. In general, you guys are fact based. Women are theorizers. We are feelers. You are doers. We multitask. I observe such gender differences in my own children. I have a son who is ten and a daughter who is seven. When my boy was in kindergarten, I’d ask him daily, so excited to hear every detail, hungry for each morsel, “How was your day?” He’d say, “Good.” I’d say, “That’s it? That’s all? How was it? What did you do? Who did you play with at recess? What was your snack? Were you able to wipe okay?” He’d say, “Great.”
So, I had to wait. I waited three years for my daughter to enter kindergarten to find out the answer to this question, “How was your day?” And then she’d launch, like a downhill skier, arms back, tips pointed for speed. There is not enough breath in her lungs. She’s like a food binger with words. As soon as my daughter learned to talk, she would not shut up. Sawyer has a thousand tales of her slights: “Stella S. got a bigger pudding!” Her snack: “Pudding! It had a blue cookie on it!” Her indignation: “I tried saying the difference between a hard g, ‘gah,’ and a soft g, ‘jah,’ to Enzo, but he was playing with a train!” Someone she’s mad at: “If there’s a jail for kids, that’s where Hudson should live!” A boy she wants to be friends with, a girl she wishes she wasn’t friends with, a jag about a fantastic poop, and a non sequitur about the ending of a book where the giraffe hilariously contracted a case of the hiccoughs.