I write about my marriage on a daily basis on my blog, Married my sugar daddy, and I've always felt like I had a grasp on the mind of the married man. I mean I literally grill my husband for his thoughts, opinions and ideas before I write my posts and I've also done my fair share of interviewing random strange men for their views on marriage.
I've gathered that men and women are vastly different in terms of the way they communicate their wants and needs. However, in a marriage -- if you are truly in it -- I've always felt that infidelity on the part of either spouse would not be tolerated and if it was committed, would ultimately lead to the demise of that relationship, as it would insidiously chip away at the integrity of said marriage until its foundation was completely obliterated. And so, that is what I have always thought as a married woman, and what I have assumed my husband and most men believed as well.
However, an incident which recently transpired has me rethinking all of it.
This weekend, I was picked up at 4:30 in the morning by a corporate limo service. As soon as I got in the car, the driver began to regale me with tales of his previous pickup at a Connecticut estate where, upon using his flashlight to find an address, the homeowner came out with a shot gun and ordered him off of his property. And then he continued to ramble on and somehow our conversation trickled down to the environment and the fact that I am deathly afraid of using any chemicals in my house, at which point he grabbed his phone, handed it to me and said; "You know there's an article that says squeezing a woman's breast can help reduce her chances of breast cancer."
I should have known the direction the conversation was headed at that point but it was 5 a.m., I was tired and so I just said, "That is great to know, I'll be sure to show it to my husband and you should show it to your wife."
At this point, he began to tell me about his wife and her very down-to-earth temperament, which I was later to learn was code word for her boring nature. He talked about how when he met her she was so beautiful and sweet, he had to marry her. But he was young and so was she. They now have two kids and he constantly feels wistful for a life he feels is passing him by. He wants to go out more, but she prefers to stay in.
"My friends invite me out and with this job I meet a lot of people, you know, " he said, setting the stage for what would become a full-on church confessional to me at 5:15 a.m. He continued:
I'll go out with friends after my shift and if I meet a woman, we'll kiss and rub up on each other. But we won't have sex -- because I wouldn't do that to my wife. But I don't think there is anything wrong with kissing and rubbing. It's just a physical thing -- I would never give another woman my mind, just my body.
Me: "So you do these things and your wife has no idea?"
Him: "Yes, but it's better that way. And I wouldn't want to know if she got physical with another man. As long as we have our love and emotional connection, that is what counts -- the physical stuff we do outside our marriage doesn't mean anything."
Me: "I'm not so sure your wife would agree with this. Are your friends doing the same thing?"
Him: "We got married young -- there is so much out there and I feel like I'm missing out."
At this point, I didn't really know what to say -- I just kept ruminating over this one thought: "Is this what goes on in other people's marriages?"
Am I so naive as to think that married men -- including my own husband -- do not harbor these thoughts?
How many men are doing this kind of thing to their unsuspecting wives and couching it under the guise of, well, "it's not sex?"
I wish I could call this woman and tell her what her husband is doin g-- or maybe she knows and this is their arrangement...
So I ask you:
Tell me this man is an aberration and is this NOT what goes on in the mind of a married man.
Tell me this man got married too young and his attitude is a result of his not being fully ready to commit himself to fidelity.
Tell me this man is not at all representative of the average married man and that his notions of what is and isn't acceptable in a monogamous average marital union are not part of the psyche of the mind of the married man.
Or maybe this arrangement works because there more wives like Maria Shriver.
Or maybe it's the conundrum so many wives face so eloquently captured by the late Nora Ephron in the film Heartburn and spoken by actress Meryl Streep, when she's asked "How is it possible to live with someone and not know something so fundamental?"
It is possible to... It is possible... Well, to love someone so much, or to think that you want to love them so much that you just don't even see anything. You decide to love him. And you decide to trust him, and you're in the marriage.
And you're in the... You're in the day-to-dayness of the marriage and... You sort of notice that things are not the Way they Were, but it's... It's a...A distant bell.
And then When things do turn out to have been Wrong, it's not that you kneW all along. It's just that you Were... someWhere else.
You'd have to be living in a dream.
And then the dream dies. And the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces Which gives you a choice. You can stick With it, Which is unbearable, or you can just go off and dream another dream.
Personally, I hope this driver's wife goes off with her two kids, and lives another dream.