by Dan Savage
Frequently these sexually frustrated men and women tell me that they’re happy in every other aspect of their married lives. They enjoy their spouses’ company, their spouses are good partners and wonderful parents, and they don’t want to destroy the lives they’ve built with their spouses. Many add that they can’t see leaving their husbands or wives—or fear being harshly judged by others for leaving them—over something so “trivial” as sex. Some have spouses they can’t leave: They’re physically disabled or their spouses are; they’re financially dependent or their spouses are; they get their health insurance through their spouses or their spouses get their health insurance through them. Many mention having gone five, ten, or fifteen years—sometimes longer—without any sexual intimacy at all. And they usually write to me when they reach the point where they’re being driven nearly out of their minds by sexual deprivation. (It’s amazing how nontrivial sex becomes when you haven’t had any for a decade.)
Then they ask me what to do.
I’m supposed to tell them to remain faithful and to maybe find a couples’ counselor. (Or another couples’ counselor if they’ve tried that already, and they’ve all tried that already.) I’m supposed to tell them to work harder at their marriages. I’m supposed to tell them to drag their spouses to an endocrinologist to have their hormone levels checked. I’m supposed to urge them to drag their spouses to a shrink to rule out depression. And as the advice industry is biased in favor of women—women are our primary customers, you see, as women are likelier to ask for advice (and directions)—I’m supposed to blame the husbands.3 When the people complaining about sexless marriages are male, I’m supposed to tell them that they’re to blame. When the people complaining about sexless marriages are female, I’m supposed to tell them that their husbands are to blame.
But that’s not what I tell them.
Because if someone truly loves his wife, if someone truly loves her husband, if someone has kids, if someone has already been to a couples’ counselor (or three) and an endocrinologist and a shrink, if someone isn’t depriving his or her spouse of anything he or she actually values—sex generally, sex with them specifically, time spent exploring kinks their spouses find repulsive—in those cases, I believe it’s better to cheat than to leave.
So I sometimes advise people to go ahead and cheat.
Here’s an example from my in-box: This man’s wife had informed him, ten years and two children into their marriage, that she not only wasn’t interested in having sex with him anymore, she was never really that interested in sex with him, or with anyone else, in the first place. And she was done pretending.
“When we met she seemed very into sex,” the unlucky guy wrote. “I thought we had a great connection. I’m not a selfish lover, I focused on her pleasure, and I do more than my half of the housework and childcare. She tells me that I’m not doing anything wrong, just that her libido is gone. She says she never really enjoyed sex, and she claims she doesn’t miss it. She won’t go to counseling. Any conversation about my getting my needs met elsewhere ends in tears. She gets upset when she catches me looking at porn or masturbating because it makes her ‘feel guilty,’ like she’s ‘doing something wrong.’ It’s been five years since I’ve had sex, and my choices right now boil down to leaving my wife (and my kids, which I don’t want to do) and being seen as the bad guy, or cheating on my wife and actually being the bad guy. What the hell do I do?”
The advice I’m supposed to give in cases like this—the advice I’m frequently taken to task for not giving—is of the Work Harder on Your Marriage and Do More Around the House variety. If you were doing enough around the house, if you were working hard enough on your marriage, your sex life would be roaring along. Never mind that this guy has worked hard on his marriage; never mind that he’s already doing his fair share around the house. Most advice professionals write as if they are contractually required to assume that, however hard a sexually spurned husband claims to be working at his marriage, he must not be working hard enough; however much he claims to be doing around the house, it’s not enough. Because when husbands do everything right—working on that marriage, helping around the house—their wives fuck ’em twice a week at least. Because nothing is more arousing than watching your husband clean the bathroom. (And, yes, I’m taking the letter writer at his word when he says he does his fair share around the house. Some advice columnists do call bullshit on their letter writers, but usually we accept the letter writer’s characterization of a given dispute and advise accordingly.4 Until advice columnists are granted the authority to depose all parties involved in a particular dispute—and I hope that happens soon, because that would be fucking awesome—this is a limitation of the medium that we have to live with.)
But let’s say this man is doing everything right to no avail. Let’s say that his wife truly has no libido and never did. (We won’t pause here to consider the dishonesty of pretending to be a sexual person when you’re not; and we won’t entertain the possibility that the wife is lying when she says she’s not interested in sex. It’s possible that she is, just not with her husband; it’s also possible that she’s getting it elsewhere herself. So we’re not just giving the husband the benefit of the doubt in this situation—crediting him with doing his fair share of the housework, working on his marriage, and so forth—we’re also giving the wife the benefit of some unspoken doubts.) Then what am I supposed to tell him to do? What’s my industry’s go-to advice then? I’m supposed to tell him to do the “right” thing and get a divorce. Never mind the love, never mind the kids, never mind the expense, never mind the trauma. If he wants to have sex again—if this particular guy wants to masturbate in peace again!—he has to leave his wife and abandon his children.
What’s the one thing I’m not allowed to suggest? The one thing that might actually save this marriage, the one thing that might make it possible for this man to stay married and stay sane: Get it elsewhere. If I were to give that advice, and if the letter writer were to follow it, I would also urge him to be discreet (don’t humiliate your wife), and to be dishonest (don’t make your wife cry by asking permission). But when I tell people who are trapped in sexless-but-otherwise-rewarding marriages to get it elsewhere—and urge them to show consideration by being discreet and compassion by being dishonest—an angry mob gathers under my window to chant, “Cheating is never okay!” (Technically the angry mob gathers in my in-box. And the mob doesn’t chant, it types. But still.) Letters pour in from irate readers who insist that cheating never saved a marriage—why, everyone they know who had an affair wound up getting caught and getting divorced.
Sometimes I’ll blast an e-mail back at people who write in to make this point. Okay, you say that cheating always ends in divorce because everyone you know who cheated wound up getting caught. But what about the people you know who cheated and didn’t get caught? The people who cheated and got away with it probably didn’t wind up getting divorced; since they didn’t get divorced (which is typically when you find out that a friend or family member has been cheating), you never found out about the cheating. Even if they got caught cheating by their spouses, you wouldn’t have found out about the cheating if they managed to work through it and stay together. You follow?
Take, for example, this guy. I’m sure that someone out there—maybe even someone who has written to me insisting that all cheaters get caught and very soon divorced—knows him:
I’ve been married for more than fifteen years. For the first eight or so, everything was great. Lots of mutually GGG sex [GGG is explained in chapter 4], lots of love, lots of openness. Then, my wife’s libido failed. We had a lot of discussions about it. Whatever the problem was, she couldn’t articulate it. I tried everything—romantic nights out, gifts, thoughtful surprises, not trying to initiate sex for weeks (and months). After a year where we’d had sex just twice, I realized I was with a woman who I loved, and who loved me, but whose libido had died. So, I eventually reached out to someone else. I used Craigslist,
and I used it honestly: I explained that I had no intention of leaving my wife, that I was looking for someone in a similar situation. It actually took months to find someone who was not spam, to whom I was attracted, and who had no intention of taking a relationship past fuck-buddy status. We struck up a years-long affair, and it was incredible. Fantasies fulfilled, honest talk, no need for anything other than sex. At the same time, I had a wonderful-yet-sexless marriage. Then, after nearly four years, an interesting thing happened: My wife’s libido came back strong. To this day, she cannot explain why it left, or why it came back. But, with the reason for my affair gone, I ended things with my fuck buddy. Years of honest talk with my fuck buddy made this easy for both sides. She understood, and we went our own ways.5
We only hear about cheating—or a four-year affair—when it destroys a marriage. We never hear about cheating—or a four-year affair—when it saves one.
Suggesting that cheating can save a sexless marriage—and we probably shouldn’t call it “cheating” in cases where the getting-it-elsewhere spouse isn’t actually cheating his wife out of anything she wants, as is the case with the man whose wife is done with sex—is so inconceivable that a recent CNN story offering tips on how to save a “mediocre marriage” suggested divorce before finally, and very tentatively, suggesting that a couple might want to think about the possibility of exploring “ethical non-monogamy,” aka cheating with permission (which, again, isn’t cheating at all), as an alternative to divorce.
According to CNN—the most trusted name in news—divorce is likelier to “save your marriage” than getting it elsewhere.
Divorce.
Those are just two examples of when this advice columnist thinks it’s okay to cheat: One man with a wife who mysteriously (and temporarily) lost her libido and another with a wife who never had much of a libido to begin with, decides she’s finished with sex and then engages in emotional blackmail in an effort to get her duped husband to drop the subject. Cheating in both cases? Better than the alternatives, of which there are two: one, the divorces no one involved wanted or two, a couple of marriages poisoned by resentment, both likely to end in the divorces that nobody wanted. (Coming up: an example featuring a woman whose husband is done with sex.)
I could give other examples of when it’s okay to cheat—men and women whose spouses have Alzheimer’s disease and are no longer husbands or wives but nurses and home-health-care aides; men and women who are married to people who don’t like sex and do their best to make sure sex is so lousy that their spouses will stop pestering them for it—but here, in the interest of balance, are a few examples of when cheating is not okay.
It’s not okay to cheat when you’ve made a monogamous commitment and your partner is doing his or her best to meet your sexual needs, that is, you’re getting regular vanilla intercourse; your reasonable kinks are being indulged; you get a pass to watch a little porn and jerk it, if you’re the husband; or a pass to read Fifty Shades of Grey and vibrate it, if you’re the wife. (And, yes, some women do watch porn, just as some men are rumored to have read Fifty Shades of Grey.)
It’s not okay to cheat on your wife because you’re horny right now and she happens to have the flu right now. It’s not okay to cheat on your husband because you finished the last book in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy last week and he has yet to convert the spare bedroom into a “red room of pain.”
Guys: It’s not okay to cheat on your wife because she recently had a baby—you did that with her, don’t forget—and she’s just not feeling it at the moment. There are times in our adult married lives when we have to go without for three, six, even twelve months, and a new baby in the house is one of those times.
It’s not okay to cheat because you’re bored. If you’re bored, odds are good that your spouse is too. Before you can justify cheating out of boredom, invite your spouse to go on a sexual adventure with you.
It’s also not okay to cheat unsafely. Even if you’re not having sex with your spouse anymore, even if there’s no way you could pass a sexually transmitted infection to your spouse, sexually transmitted infections are no fun. And coming down with and seeking treatment for an STI—the appearance of symptoms, making doctors’ appointments, bringing a prescription home, going on meds for the rest of your life if you’re unlucky enough to contract a chronic STI—makes being discreet about cheating difficult, if not impossible.
And, finally, a word to you serial cheaters: It’s not okay to make a monogamous commitment that you damn well know you’re incapable of keeping. Al Gore invented the Internet so that honest, self-aware, non-monogamous people would have an easier time finding each other, dating each other, and marrying each other, thereby sparing the monogamously predisposed from the heartbreak of marrying a serial cheat. I don’t believe “Once a cheater, always a cheater,” but I do know there are people who cheat compulsively. They should find and marry each other. (“Cheating compulsively” ≠ “open relationships or polyamorous relationships.” People in open or poly relationships aren’t cheating.)
All of that said, sometimes people make monogamous commitments that they fully intend to keep; they make commitments that they believe they can keep, and they still wind up cheating. Some, like the two men above, have grounds to cheat and wind up cheating—or wind up considering it—to save their marriages. But some cheat without cause. Some people cheat because they’re bored, or drunk, or desperate for some variety (a legitimate and non-gender-specific need that porn and bad BDSM novels can’t always meet), and they do something stupid that they regret. Like this woman who wrote to me recently to confess her indiscretion:
What do you do if you know you’re a CPOS [cheating piece of shit]? How do you live with the guilt? Or alternately, how do you tell your partner? Your loving, devoted, honest, hard-working partner that you would never give him up for anything? Except apparently for a quick drunken fuck with a near stranger.
Have I just destroyed my relationship?
Sorry, I’m still drunk and kinda in shock. Never thought I’d be “that person.” What the fuck do I do?
It’s not like I was raped. If I was sober, this never would have happened. But I never said no, and I let the guy coerce me into doing it. Is there any kind of get-out-of-jail-free card—“Hey honey, I wasn’t really raped but I kinda got drunk and made a stupid fucking decision. We cool?” I want to save my relationship, bottom line. I do honestly want to be with my boyfriend, but now I’m terrified he’s going to break up with me because I got drunk and made a bad call.
What the fuck do I do from here?
If these cheaters don’t get caught—and if they sincerely regret the infidelity and the lesson they took away from it was “I’m never doing that again”—they should resist the urge to unburden themselves to their spouses, resolve never to do it again, and take that secret to the grave. That’s your get-out-of-jail-free card.
But what do you do if your spouse does unburden himself or herself after an affair?
My advice: Recognize that monogamy is a struggle. In a terrific piece in Slate (“Are Humans Monogamous or Polygamous? Archaeologists, Anthropologists, and Biologists Agree: It’s Complicated”), Daniel Engber writes, “According to anthropologists, only 1 in 6 societies enforces monogamy as a rule.” Even so, pair bonding is common. “In The Myth of Monogamy,” Engber continues, “evolutionary psychologists David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton say we’re not the only pair-bonding species that likes to sleep around. Even among the animals that have long been known as faithful types—nesting birds, etc.—not too many stay exclusive. Most dally. ‘There are a few species that are monogamous,’ says Barash. ‘The fat-tailed dwarf lemur. The Malagasy giant jumping rat. You’ve got to look in the nooks and crannies to find them, though.’ Like so many other animals, human beings aren’t really that monogamous. Better to say, we’re monogamish.”
Monogamish is a term I coined to describe marriages like mine. My husband Terry and I are mostly monogamous; we are more monogamous
than not, but there are times—certain set and limited circumstances—when it is permissible for us to have sex with others. If we weren’t open about this facet of our sex life (which we went public with lest we be busted by some right-wing muckraker for pretending to be monogamous), Terry and I would probably be perceived to be monogamous by our friends, neighbors, and family members. We would be, in the parlance of sex researchers, a socially, but not sexually, monogamous couple.
Social monogamy is easy; all it requires is discretion. Sexual monogamy, however, is a struggle and we should grade people—even people we happen to be married to—on a curve. If you have been with someone for twenty, thirty, or forty years and your spouse only cheats on you once or twice, your spouse is good at monogamy. Not bad at it. Good at it. I believe we should place a higher value on marital stability than we place on marital monogamy. Yes, your partner should’ve thought about your marriage and all it meant to him or her before cheating. But if your partner messed up and got caught—if he or she cheated and you found out—you have to ask yourself: Who do you want to be? Hillary Clinton or Jenny Sanford? Robert Pattinson or…well, I can’t think of another example of a high-profile guy who didn’t take his wife or girlfriend back after she cheated on him. But you get my point.