Michael married his high-school sweetheart. They met when she was sixteen and he was seventeen, then they lived together, and then they got married and had children. He had good jobs because he was a tech guy and everybody who was any good at technical stuff had a good job and Michael was good at technical stuff. This is exactly the way it’s supposed to work, isn’t it? You get married to the woman you love and work in the field you know and raise strong, healthy children.
In Michael’s case, as in the cases of millions of others, the river of life eroded the banks.
“We did not have the opportunity to explore when we were young,” he says of his wife. Ostensibly, Michael is talking about sex, but I do not think that’s all he is talking about. “When we were young we seemed to agree, but we began to diverge in our sexual outlook. Over time she became much more conservative. You know, hormonal changes go on, she had the kids. Anyway, it caused us to drift apart in that realm.”
This is something I have been noticing on my journey, the way people refer to sex as “that realm,” a place apart from their regular lives. They make it sound like the old conception of Limbo I picked up in Catholic school, the place where unbaptized babies went, a place I always imagined was located on a Pacific island. There were beach towels. Or, more positively, they make “that realm” sound like a Club Med where you get to behave the way you want to behave but are not allowed to behave when you are home. I wonder if the stories people tell me would be any different if they thought of sex the way they thought of playing golf or a night out eating seared ahi while wearing smart clothes, something fun, but a regular part of life.
Anyway, for Michael sex was an escape. His mind was a logic machine and he lived and worked among others whose minds were logic machines, all highly talented people. Sex allowed him to shut the machine down and think about something else other than calculations and data. By tapping a primal instinct, he could chase away the discipline of logic and lose control. But when sex with his wife became rare and mundane, he had nowhere to go.
The millennial technology financial meltdown took Michael with it. Suddenly it didn’t matter how good he was at his job because his job no longer existed. Then his marriage folded. Michael could have absorbed the financial strain, the family frictions, if only the sex was there to provide his escape. “But it wasn’t. So there I was, forty-something, which was young to me, feeling virile, and nothing to do. That led to fights. And that led to my ex saying to me one day, ‘If you do not like it here, get the fuck out!’ ‘If you think somebody else is better for you, go!’ At that point I said, ‘Okay.’ I am sitting out on the curb saying to myself, ‘What next?’ And that is when it began for me, this period of exploration.”
Before the Internet, a man going through a midlife crisis had options, but not many and they weren’t very practical. There were “swinger parties,” and “key parties,” those suburban wife-swapping soirees that were supposed to be rampant among the sophisticated and aspiring junior executives of the 1960s and 1970s. But they were far more common in pulp fiction than in real life, and even back then Michael would never have been a suburban, leisure-suited party boy with a too-quick laugh and a martini. He didn’t know any swingers anyway, and he is not the kind of guy to walk up to a couple and ask if they would be interested in a three-way. Swinger magazines have been around for a long time, too, but placing an ad, renting a post-office box to receive the responses, was cumbersome and limited and, again, not for Michael.
“Now you can sit down with a computer, and in the anonymous setting of your basement, lie in your bed with your WiFi and with any digital savvy at all, within ten minutes post an ad on something like Craig’s List and away you go.”
So away he went.
Susan has a bit of New Age about her—she is always entering a “good space” or leaving a “bad space”—and yet she can sound supremely practical. She calls me “hon” without irony nor a hint of flirtatiousness like some crusty diner waitress on a road bypassed by the interstate, a habit she has picked up working as a nurse. When you are sliding a rubber catheter tube up a guy’s urethra, it helps if he knows that you know exactly what you are doing, that you won’t put up with fussiness, but that you sympathize.
Susan spends a lot of time, or what little free time she has, reading and thinking. So she has thought a great deal about what she would say to a person like me who is sitting back at her kitchen table and asking questions about her life. She has a strong impulse to make me understand that her life is not so very different from anybody else’s; she just happens to crave experience. Sometimes the experiences are good ones, sometimes they are bad ones, but harboring regret is a waste of time. There have been reasons to regret, for sure. Romances have gone sour. Some were just strange, like the guy she lived with for eighteen months who turned out to be a cross-dresser but never told Susan he was a cross-dresser, and if there is one woman on the planet a man could tell about his cross-dressing, Susan is that woman because she would say, “Well, that makes you special; how can we have fun with this?” but he didn’t tell her and she was hurt by his lack of trust. Plus, he complained about her job. All those penises she looked at every day played on his mind and made him jealous. She still laughs out loud when she tells the story, because if you have seen one shriveled little penis you have seen them all. In the context of nursing work, penises aren’t sexy.
When she tells stories of hurt, she never frames the plot to focus on pain. Instead, they serve as little illustrations of the ways in which everybody gets hurt if they step outside themselves and what fun would it be if you just kept yourself locked in all safe and sound? All in all, her wounds have not been any more deadly than most other people’s. Her siblings are the safe-and-sound types. They haven’t experienced half of what she has, and haven’t been hurt half as much, but she suspects they aren’t as happy as she is either.
Susan has had to make a peace with her family. They have not always approved of the way she has lived her life and have not hesitated to criticize. So she is skeptical of professions of love. She is skeptical of media, too. And the medical profession she is part of, and business, and religion, and especially politicians of all stripes. Our society no longer breeds trust, she tells me.
And yet she insists she is happy.
Life is too short not to be happy. You can wait all your life for the good stuff to start, or you can do something to make it happen and Susan is the kind to make it happen. Like now, for instance. She was in that last relationship until a few months ago, was crazy about the guy, but it didn’t work out. So she took a breath, saddled up, and went online.
Men outnumber women online by a wide margin, but Susan is picky. A lot of them snap a digital image of their penises, and Susan isn’t exactly impressed by penises. Many say something crude in their ads, thinking a blatant come-on will attract, but she skips right past those. She liked Michael’s response because he sounded intelligent and straightforward and never mentioned sex, at least not outright. He said he was a middle-aged man, professional, educated, and was looking for somebody who thought like he did. He said he wanted to spend time together.
She answered. “I told him he was intriguing, and he said, ‘You don’t know me well enough to say I am intriguing.’”
“Hard to get, huh?” I say to Michael, who is standing nearby. “Were you giving her sass?”
He laughs. “Like, ‘You can’t have that.’” He glances over his spectacles. “I got that bad boy thing goin’ on!”
Susan and Michael exchanged a series of e-mails, each slowly courting the other with banter and the slow dance of revelation. They made it clear to each other that sex was the point and if something developed besides sex, that was all to the good, but sex, the kind of sex that has a few twists and turns, was the agenda.
In the days before online chatting, digital ads, and the ability to send photos of yourself performing sex acts screaming around the world, Michael and Susan would never have met. And if they had, th
ey would have talked on the phone and likely never broached the subject of kinky sex. That is the wonder of the digital revolution, Michael says, why it has become a vital tool enabling sexual experimentation. When Michael talks about the Internet, he uses words that remind me of Don, words like convenience and freedom and self-expression, but he sounds less giddy than Don.
“It is a double-edged sword sometimes. It puts it right in your face.”
What’s “it”? Sex? Loneliness? The fact that you are a middle-aged man alone on your bed scanning a computer screen for “intimate connections”? “You do search in solitude. It’s not like in the days when you were part of somebody or part of your social group when you went to church, or had people you went to school with. I think as you get older, you lose those kinds of friends. As those things change in your life, you realize there is this portal into a parallel universe.”
In the parallel universe, the intimacy that used to grow over a lifetime snaps to life in a flash. You say what you want to say and tell other people exactly what you want because there is no chance she is going to throw a glass of cabernet in your face or spread the word among your mutual friends that you are a weaselly pervert. There is very little time wasted. The long discussions over pasta dinners on first dates are replaced by keystrokes sent into cyberspace. You don’t even have to dress up. You can sip a cold beer and pitch woo in your boxer shorts.
If Susan detects too much drama in a guy online, she moves along to the next one. If Michael senses a woman won’t be up for his brand of sexual shenanigans, he won’t bother to send another e-mail. In chat rooms, they say, you can always tell who is for real and who is posing and get a pretty good idea of their education and their openness to whatever it is that they want somebody to be open to.
“I work with hospice nurses, and you do not talk about sexuality in these terms and you cannot talk about who you are,” Susan says. “It does not work that way, at church or school or wherever your community is. You cannot be real open and talk about your sexuality, but you sure can online and you can find somebody who is interested in the same things you are without exposing yourself. For me, online, the freedom I get is that I can talk about all the intimate deep, dark secrets. If I meet a guy at church, I cannot be sitting there in church going, ‘You know, sex is so important to me!’ That is probably just not gonna fly. They are not going to expect it. I do not know if I would feel comfortable doing that. Now, there could be individuals like me at church, but I am not gonna sit there and talk about my sexuality in a public setting. Online it is a public setting, but the anonymity is there and I can be 100 percent who I am.”
Because of all the online spadework and revelation, when they finally did meet in person for lunch, they spent three hours talking and never mentioned sex.
“We talked about who we were in the world,” Susan says.
“I was looking for a new friend,” Michael tells me. “A new friend who had some of the same thoughts in her mind as I did. You have to have other interests after you climb out of bed.”
“Or you don’t,” Susan interjects, “but then it’s not as good.”
“Friendship is important and intimacy is important,” Michael says. “But if you meet someone and you have nothing else in common, but the sex is great, well, is that so bad?”
“Exactly,” Susan says. “You know what it is, and it is never gonna be anything more than that, but that’s not a bad thing.”
For Michael, the Internet is a reflection of the human mind, and so, to anybody who would condemn his own behavior, he would say, “Take a look inside your own mind if you think we are the freaks.” The Web, he argues, gives him “the freedom to be free to think things you want to think and not only think them, but go and act upon them. It’s self-actualization.”
“Wow, I had never thought of it that way,” Susan says, “self-actualization as being part of this, but yeah.”
“I mean, how cool is it that you can dream the dream, then go make it real?” Michael asks.
“You can find somebody to make it real with,” Susan enthuses.
At the moment, Michael is hoping to self-actualize with another woman named Christine and Christine’s boyfriend. Last night, he arranged a meeting with Christine after she answered an ad Michael and Susan placed on Craig’s List looking for a couple. Susan was upset that he went to the bar without her, though she does not use the word upset. Disturbed, maybe. Chagrined.
Michael scrambles to explain himself. “Look, the female half of the other couple called me and we talked on the phone and she said—Susan was working, by the way—and she said, ‘Why not come and meet me at a bar? My boyfriend can’t come because he works a night shift.’ So I went and met her at this bar last night.”
Susan smiles. When Michael told her he had met Christine, she asked for a conversation with him. “That only took three hours to work through. I brought baggage. He brought baggage. We got back to some good space.”
Not perfect space. Not enough space. Susan has paused for the first time in an hour.
“So tell me about her. Come on,” she says to Michael.
Michael is on the spot.
“She was interesting. She was cute. She has a health-care background.” Michael looks at Susan with hope in his eyes. “She’s not an EMT now, but she spent time with EMTs.” Michael tries a segue. “I tend to find there is a little correlation between edgy kinds of sexual behavior and the jobs some of these people do. You see trauma nurses, EMTs, police officers, firemen. My gut tells me there is some correlation there between that adrenaline-pumping kind of job and other areas of their lives.”
Susan refuses to take the bait to change subjects.
“We are going out, maybe tomorrow night, all four us together,” she says, “to see if we like each other. We don’t know yet. We have not made formal plans. Maybe we’ll get drinks and snack and meet her boyfriend.”
“Christine is a bit younger, about forty,” Michael says. “She is interested in bisexual experiences, in trying it. Susan has some experience with that.”
Susan does have experience with that and she has experience with swinging, so that’s not what bugged her. It was the fact that Michael met with Christine alone. Now she doesn’t sound keen on the setup at all.
“What about that other girl?” she asks, referring to another responder to their ad. Michael and Susan sent a few photos to her and she was supposed to have answered. They have been waiting for her e-mail. “What did she say?”
Michael makes a few clicks on Susan’s laptop computer. There is an e-mail waiting.
“I was wondering if I am the only dirty, kinky little girl who finds that sick sort of role play oh so hot,” the e-mail reads. “How big is your dick daddy? And I am glad I can make mommy watch as I fuck my daddy. I am a redhead, too. How fun is that? And I have red pussy hair to prove it.”
“Well, that’s pretty explicit,” Susan says, frowning.
“So do you like that or not?” I ask.
“It can work both ways.” Susan thinks. “To me, that is a big, drama-filled response.”
Earlier I had asked how these two would define their relationship. “What are you? Lovers?”
“Lovers is a good word,” Michael replied. “I prefer the phrase intimate friendship.”
“Which is different than friends with benefits,” Susan interjected. “It is intimacy on several different levels.”
Susan seemed a little nervous about words like love. She told me several times before I even arrived in Maryland that she is not “in love.” They have never talked about love. Usually, when Susan finds great sex, and comfort with a man, she falls in love rather hard and rather fast, and the interesting thing is, she is not doing that with Michael. No, she is not in love. What a relief. “We are not future-oriented people,” she said.
They seemed to work hard at not being in love, and now there is this hint of jealousy or mistrust the way somebody in love might feel vulnerable. Personally, I think the
y are in love, and fresh with the memories of how thin the ice under love can be. They are skating as fast as they can to avoid falling in.
That’s why I have been stalling about going upstairs, I guess. Susan has been sincere since I first made contact and I have grown to like her. Now that I have met Michael, I like him, too. I came all the way to Maryland to see how they took photos of their sexual escapades to share with others, and how they navigated their own sexual terrain through the Internet and then made it come to life. Both of them, especially Susan, who is a gleeful exhibitionist, have welcomed me to watch, but now it feels wrong. This isn’t porn. I think I could intrude on sex, but I have no desire to intrude on love.
Susan is palpably straining to go upstairs and get going, though. I follow them up, and after some initial awkwardness, they kiss passionately, knocking Michael’s glasses askew. I see some things and I hear some things and a few photos are snapped, but I am not going to tell you much about any of this. Instead, I am going to point out that I am kneeling outside Susan’s open bedroom door trying to make myself unobtrusive and I am not really looking at them. I am scanning the books in a bookcase. Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love is there, which I know well. Susan told me earlier today that it was a big influence on her thinking. In it, Heinlein’s hero, an especially randy immortal, rejects all sexual taboos, even managing to have sex with his own mother thanks to time travel.
A book on Anselm of Canterbury, the father of Scholasticism, is there, too.
I am telling you about these books because I am comfortable around books. I am not comfortable watching two people I have come to know have sex. This surprises me perhaps as much as it is surprising you. Still, I am supposed to be reporting, and so I see enough to get the gist of their style and to notice when Michael pulls out one of those wooden sticks used to stir paint, but before Michael has taken off his trousers, I close the bedroom door softly and walk out of Susan’s house.
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