Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  Letting myself lust after other men means indulging in a willful delusion. I never went in for hallucinogens, but maybe that’s what I want here: a psychic vacation, one in which I’m a liberated version of my normal married self.

  And yet the drug isn’t quite strong enough to fully take me out of this particular world. I never have been able to forget that I’m married. Even midway through a sexy dream about someone else, I will think, What are you doing? You’re married! A sense of transgression amplifies pleasure—I am so BAD!—but also limits it. Ever since we met, back in the year 2000, Neal has never not been in my head. Can’t I even be free when I’m asleep? I ask my brain. My brain says no.

  In my twenties, I realized that I couldn’t be a Sanskrit translator and also do the other things I wanted to do in life. As a cub reporter at the Austin Chronicle, I was able to attend boxing matches in rural Texas, stay out late at rock shows, and interview interesting people who passed through town. So I chose journalism over linguistics.

  Some of the drama in the Five Nalas story comes not, I think, from the danger that the princess will choose wrong but from the fact that she has to choose at all. Even if your choice is perfect, you will have to put all your faith in one person, and someone will put all their faith in you. That’s a lot of pressure. There’s something so much easier about sitting in limbo, like the Sanskrit chairman deciding whether or not to get married.

  Even after you’ve already chosen—maybe especially then—the choice can be terrifying. I chose well. But I dream that I might be able to pretend I’m still looking up and down a line of suitors, wondering which one to take home. I dream that I could play “Husband” like I play “City.”

  Driving through the Midwest after kissing the man who wasn’t my husband, I looked at the cornfields and the pastures and the play-set barns and silos, with the radio on scan until it picked up Taylor Swift. (I like to leave rental-car radios on scan until I hear a song I know. It drives other people crazy, so I can do it only when I’m alone.)

  So many farms and trees and thoughts about the oddness of having someone else touch me, the thrill and the horror. How lucky I am that so far in life, lust generally has led to adventure and not tragedy. Once, twenty years ago, in bed with someone I didn’t know well, I thought, Well, this wasn’t a very good idea. But even then, the idea had been mine.

  “I made out with someone,” I told Neal when I got home and he asked me for the tenth time why I was acting weird. I’d spent a full hour thinking I could get away with not mentioning it, before remembering that I am terrible at keeping secrets.

  “Oh yeah?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It was a fling. I didn’t have sex with him. I really hope you’re not upset.” My heart was racing. I waited to hear what he would say.

  “I’m not too upset,” he said, finally.

  And when he didn’t ask for details, I felt like a governor had called to stay my execution. And then we had some of the best sex of our lives. I had acclimated a little to the other man’s body, even though I’d been near it for only one evening, and so Neal’s body felt surprising and familiar at the same time, like getting back into a hot tub after a cold plunge.

  Later, Neal had a confession, too: the night I’d been doing what I did, someone we know had told him he was attractive and he’d said she was, too. Nothing more had happened. He was proud that a pretty woman had praised him. But I heard the subtext: they wanted each other. He has that bats-flying-out-from-under-the-bridge feeling too! I realized, horrified.

  He had joked about how we were “going on a break” while I was on tour. Now it seemed like he’d (a little bit) meant it. And I was faced with a distressing realization: he wants other people, has the same feelings of loneliness and of longing that I do. We are both Nala and Damayanti—hoping to be chosen, hoping to choose right. How do you look out into the world, see your spouse standing next to all these other people, know they’re all there for you, and never choose wrong?

  When Neal told me about his exchange with this woman, who exudes a cheerful sexuality I find insufferable, I was furious. Then I was upset with myself. By doing what I’d done, I’d abandoned the right to be offended. “No affair could ever be as hot as having the moral high ground,” my friend Jason had once told me, and while I’d found that funny at the time, now I saw that Jason was entirely correct.

  I struggled to quash my jealousy. I tried to be inspired by Neal’s example. He didn’t appear to be too upset by what I’d done. There was even a payoff to that “break,” or whatever it was: a sexual charge that lingered for weeks. Wanting each other that powerfully after so many years is a gift. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t negative fallout, too.

  “Have you heard the Taylor Swift song ‘Wildest Dreams’?” I asked Neal weeks later. “It was in constant rotation with ‘Hotline Bling’ when I was driving around on tour.” On my laptop, I called up the video for “Wildest Dreams,” with the old-time movie set and the giraffe. I love Taylor Swift, especially when she sexily talks about her clothes and makeup—a nice dress, red lips and rosy cheeks, a tight little skirt.

  Neal got quiet. He looked pained. “Well, I can see why you’d like that song,” he said. “It’s about a star-crossed affair.”

  “Nooooo!” I said. “That didn’t even occur to me! It’s just a song! It was on the radio every two minutes, that’s all! It wasn’t like that with that guy!”

  “Huh,” he said. “Well, anyway, ‘Blank Space’ is better.”

  Chris Kraus’s cult classic I Love Dick is a strange, self-indulgent, mesmerizing art project of a book in which Kraus and her husband stoked a crush she had on their friend named Dick via letter after obsessive letter. It was fun for them, and hot, until Kraus started to develop strong real-life feelings for Dick. No longer was it something the couple was playing at together; it became more than a game for her. After Dick rejected her (pointing out, rightly, that she barely knew him), she was heartbroken and unable to fully return to her husband, Sylvère Lotringer. When Lotringer was asked, years later, what the project taught him, he said, “I learned that you have to pay for indulgence.”

  Neal felt threatened by what I had done, and at the same time, he felt that his own flirtation was no big deal. To him, the mild intrigue with that woman was merely a validation of his virility, but to me, it felt monstrous. I hated the idea that this trollop was walking around knowing that my husband found her attractive, that he’d given her that right. This, even though if you’d asked me whether I knew he found other women attractive or whether this particular woman was objectively attractive, I would have said, “Of course.”

  How terribly hard it is to accept that other people feel what we feel. When politicians cheat, we say they are morally bankrupt. Throw the bastards out. When celebrity men lust after nannies, we shame them on tabloid covers. But when one day at work our eyes meet someone else’s, it feels different. Why do we treat out-of-bounds desire as beyond our control when it happens to us but as an easily avoided abomination when it happens to others? And why do these things feel so different to us in the moment than they do to our spouses later?

  For weeks, Neal and I talked and talked and talked. At some point, I became conscious of the fact that every minute of making out with that man had been paid for in hours of processing at home.

  Monogamy wasn’t made marital law on a whim. When we come across a fence in the middle of the road, G. K. Chesterton noted, it’s probably there for a reason: “The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.”

  “The hardest lesson in a marriage,” says my friend Asia, “is understanding the truth of the other person, believing in your heart that they are as real as you are, and their feelings matter as much. We all think that when something is wrong it will feel w
rong to us, but that’s the biggest lie. So many things that your partner will see as betrayal will feel to you like nothing. One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren’t the end of the story. We have to hold so many realities at once: here’s me, here’s you, here’s us, here’s the rest of the world.”

  “Yes, your friend is exactly right,” says therapist Dr. Kelly Roberts. “The research across all of social science confirms this. And not just in marriage. When you look at doctors and patients, for example: the doctor thinks the doctor did a great job; the patient says the doctor didn’t hear them. There’s this gap that needs to be bridged. In a marriage, you’re having that experience daily. When does the bridge ever happen? It’s kind of rare. I’m sad about that. I believe, like your friend, that the more you can reflect and reach out and somehow touch what you think this person is saying or validate it, that’s where that magic happens. That’s where they believe that they are loved.”

  In all our relationships—with our parents, our children, our bosses, our clients, our landlords, our waiters—we just want to be seen. And we forget, sometimes, that other people crave that, too.

  Dr. Roberts works on this in her own marriage: “I’ve been married thirty years. I hate golf and the sports my husband watches. And I force myself to sit on the cart with him twice a year. There’s a softening in the first few minutes—watching his joy makes me understand his humanity. I’ve entered his world. That’s a big deal.”

  “Do you want to come into my world?” Oliver and his friends ask each other when they’re playing Minecraft. “Yes,” they say. “I am coming into your world.” I wonder if in twenty years, when they are likely to be thinking about marriage, this screen time will make interpersonal empathy easier for them, because they know what it’s like to create a universe and to invite someone they care about to spend time there.

  A couple of weeks after the first round of processing with Neal, I found myself in Seattle, driving to a bookstore reading, feeling confident: I located the rental car’s back windshield wiper on the first try. I was effortlessly navigating a city I barely knew. I’d gotten enough sleep. I’d had the exact right amount of coffee.

  Then, when I was stopped at a light, a man in a suit crossing the street pointed to my car and opened and closed his hand. Unlike all the other rental cars I’d had that month, this one lacked running lights. I’d been driving through the rain for an hour with my headlights off, navigating an invisible car through a dark city, imagining I was visible and secure and safe. If I’d been oblivious to my danger there, what other hazards wasn’t I noticing? Had I put my marriage at risk with what I’d done? And, wait a second, I was on tour again. Was Neal still in touch with that hussy?

  Nala and Damayanti, they can’t see each other for all the other people. They are terrified that they will lose each other in the crowd.

  That Taylor Swift song “Wildest Dreams” is about wanting to be remembered. I didn’t think I wanted that. But after I got home from Seattle, sitting on a bench at the Brooklyn playground where I’ve spent so much of the past several years, buying ices and pushing swings and breaking up kids’ fights, I found myself wondering what that man was doing. When we’d hung out, he’d complimented me so many times, it was like he’d been trying to meet a quota. (“I like your bag and your glasses,” he’d said as I was leaving.) What had he been thinking all those weeks since?

  On my phone, I started to write him an e-mail. Then the little kids next to me climbed onto the water fountain and began to jump off like they could fly. I deleted the draft and saved the children.

  “Hi,” I began again later that day. Then I got a call and abandoned the e-mail.

  The next day, having arrived early to pick up my son from school, I took out my phone to try again, but another parent started talking to me, so I put my phone away.

  I was reminded of one of Erma Bombeck’s subtitles: Too Tired for an Affair.

  Finally, I decided not to write; there’d be nothing to say except what that damn song said: Remember hanging out with me? Yeah, me too.

  And then, after a few days, like a cold, the wanting to ask him went away.

  At which point, as if on cue, I received a long, charming message from him. He forwarded me an e-mail he knew would make me laugh. He asked for advice. He said again that he wished we’d had more time together, and that he’d be in town in a couple of months and hoped we could meet up.

  I wrote back. Something friendly but short. No flirting. Collegial. That seemed okay. But later, when I thought of Neal’s being in touch in a similar way with that dreadful girl, it seemed not okay at all.

  Sriharsha lived nine hundred years ago—nearly a millennium. Human beings have changed so little. When we marry, we still find ourselves looking down rows of appealing people, having to choose the same one, year after year. I’ve begun to suspect that fidelity is less a problem you solve than a chronic condition you manage with willpower and strategy—a decision to skip drinks, to tell the body no, or not again, or definitely only twice more. (The comedian Rick Shapiro once described a disastrous bender that led him to a crystal-clear conclusion: “Man, I really need to give up cocaine in five years.”)

  The notion of “good character” has fallen out of fashion. Joan Didion wrote that “one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection.” But I think that staying away from other men may require cultivation of just that ideal.

  Years ago, I was able to quit smoking using Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which brainwashes you into believing that the gift you’re giving yourself is not-smoking, that you’re engaging not in self-denial but in a positive choice. This might be the challenge of staying faithful: seeing it not as denying yourself something but as giving yourself the experience—the security, the comfort, the pleasure—of not-cheating.

  When I was in college, I had a professor who often talked about his young child. His toddler would scream in stores, “I want it!” The man told us he responded, “Good! Want it!” I remember nothing else from that class—except that the professor wore a Star Wars T-shirt, and that when he encouraged us to pick a performance to deconstruct, half the class went to strip clubs—but that line “Good! Want it!” has stayed with me ever since.

  It reminds me of the saying “Feelings aren’t facts.” Sometimes we can thank our feelings for sharing and ignore them. Maybe wanting doesn’t have to perfectly coincide with getting. Maybe sometimes not-getting has a value of its own. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow,” wrote Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping. “For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?”

  The other night, Neal and I went to a movie and then dinner. On the way home, he said, “I’ve been thinking about this whole other-people thing. And I think after all this time I have a new thought about it: it’s a terrible idea. I mean, I guess I have three distinct thoughts, all totally true. One: It’s hot. Two: It makes me jealous. Three: It’s a terrible idea. Probably, at least until we’re old, it will keep coming up, and we’ll keep figuring it out, but I wanted you to know that I’ve arrived at a new baseline feeling: Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.”

  “Well, that’s probably true,” I said. “I mean, what’s the best-case scenario? You flirt with someone, say, then it’s like, Well, that was fun, which means I probably shouldn’t see this person again or it might become a thing I have to fight to break off, with the hurt feelings and the drama. Or you have a lame time, and then it’s like, Wow, I went through all the taboo breaking and wrestling with my morality for that?”

  I laughed at our sudden, stupidly basic conclusions. How many conversations had we had on this subject? And what had it come down to? Infidelity: not the b
est idea. Stop the presses.

  “You shouldn’t sleep with other people when you’re married,” a friend once told me, “but you and your spouse can talk about sleeping with other people when you’re in bed with each other, and that’s even better.”

  Another friend said something similar: “You and Neal both have good imaginations. Do you know how many people I have sex with in my head? Men! Women! Whole football and cheerleading teams! Why have you been playing with fire when you could have just kept it as a fantasy?”

  “Because we’re sort of dumb?” I said.

  “You’re not dumb,” another friend countered. “Sex isn’t logical, for one thing. And for another, part of what makes a fantasy hot is the idea that it could really happen.”

  When that man came to town, I made sure I was away. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him; I did. But I also felt like no good could come of it. Sating certain desires forestalls other pleasures. If I indulged my desire to eat ice cream for breakfast every morning, I would no longer have the pleasure of fitting into my jeans. In this case, I wanted Neal to feel secure more than I wanted to sit at a café with that man wondering if he would hold my hand.

  Just once I would like to hear someone say this in their marriage vows: How much do I love you? I love you so much that I will pass on having coffee with someone handsome and fun who I know wants me. I love you so much that even if you sort of gave me permission I wouldn’t have sex with someone else because I know deep down it would bother you. I love you so much I will never be able to listen to that Taylor Swift song again without feeling sad because you thought it reminded me of another man.