Infidelity

I've been thinking about this concept a lot lately.  Unfaithfulness. Infidelity.

Essentially, it means not keeping your promise, and it has come to be used almost exclusively with the act of not maintaining sexual fidelity.

Marriages split up because one spouse had sex with someone outside the marriage. It has come to the point where it is almost the single most valued thing in a marriage. "I can put up with anything as long as he doesn't cheat on me."  Really?

I've been told many times that if I'm going to cheat, I should just end it, as if sexual fidelity is all there is and if you don't have that you have nothing. That's just bullshit.

A long term marriage is a very complicated thing. It involves being with someone day in and day out, often while raising children, and doing your best to support, not squash, each other's hopes and dreams.  It involves sickness and puke and seeing your partner in the most physically unattractive ways and still trying to maintain a sexual attraction. It involves a massive amount of forgiveness and humility. And love. Especially love.

I've shared with you before that my marriage vows were rather unconventional and didn't include most of the typical language of marriage vows, but the point was the same. I promised to be his partner in life, no matter what. That's it in a nutshell. I promised that nothing would ever make me walk away from him. Nothing means nothing. I promised to be in it for the long haul - in sickness, health, good times, bad times.While our vows didn't include a sexual fidelity component, most do, and it was pretty much understood in ours.  We just didn't say it.

The core of my commitment - and his - was that we would stay together no matter what. I would consider my husband truly unfaithful if he walked way from the marriage.  Anything short of that may fall under the "sickness, worst of times, or poorer" part, but it's certainly not cause to leave the marriage.

A word to my divorced friends....I'm not judging you.  To make a long term marriage work, both people must be fully committed and do their part to make the marriage work. If one party has checked out there's often nothing the other can do.

For those of you thinking, "What about abusive relationships?" I'll admit that my "no matter what" promise has two conditions - physically abusing me or abusing our children in ANY way. In those cases, I would leave immediately, but I can't say what would happen in the long run.  I've seen many families recover from such awful situations.  Each has to judge for him/herself.

But I digress.....again.  What I'm trying to say is that sexual infidelity does not erase years of fidelity to all the other promises. My husband has been with many other women during our marriage, and I didn't know about it until fairly recently. Should that outweigh everything he's done to honor our marriage over the past 27 years? Of course not. He's been my partner through thick and thin for a long, long time.  He's the father of my children.  So what if he likes to fuck younger women?  If it were a problem for me, we'd have to deal with that, but if it were so much of a problem that I'd throw everything away because of it, I'd be an idiot.

The opposite is also true.  If he was so twisted up over me having sexual encounters with other men that he couldn't see all the good in our relationship, he'd be an idiot.  But he can see beyond it.  He doesn't like it, and it was very upsetting for him when he first discovered it, but it's not going to destroy the marriage. Our marriage is about much, much more than sex. Most married couples understand that, but then they turn bat shit crazy over a single incident of cheating. It's illogical and shortsighted.

Let's look at it from another angle. If a marriage is reasonably good in most respects (or even if it isn't right now, but you believe in staying together no matter what), but the sex life is dead and there is nothing you can do to revive it, is it so bad to have those needs met elsewhere?  Obviously, I don't think so, but I am aware that I am in a minority. Does it make any sense at all to let sexual dysfunction or the lack of marital sex cause the downfall of the whole relationship?  Not to me.

I'm not saying that all marriages should be open relationships, but it's silly to let lack of sex poison things. It's just one piece of the marital relationship, after all.

Yes, I do think that the best case scenario is to have a healthy intimacy with your spouse that includes an awesome and ever-exciting sex life. If you've been married over 20 years and you have that and neither of you has cheated, God bless you. You have life's golden ticket.  Don't take it for granted.

If you're unmarried, or if you've been married for less than 18-20 years, you need to stop pushing morality that you can't possibly understand onto other people. I often wonder how many marriages split up because one spouse cheats and the other is pushed and prodded into divorce by well meaning friends and family members who don't truly understand the value of a long term loving, albeit imperfect, relationship with another human being.

Too often, we try to make very complex things simpler by narrowing them down to a few simple rules. That's what has happened with marriage and infidelity. Unfortunately, no matter how much you try to make it simpler, marriage isn't so easily "managed," neither is anything truly valuable in life.

If someone were to ask me if my husband has been faithful to me over these past 27 years, my answer would be, "In almost every way, and certainly in all the ways that really matter. I'm a very fortunate woman." His answer would be the same.

Two Months? Really?

To be more accurate, it has been about a month and half since I posted, but that's still a l-o-n-g time.  I wonder if anyone is still out there. Anyone?

The only explanation I have is that the blog has not been high on my list of priorities. Family and work come first, and they have been commanding most of my attention over the past few months.

And I also haven't had much to say about prowling. The last extramarital sex I had was in mid-June when I met SNS Guy. Yes, that's five months of fidelity. Five months of nothing but Hubby.

It's not that anything is wrong with Hubby, but I've said it here before - going back to nothing but the same routine sex, same positions, same thing...the same thing we've done for 25 years - is difficult.  No, it's more than difficult. It's stifling.

I wonder sometimes if I could be ok with it if I had never known the likes of W, J, JJ, SNS Guy and the others, but I don't think so. I started prowling so I could fill that void in my life. Now, though, I know what I'm missing. So, I put one foot in front of the other and try to just walk through it. Each day and week and month of "just walking through it" kills some of the passion and desire in me.

Have you ever seen the movie Pleasantville? In the film, the black and white world of a small, restrained town slowly turns to color as the residents experience joy and real pleasure of all kinds. We cheer for them as the color bursts forth, freeing them from their old life and way of looking at the world. Prowling was a lot like that for me. Parts of myself that I had never known and other parts of me that I knew about but was too afraid to let loose just burst into color. I felt alive. Fully alive.

The last several months have been the beginning of the reversal of the process.  The world is slowly becoming more grey. I'm alive and well and reasonably healthy.  All is well with my family. There are challenges to face, but there always are. Hubby is finally happy because I'm compliant with his monitoring requirements and he's confident I'm not prowling. So, he's content and I'm fading a little more each day.

That sounds sad and pathetic, doesn't it? The truth is that it's really not as bad as all that. It is.  It's no way to live.

I'll never understand why people who claim to love us so much feel the need to keep us so tied down. Fear is a powerful motivator, I suppose.

A friend of mine encouraged me to share this with you.  I was just going to stay quiet forever, or until my world started turning to color again, but he's right.  Keeping it to myself helps no one. And nothing changes if I don't change it.

An image of a tiger in a cage (Kat in a cage?) comes to mind.  When the tiger is first captured, he pushes against the bars and roars and paces back and forth waiting for a chance to escape. Eventually, though, he just lays down, not even getting up when the cage door opens. He just gives up.

Time to get up and start pacing again.

I'd Do You

A friend of mine just shared this with me.  He knew it would be right up my alley.

So, who's organizing the pool for how long I'll be on the fidelity wagon?

Involuntary Fidelity

It has been over a month since I've prowled and I have no immediate prospects in sight. This isn't my record, of course. My record is 8 years. Right now I'm wondering how I survived those 8 years. Actually, I know. I worked 60-80 hours a week.....and I ate a lot. FYI - neither of those is a good substitute for mind blowing sex. All they can do is distract you, hopefully enough so you forget about what you're missing.

I know what you're thinking. "Kat, you are a prowler extraordinaire. How could you be struck involuntarily faithful?"

 There are several reasons.

First, JJ has been MIA. He has been dealing with family issues and he's busy. In a week or so it will 2 months since I've seen him. And there has been hardly any communication in the last week, and none in the last few days....and it has been dwindling over time. Yeah, it looks more like lack of interest than lack of time to me, too. Ouch. I've got a bit of a heartache over that. I don't want to talk about it. Let's move on...

Second, I just haven't been that motivated to search out new friends. There's all that getting-to-know-you crap that seems to take forever. Whatever happened to the days when it was ok just to say, "Hey, I think we could have a good time together. Wanna?" Oh yeah, that was the 80's. Sometimes I miss the 80's.

Third, I've been busy at work (not a good thing) and Hubby and I are getting along very well (a very good thing) and I've fallen back into a rut in my life in general. I've made some changes in my work life that will get me out of that rut very soon, but when part of your life is in a rut, it's hard to get another part out of it, too.

Finally, I was reconsidering fidelity for awhile a few weeks ago. That got me out of the swing of things, I guess.

 So here I am.

Daunt corrected me earlier today and told me that I am actually voluntarily faithful because I could jump on AM and have a "date" within 24 hours if I really wanted to or I could pick up the phone and call any of a handful of ex-playmates and be hooked up within a few hours. That's true. So why don't I really want to?

Is it because I miss JJ and I'm down about not being able to see him and not talking to him?

Is it because I can't seem to get Seattle Guy off my mind?

I really don't know.

But I do know this. While I may not be in the mood to hunt, I'm an definitely hungry for an extramarital treat. Very hungry.

Well, if it's not going to come to me, I'll guess I'll have to get off my ass and go find a tasty morsel (a.k.a. hot and horny fine specimen of a man) to enjoy.

Applications are now being accepted.

Doubt

One of the things I've known for a long time is that I had no doubt at all if this prowling lifestyle was right for me. Some things were missing from my marriage - mostly sexual, but not all sexual - that I could get outside the marriage.  When I had those things, I was happier with my life in general, including with my marriage.

The things that were missing were not an indication of a shortcoming on my husband's part at all.  They are just the natural results of many long-term marriages - lack of passion in the bedroom, boring sex, a sense of suffocation from being fused to another human being for so long. There was no "my life" anymore; it was "our life." I didn't have friends; we had our friends.

Our names start with the same letter so half the time (literally, about half the time) people call me by his name. But most people who know us both (which is almost everyone we know) don't even both to call me by an individual name.  It's like we are one unit and our name is a run together version of what used to be our individual names (Mr.-Kat-and-Kat) or just the initials, "Are K&K going to be there?"

When I started prowling again a couple years ago, after an 8-year hiatus from the lifestyle in an attempt to "be good," what I really wanted was some breathing room. I loved my husband (I still do). The lack of passion between us left me wondering what kind of love I had for him, but there was never any doubt that I wanted him in my life.

But after that 8 years, the lack of passionate sex and the K&K straight-jacket were killing me. What happened is exactly what had happened before. I went outside the marriage, found what I needed, felt great, and all was well. For a while. Then I found out about hubby's cheating. And he found out about mine. My reaction to his was to ask for an open marriage.  His declined my request.  Apparently, he was ok with sex outside of the marriage as long as it was for him and not for me.

His reaction to learning about me was to have a breakdown. Knowing I cheated (and he has no idea of the extent of it) pulled the rug out from under him and rocked his emotional world. It has taken many months for him to regain his footing.  In the meantime, I've been on a very tight leash, which of course has made me feel more confined. What he was doing as a way to cope with his feelings and hold onto me was exactly the thing that made me want to get away from him and get some space.

And while I'm getting some space, why not have some fantastic and passionate sex at the same time?

There's a reason I'm recapping this story.  Stay with me.....

 Things are changing. He's trying to give me some room to have at least a little bit of a life of my own. He's trying very hard to make sex more satisfying for me. Is it all that I want? No.  Not even close.  But it's better. When I look into his eyes now, I don't see him looking through me. I see him looking at me. Unlike in the past, when he's with me, he's present. And lately, I have been, too.

This man has been with me for 25 years, through good times and bad.  And I mean really bad. We've hurt each other. We've helped each other.We've got a quarter century's worth of shared history between us. He's willing to let me call the shots. I can have whatever freedom I want. All he wants is for me to stop having sex with other men. That's it.  That one thing.

He won't leave me if I keep having sex outside the marriage, but it makes him terribly unhappy and anxious.  It makes him terrified that I'll meet someone else I like better and leave him. So, if I can just do that one thing for him, he'll work on the rest for me. Specifically, he'll take off the leash he's had on me for 25 years.

What does all this mean?

 It means that, for the first time in the 20 years that I've been prowling, I have some doubt. My certainty that this prowling lifestyle is right for me is wavering. For the first time, I'm considering if I can give my husband the one thing he wants.

 Can I look at fidelity as a gift rather than as a noose?

Can I be happy with a life of mediocre sex?

Can I stop looking at men as potential sex partners?

If he gives me what I want most (some freedom and independence), will I be able to give him what he wants (fidelity)?

I don't have any answers. I only have doubt.