by Ada Calhoun
Reliable infidelity statistics are notoriously difficult to come by, but studies suggest that at least one in ten, and probably far more, married people cheat. I’ve begun to think that being good at monogamy—an ability to accept sameness—isn’t a trait, like green eyes; it’s a skill, like playing a sport. Some are born with an aptitude; others cultivate one or give themselves permission not to. Some people never look at another person. Others sleep with everything that moves.
Neal and I have found ourselves in the middle—not that we have the much-maligned “open marriage.” Actually, scratch that. I’d argue that everyone who leaves the house has an open marriage. It’s just a question of how open: What about flirting? Watching porn? Friendships with members of the opposite sex?
If marriages exist on a monogamy spectrum between totally closed and totally open, with 0 being never leaving each other’s side or looking at another person, even on a screen, and 5 being extended romantic and sexual affairs with many other people, I’m by nature a somewhat flirty but reliably faithful 1–2.
For a time, Neal thought it might make him feel less guilty if I occasionally fooled around with other people. I considered this a lousy idea until I found myself attracted to someone else, at which point I thought he was a genius and engaged in some 3-zone behavior. This was followed by a chaos-fleeing period of 0-ness.
Many of my friends fall into the 0–1 range. They seem neither to be tempted nor to stir up temptation in others. They admit to me that they have opted out of that side of life, a choice some telegraph by wearing sandals with wool socks, like so many Trappist monks. At times, I’ve envied them their placidity. But then they tell me that they don’t have much going on at home sexually, and that sometimes they miss it.
“Paradoxically,” says renowned sex therapist Esther Perel, “the things that nurture love are sometimes the very same ones that flatten desire. . . . Family life wants consistency, repetition, routine; and the erotic thrives on the unpredictable, novelty, and the unexpected.”
I’ve noticed that Neal and I need some distance to feel attraction. If we’re too connected, there’s no space to bridge with desire. If we’re too far apart, we become estranged. I’ve begun to suspect that, regardless of what women’s magazines tell us, there might be no perfect way to reach peak sexiness and perfect security simultaneously, that marriage might just involve finding and refinding our own balance between boredom and jealousy, safety and danger.
One woman I met who lives in California and has been married for fourteen years started out her marriage in the 3 zone. When she and her husband were first together, they would sometimes flirt or even make out with other people.† As their marriage changed, that became less okay with her, something she realized when he kissed a libertine friend of theirs: “Before we had kids, it would have turned me on that he made out with a friend of ours at a party. But after. . . . What works the first couple of years might not work once you have kids.”
Ultimately, though, she wound up grateful for the disruption: “I realized I wasn’t giving my husband what he needed—being a new mother and all that, I was paying a lot more attention to the baby than to him. I realized, I want to be the person to make my husband feel good.” After Neal’s affair, I felt something like that too, once I got over the shock. It made me sad that he’d been lonely, and it made me face the reality that I’d been lonely too.
An acquaintance of mine and his wife are 5’s. They both sometimes sleep with other people, together or apart. “From the start, that was the spirit of our relationship,” he said, “a playfulness, and not wanting to hold each other back.” He described what he felt a couple needed for this to succeed:
People act like having an open relationship means no boundaries, but really it involves more boundaries, because you have to talk all the time to make it work. There is this idea of “compersion.” It’s the idea that it’s possible, if you really love someone, to not be threatened by their sexual feelings for other people but to enjoy them. It’s a silly word and comes out of a hippie commune [the free-love Kerista Commune in San Francisco, which lasted from 1971 to 1991], but I think there’s something to it. It’s kind of like lascivious empathy. I’ve felt it. It is possible to sort of flip jealousy and to take pleasure in their pleasure.
I’m nowhere near this evolved. When I think about Neal kissing someone else, I want to start knocking things off tables. When I think about myself kissing someone else, I get a thrill. That’s the opposite of lascivious empathy: an anxious double standard.
Having a very open marriage worked for this man and his wife for a long time. “It was how we got together—having adventures—and we carried it into our marriage,” he told me. “We slept with other people separately and together. We talked about it, and it made us closer and our marriage hotter. There were no secrets.” Once they had a baby, though, they were spending less and less time together and more and more either with the baby or out in the world alone. “Raising a child can be so isolating,” he said. He and his wife were living on parallel tracks.
One day she found a text on his phone from another woman and confronted him about it. Secrecy wasn’t part of the arrangement.
“Well, you’re having an affair, too,” he said. “I know you are.”
She admitted it, and they had a huge fight.
“But it was the best thing that could have happened,” he said. “Yelling was so much better than lying in bed silent all that time. I felt like I hadn’t looked at her for years. The next morning, things started getting better, and now they are really great. These Zen masters I met told me that you have to accept the other person one hundred percent, that all fights come from nonacceptance.”
Another man I know who has been in the 5 zone told me he’d always prided himself on the sexual openness of his marriage but had recently had an epiphany about the value of the boring parts:
My best friend’s father died suddenly. He was sixty-one and healthy and then one day he woke up, started to say something to his wife, and fell over, dead. I went to the funeral. A thousand people came. And all these people kept coming up to my friend, saying, “I knew your father for ten years,” or five, or twenty, “and he changed my life.” All these stories about things he had done for them. He’d been with his wife since they were nineteen. Everyone loved them. They raised this amazing family and helped so many people. Marriage was a collaboration that let them do all these things for other people, that let them find their purpose. And I went home to my wife and I said, “That is the life I want. And we are not going to get there the way we are going, because you with these other men—it dominates my thoughts.”
Recently, I found myself doing yard work for the first time in my life. I learned that the way to take care of a tree is to prune back the little shoots and scraggly branches so that the nutrients will go instead toward the rest of the tree, making it stronger. Perhaps avoiding affairs is a little like pruning back a tree to help it grow. If you’re fooling around too much, your marriage might make a pretty hedge, but it will never be an oak. Friends and colleagues can’t take refuge beneath a shrub.
“When people are married,” one friend said, “and they zoom in and out of other people’s lives while staying married, they end up hurting others. I think it happens every day, these infidelities, but there is a cost.”
Neal stopped seeing the other woman. We talked about it ad nauseam. He suffered. I suffered. She probably suffered, too, and eventually I found myself feeling pity for her. Some friends told me I should leave Neal, saying I deserved someone who would never look at another woman. If such a man existed, though, I doubted I would want him.
I also had to admit that temptation was the least surprising thing that could have happened that year—a year when we were both working a lot and we had a little kid and were apart so often. (I was let go from my job, the one paying most of our bills and providing health insurance, soon after Neal revealed his affair. I think we skipped the Christmas card that y
ear.)
What’s more, I knew firsthand how such a thing could happen. When I was living with Neal in New York before we got married, I had a male best friend at work. We had a flotilla of inside jokes, nicknames for our co-workers, and a habit of e-mailing each other all day, every day. We were reading books and listening to songs and watching movies the other had recommended. We almost never spent time together outside the office, but during work hours we were an army of two.
Then, one night, after work and a couple of drinks, we kissed. And despite how much I’d wanted it to happen, I was caught off guard by its intensity—it was a time-stops, rest-of-the-world-melts-away kiss. I’d been looking at him out of the corner of my eye for months, and now here I was staring at him close-up, my hand touching his scratchy face. He became, in an instant, warm and three-dimensional. The transformation was so startling it was like that cartoon where an ordinary frog suddenly sports a cane and top hat and breaks into song.
I was so dazed by that kiss that for minutes I was able to forget there would be consequences. If the kiss had been worse—sloppy, drunken, forgettable—maybe we could have stayed friends. Instead, it alerted us to what roiled beneath the surface of our office banter. It was as though we’d started a garden with our eyes closed and opened them to find it thick with plants. No one else, I realized, would ever quite understand this. Love and sex: they’re the ultimate inside joke.
“Just what the hell is your plan here?” Neal asked when I admitted to the kiss.
I had no plan. I’d hoped, vaguely, that I’d be able to keep them both close. Now I was mortified to realize how reckless I’d been. Neal wanted to marry me. He’d believed in us having our own friends, even thought flirting was fine, but he drew the line at my having a boyfriend at work.
His request that I break the friendship off was not unreasonable, but it proved more painful than I’d anticipated. When I pulled away, my friend was furious. And without his amusing, seductive e-mails to sustain me, I began to find that workplace intolerably lonely. I was relieved to get an offer for another job, though I remained heartsick. For years, I hoped I would run into that man on the subway. I imagined I saw him in crowds.
These days, I don’t enjoy crushes as much as I used to. That’s not how I want to be with other people—selfish, confusing, greedy. I want to be better than that. In her story “Floating Bridge,” Alice Munro writes about times “when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.” These other men—did I ever really see them? Or were they just projection screens onto which I could shadow-puppet my own desires?
Besides, trying to have fun but not too much fun can be exhausting, like playing the game Operation, where you can extract the prize only if you don’t hit any of the sensors on all sides. Maybe more than Operation it’s like Russian roulette, because for every five times an extramarital flirtation makes you feel extra alive, there’s one crush that kills you.
“Every married woman I know has suffered those unspoken devastations,” a friend of mine told me the other day, recalling a moment in her marriage when she was smiling at her husband and doing the dishes but could think of nothing but whether the phone in her pocket would ping with a response from another man. “Everyone talks about what crushes do to a marriage, whether they strengthen it or weaken it or whatever, but no one talks about what it does to us, to have that connection and then lose it. It’s brutal. And you’re all alone in it. Because what are you going to do—ask your husband to comfort you?”
“Marriage involves more suffering than most of modern American life,” the poet Sparrow told me. “That’s why so many escape it. It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband—just like females did in the eleventh century. It’s a completely antiquated setup, but no one can think of another one. Or, rather, lots of people can think of many other ones, and they all seem to work well for about two and a half years. Then they collapse.”
A few years ago, I made fast friends with a man at a work conference in Florida. We snuck out of a tedious lecture together and drove to a mansion and park called Vizcaya. It was raining, and we walked through the gardens, looking at the plants and out at the ocean and talking as though we’d known each other forever. We sent another conference friend, marooned in the lecture hall, a photo of ourselves smiling in ponchos in the rain. She texted back, “Did you elope?”
Then, because we’re both married to other people, we never saw each other again. Now that magical day feels like a waste, like I did job training for a position I’ll never take. Worse, I can’t turn to Neal and say, “Remember all those giant urns at Vizcaya? So many urns!” I can’t talk to anyone about the urns.
“One time when I was seven or eight, I was at Chuck E. Cheese’s with my parents,” Neal tells me, “feeling totally secure and happy. I was chattering away, and then I got up to go to the bathroom and I came back and sat down still rambling and then I looked up and realized that the people at the table weren’t my parents. I’d sat down at the wrong table. I screamed. And that’s how my affair felt when I realized what was going on. I looked up and I’d been talking to this other person who wasn’t you and I felt terrified.”
The other day, I called Neal from the street, dying to talk to him. “Remember when we moved to this neighborhood,” I said when he picked up, “and rented movies at the Smokiest Movie Rental Place in the World? The woman who ran it is still alive! I just passed her on the street!”
Another time, we took Oliver to Disney World and moved according to an elaborate crowd-thwarting strategy I’d culled from the Internet, epitomized by the battle cry “Run to Dumbo!” We didn’t wait in any lines. It was the greatest tactical success of my life. “Run to Dumbo!” has served as a family mantra ever since.
That, for me, may be the most persuasive argument for monogamy: it lets you keep all your inside jokes in one place.
A man I know who divorced his wife of fifteen years dated for just a year before marrying again; he is in his fifteenth year of that second marriage. “I thought I would like being single more than I did,” he said. “It was like the movie Home Alone. At first, it was great. Then it really wasn’t.” This time around, he’s grateful for boredom, seeing it as a challenge rather than a burden: “When you’re bored, you’re forced to figure things out, to be creative.”
The other day on a city sidewalk, I saw a little boy approach an open fire hydrant. He kept putting his hand in the stream of water over and over again, shrieking with delight each time. His mother looked intensely bored. My heart went out to her. And yet I thought: I would give every cent I have to spend one more hour with Oliver at that age.
I try to remember that during the hours I spend throwing coins to him in the pool: how this will feel years later, when he’s taller than me and lives on his own. Probably it will feel like nursing does in my memory—like a Madonna and Child fresco illuminated by divine light, rather than a bleary task bathed in the glow of a TV showing the Mets squandering an early lead.
Back then, a labor and delivery nurse explained that breast milk starts out weak and sugary but turns less sweet and more filling—the baby gets dessert first. In marriage, too, I’ve begun to suspect, the boring later phase nourishes more than the rapture of new love.
Eighteen hours after a discussion about car insurance so boring I wanted to lie down under the collision-damage-waivered wheels, Neal and I found ourselves at a minor-league baseball game. Oliver kept running to the parking lot with the other kids to chase foul balls. As Neal and I sat on the bleachers, everything seemed to make us laugh, from the five-slot hitter’s use of the walk-up song “Beast of Burden,” which we translated as “No, really, don’t count on me to get you home,” to the giant cups of ice served with tiny bottles of wine at the concession stand. I felt happy and free and weirdly, dopily in love. Exposition establishes the plot. The boring parts don’t last forever. In retrospect, they are
n’t even boring.
* It was his fault, because he didn’t stop me from breaking it.
† Inspiring just the right amount of jealousy is a time-tested strategy for marital satisfaction, confirmed in independent clinical trials by the Kama Sutra’s author and by Beyoncé, as in her club track / white paper “Freakum Dress.”
TOAST 3
Containing Multitudes
Marriage is people.
—Maurice Lamm,
The Jewish Way in Love and Marriage, 1980
FOR A WEEK THIS SUMMER, I wore a tight-bodiced, large-sleeved, floor-length pioneer dress covered with a handmade Red Cross apron, my hair piled on top of my head. I bandaged scrapes with gauze, felt sweaty foreheads to check for fever, and when a child fell and knocked out a baby tooth while playing Ante-I-Over, I put him on the nurse’s cot with an old adventure book called The Coral Island and a rag cooled in the stream.
“Miss Cook,” a little girl in braids and a gingham frock asked me, “could you help me across the road?”
“Nurse Cook,” a little boy in overalls and bare feet said, pointing at another child, “he hurt his elbow.”
This scenario came about like everything interesting does: completely at random. Oliver had wanted to go to the old-timey camp near his grandparents’ house; the only way I could get him off the waiting list was by agreeing to renew my CPR certification and volunteering as the camp nurse. Watching the old-timey children make cornhusk dolls and blackberry ink, play Hoop and Stick, Corncob Darts, and Maypole, I had time to reflect on how we can end up all sorts of places we never thought we would, filling all manner of unlikely roles—even, sometimes, a nineteenth-century nurse named Miss Ruth Cook.