Sex, Fidelity and Trust

I've thought about this whole subject a lot over the years, and with all the stories in the news, it seems particularly timely today. What do we see? Men cheating, people condemning, and families shattering. If you saw the Sex and the City movie, there was a really good, if extreme, example of a smart, independent woman---Miranda---almost ending her marriage over her Steve's indiscretion. For those of you who didn't see it, Miranda had pretty much stopped having sex with Steve because she was tired and stressed. The last time they had sex, she told him to "get it over with." A short time later, a tearful Steve confessed that he'd had sex with someone else. Just sex, nothing else. Miranda moved out. She said that what she couldn't get over was the breach of trust. Well, that seemed all wrong to me. Steve was horny and he slept with a woman. His relationship with Miranda was important enough that he didn't want to keep it secret from her, so he told her. That doesn't really seem to be breaking a trust. If you've seen SATC, you know that Miranda (and the rest of the women on the show) have had a lot of sex with a lot of different men over the years. It always seems odd to me when women who've had casual sex act like just that sex act is so much more important than everything else that goes into making a marriage or a relationship.

Also, it seems fairly obvious that men and women are hardwired differently. Even though there are a lot of powerful women out there these days, you don't get that many stories about women having sex with men other than their husbands. When you do, it's usually one other man and they are having an emotional affair because something is lacking in their marriage or relationship. There are no female equivalents to Bill Clinton or Tiger Woods because women, generally, are more naturally monogamous. Both sexes are programmed by nature to be the way they are. Men are supposed to spread their seed; women are supposed to stay and protect their offspring.

So I thought I had it all figured out. Here's the problem with infidelity, I said. We expect men to conform to a way of life that is not natural to them. There are, of course, some men who adapt quite happily to a monogamous lifestyle. The benefits outweigh the costs. But I'd say most men, or at least most highly sexed men, at some point either resent their partners because they are keeping them from sex with someone else, or, more likely, cheat on their partners and lie and cover up. It's the lying and covering up that break down the relationship, not the sex. So Steve and I struck a deal fairly early in our relationship. (I still have the e-mails discussing some of it.) He said that sharing was the most important thing, in general. He'd also told me, early on, that he couldn't even pronounce monogamy, much less practice it. Our deal, therefore, was that if he felt like having sex with someone else, he should do so. The only two things I asked was that he wear a condom and tell me about it. Now, I am a fairly insecure person, so it seems masochistic to ask him to tell me about sex with other women. But if he tells me, he takes the fear out of it for me. She might have longer legs or fewer wrinkles, or a smaller ass, but he's telling me about her, which means I am important and she is not. He could also continue his pornography viewing and chatting with women online. Although I didn't love it, it didn't really bother me more than a lot of other things we do that annoy our partners.

The trouble with deals like this, of course, is that we each have our own ideas of what's included. My approach was a sort of Weight Watchers approach. If you've ever been to Weight Watchers, you'll understand this. Their idea is that too many people go on "diets" and see them as all-or-nothing propositions. So if you fall off the wagon, you think your diet is over and you just chuck the whole thing, probably ending up gaining more weight than you lost. So for sex, I was thinking something like If he's on a business trip, in a bar, and starts chatting up some woman, he should just go for it without feeling likes he's betraying me or ruining the relationship.

We have a very good, very frequent sex life, so it didn't seem that there would be much need for him to actively look for more. Well, I was wrong. He is, it seems, a sexual glutton, and some of it has been beyond my capacity to overlook. We will have sex on a Saturday morning and he will go downstairs to make coffee for us. Nice, right? That's what I thought until I realized he was chatting with women and viewing pornography immediately after we'd had sex. That's a little disconcerting. He also left a chat up (and yes, I know I shouldn't have read it) that talked about setting up a meeting with a woman. He told her I wasn't sexually adventurous. I thought that probably he was just chatting and wouldn't really meet, but my curiosity got the better of me, I put an ad on Craigslist, and ended up making a date to meet him. He showed up and started laughing when he saw me. "If you like pina coladas..." He said he was 90% sure it was me because of some of the chat/e-mail exchanges. We talked about the part of our agreement that he was breaking---the "tell me" part. He says it's more exciting not to tell. Well, I don't want specifics, but there's a difference between not telling and hiding, and he seems incapable of the transparency he said he desired. He went to Chicago on business and I told him to pick someone up while he was there, try to get it out of his system. He says he did, but I'm not 100% sure. He may have just been humoring me.

I do think there is something other than sex going on here. This has been a hard year and I think we each have had some problem adjusting. I also think he has always compartmentalized everything. He and his wife seem to have gone their own ways almost from the beginning, and he told me repeatedly that he and Ann share none of the same interests. He wanted to share; he craved a close emotional relationship unlike anything he'd had previously. But I think he is also scared of getting that close to someone and his way of dealing with it is by keeping a little part of himself hidden from me. So, I reasoned, I just needed to be patient and things would work out. And even if some of it was ego bruising, it was just what I'd said didn't matter---casual sex.

And then he went to San Francisco on business.