All of a sudden I got an email from a lovely lady, Lara. I confessed in the first email about my white lie about both of us seeking. She seemed forgiving. It was slow at first just getting to know each other. I was taking it slow. This was new territory for me. Every email from her seemed to reveal another hint of her personality. Every email from me to her seemed to be bringing out something in me that I couldn't quite get my brain around. I liked the feeling. I liked it a lot. I started liking her a lot.
The funny thing is that I didn't have any guilt. Mind you, this was way before I knew about Dewayne. I even started thinking about cheating on Abby. In fact, I wrote an email to Frank, asking his opinion. I never sent it though. I did send it to Lara. When I was writing it, I knew it was going to just her anyway. I wanted to sound myself out. I wanted to throw out my internal conflict between not wanting to lie to Abby, and wanting, desperately, to go with this thing that was happening with Lara.
Lara was married and her husband went away for months because of his job. This job was actually a team of people and one of the members of the team was his lover. Lara looked for and found men for her sexual and emotional pleasure when her husband was away. The arrangement was totally open and transparent and it worked very well for them.
I've thought a lot about affairs and cheating and open marriage. I've also observed a lot in other people that I know and their relationships. It occurs to me that marriage, as we know and practice it right now, is broken. Not totally, but partially. We get married, life is good, we get bored, we cheat, we divorce. More often than not.
There's got to be a better way. How can we take the shared life with our spouse, all the joys and even the heartaches, and just toss them away because one of us is just doing what we are genetically coded to do? And it's not just that we throw all of that away. That is sad enough. We compound it by spending the rest of our lives blaming the other person. I guess the scripts have been written, and we just find it easier to follow them.
Don't you think that most people don't think about having an affair before it happens? I mean, does a person just wake up some day and say to him or herself, "I think I'll have an affair?" I think not. I sure didn't. I wasn't looking for an affair when I posted that ad on Craig's List. I was just looking for some stimulating conversation. Sure, in the back of my mind, way way back, I thought there was a chance something might happen. But come on, finding the perfect person on CL? Give me a break.
When you are with someone for twenty four years, things just don't spark like they did on the honeymoon. After I just said that, the little man in my head said, "Do you really blame Abby for responding when Dewayne paid her some attention?" I'm trying to get him, the little man, to be quiet because he's disrupting my thought pattern. He does have a point though, and I'll just have to come back to that later.
Are you getting my drift here? I'm pretty happy with Abby. I'm not totally satisfied with our level of intimacy. I didn't know yet that she has taken her lust elsewhere. I'm trying to get my lust from someone else without ruining my marriage. I'm fairly certain that this additional lust will be harmless flirtation.
And now I'm a few days into my internet affair with Lara and my world is exploding and expanding in ways that I didn't think were possible. After she left me, I did a whole lot of analyzing. I would call it soul searching, but I've come to disdain that term about as much as soul mate.
Slight digression, but not really. I'm finding it hard to go forward with just facts because there are so many underlying emotions involved, and those are much harder to describe, and they don't fit in nice neat time sequences like facts do. Trust me, this is all tied together in a certain way. I'm determined to mine my own emotional memory to make some sort of sense out of this.
By the way, I'm not distraught or depressed or suicidal about Lara leaving me. The other day, I was fantasizing about what I would say if all of a sudden I got an email from her. First thing I would say in response would be, "long time, no ees." She used to talk about liking to get emails from me. Her 'ees' she called them. Then if she asked if I was angry, about her abandoning me, I would say "5% angry, 20% confused, and 75% sad," which is truly how I feel about it. But since it's pretty unlikely that she is going to email me again, I'd better not spend too much time on that fantasy, alas.
I've got to focus here. To do a much better job telling you how Lara and I became an us. Abby and I are an us. Have been for twenty four years. A good us. Not a perfect us, but a damned good one. I never thought about the concept of an us until Lara declared that we were one. And then one of those aha moments. It made perfect sense then and it still does. Our us felt good. Really fucking good.
So now I've helped to create two us's. My two us's are both good, I thought. But isn't that a conflict I kept thinking? Isn't my us with Lara taking something away from my us with Abby. I was consumed by this thought/conflict for a while, but something magical was happening and I just let it go.
Just before going north for my summer vacation, I ordered a book about open marriages. My internet affair was in full bloom at this point and I was searching for a way to move it to the next level without declaring my marriage over. I had the book shipped to our summer home, knowing that Abby would have absolutely no interest in opening a package for me from a bookstore. And the backup plan, if she did open it, was to just wing it. I was feeling pretty heady at this point with Lara and she was bringing me into a world where there could be two us's in a person's life. She and her husband had one, her husband and his girlfriend had one, she and I had one, and Abby and I had one. It all made perfect sense.
So anyway, back to the early days of my e-affair with Lara. She's saying all the right things and pulling all the right strings and I'm totally falling for her. Nothing like this has happened to me in the past two decades, and I'm totally liking it. No, I'm totally loving it. She's a fucking sexual freak, which is a good thing. Many, many orgasms a day and she's giving me credit for her increased sexual arousal, which in turn is making me say and think things that have been dormant for a long time.
All the while I'm still struggling with the idea of moving the e-affair to a physical affair, and I find myself saying something like this, "George, think about this. When you're in the car, on that fatal night, careening over the two thousand foot cliff, with about four seconds to go before impact, you're going to be having one big motherfucking regret in life if you don't fuck Lara." Decision made.
Each day that goes by brings new surprises from Lara. Our perversions are so much in tune that it's scary. She is the perfect mistress, which is really not the right word for what she is, but it will suffice. She loves sex, she loves older men, she is extremely intelligent, she wants to save the planet, she is a very good wife and mother, and she has no apparent fears.
It is slowly dawning on me that something is changing in me in the whole process.
Kind of hard to put a handle on it, but the closest I can come to describing it is that I am losing my fear. I'm not talking about a fear of getting caught. It's much deeper than that. It's almost as though I'm working through some bullshit notions that society has imposed on me and I've swallowed the bait. Lara is presenting me with an alternative to a quick and furtive affair. Ours is deeper and more profound. I know, I know. That sounds like a crock of horseshit. Like a person trying to justify the deceit. But I swear to you that something else was going on here. I was falling in love with another woman by email.
Chapter 6: My Take on Societal Evolution
I've got to admit, the words just aren't coming as easily today as in past days. Yesterday was a great day. The words just jumped off the keyboard onto the screen. Today they are stuck somewhere between my brain and the keyboard. But I can't just stop and wait for the perfect day and the perfect conditions. It occurs to me that when I read a book, there are good parts and not so good parts. It must be that the writer was having some similar problems when they did the not so good parts. Just thought I'd throw that in, mostly to apo
logize for the shitty writing.
Have you ever thought about how a society evolves? The norms change. The process can be slow. Take for example saying the word 'fuck'. When I was growing up, it was an awful thing to say. If I had said fuck, within earshot of a jock, in high school, and if his girlfriend had also been within earshot, he would have proceeded to beat the fuck out of me, not right there and then mind you, because he wouldn't have wanted his girlfriend to see the blood, so I would have had to wait until after school, spending the next few agonizing hours anticipating by beating, which I couldn't have avoided by running away because the shame would have been far worse than the beating.
Now fast forward to today when fuck is a pretty common expletive, at least in most circles. An interesting corollary here is that the possessive jock is becoming somewhat of a dinosaur at the same time. Not totally, but the idea that a man owns a woman is certainly not there anymore, thankfully. Now let's suppose that the girlfriend, in the old days had said to the boyfriend jock, i.e. "Jack, you're not going to touch a hair on George's head because I kind of like him, and if you do, I might just start fucking him instead of you."
That of course, back then, would have sent Jack the jock into a rage because his manhood was being threatened on many levels. But fast forward to today, where women are not owned and protected, generally, by men, and they have every intention, thankfully again, of being with whomever they want. And most men, realizing this, have adapted and morphed into much cooler human beings than Jack the jock, because they know, that if they try to act like him, they are never going to get laid.
Do you see where I'm going with this? I hope so. I'm just trying to tell you that I've done a huge amount of thinking about how to save marriage as an institution because I think it's a good institution.
I'm not having a good day. It's a full moon and somehow that affects me in strange ways. I just went back and read a few of the hundred plus ees that Lara sent me. God, she was good. So fucking good. And now I'm depressed. When I was reading them, a wave of intense sadness swept over me. How could something so good just disappear overnight? I need to get away from this for a while, it's just too depressing.
Are you ready for my morality diatribe? I'll try and make it brief. Basically I think it's absurd that it's ok to take down mountains for coal, but when two people share love in unconventional ways, it's wrong. Man oh man do I have a huge problem with that. That's pretty much why I stopped going to church decades ago. Not that I was aware of what I am today about the world and how our society works, but I just couldn't get past the jealous and angry god shit. Here we are supposed to worship and obey this guy in the sky who exhibits human failings like jealousy and anger? Give me a break. And when you reject that dogma that has been spoon fed you all your life, you start to question things. Specifically about thy neighbor's wife.
Why isn't adult consensual fucking a good thing, always? Aren't we built for fucking? Of course we are. So why have we built all the walls around it and made up all these rules about when and where it's appropriate? Sure, it might be disconcerting if you drove down the street and saw people humping on every street corner, but you know I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about some adult recreational sex outside of marriage.
The French seem to have it right with their liaisons. Go to work, stop by the lover's house from five to seven, go home to the spouse at seven and have a nice evening with some wine and dinner and good conversation and sex. Who in god's name is that hurting? Oops, I invoked god's name when I don't believe in him. Well, I do believe in some sort of intelligent design but not by some angry and jealous man who is going to send me to the torture chamber for lusting after one of his own beautiful creations.
Ok, I'm sorry for being so morose and moralistic and pedantic. I'm usually not any of those things. I think.
Looks like I've been digressing a little too much lately. I'm hoping that I will eventually find my way back to the main story line, i.e. my and Abby's respective affairs.
Chapter 7: Back to Abby, and Let's Meet Deborah and Edith
Let's get back to Abby and her take on an open marriage. This is pure speculation because she basically won't talk to me about it. Isn't that weird? She will go out and have an affair with some guy, but when I mention that open marriage is a better alternative, she chastises me for being unconventional.
That's not the true time sequence of events. To be accurate, I have, on more than one occasion, in our marriage, suggested that we open things up. She always just kind of makes me feel guilty for suggesting it. Like I satisfy all of her emotional and physical needs, which is horseshit.
The asshole nuns did a pretty effective job of imprinting on her brain that sex was bad. But not a perfect job, as Dewayne could testify. So the real question is this. Can Abby's brain morph in such a way that she considers her affair a good thing and not something that was wrong, and if so, can she further expand her mind to allow the possibility that an open marriage might indeed be a good thing for both of us? Stay tuned.
Let me digress and tell you about two other women and how I had interesting situations with them this summer and fall. There is a whole lot of relevance here, but it's not obvious at first. If you bear with me, though, it will become so.
Deborah is a few years older than me. She's a smart lady. Sophisticated too. She has a summer home where we do, and it's a pretty tight community where everyone knows everyone. The story goes that she walked in on the hubby, finding him hungrily bopping some random lady, and she kicked him to the curb, as they say.
The following is my speculation of what happened based on what I've observed over the years about dissolutions of marriages. She most likely got a lot of sympathy from family and friends. "The bastard," they all cried. When the divorce was final, there was most likely a lot of encouragement, i.e. "Go girl, you can find a man who has everything the bastard has/had with none of the bad things."
After a long and painful search, reality sets in. Deborah does not find Mr. right, the bastard gets remarried to a younger hottie, and Deborah lives a life of relative misery. Yes, I know there are exceptions. And I also know the situation is reversed half of the time with the bitch getting a younger hottie. But that's not the point.
The point is that an orgasm should not derail a marriage. Period. Quitting a marriage over an infidelity is absurd, especially when we have created an institution that allows no flexibility thus almost guaranteeing infidelities.
So back to Deborah. She is lonely. How do I know? Well I caught her looking at me at a party this summer. I mean really looking at me. Now let me tell you something. I'm not Brad Pitt. Hell, I'm not Brad Pitt's grandfather. Nobody looks at me that way, anymore. Maybe when I was younger, but not now. I felt bad for her. I feel bad for all people in broken marriages. Especially when they involve infidelity and the inability of the couple to work out a solution.
I mean, come on, how can two people's libidos mesh perfectly all the time? They can't. And then throwing away everything, fucking up the kid's lives, giving half of the lifetime earnings to the lawyers. How smart is that?
The other lady, Edith, is younger. She's still in her prime. Good looking lady. A little too thin for me, but that's just me. She had an older hubby. Notice the 'had'. Same story. She kicked him to the curb. Now she's in the dating phase of recreating her life. I've talked to her on a few occasions about life and the hubby and she said something very interesting to me once. She said that the hubby was perfect in many ways. At least she wasn't so consumed with anger and self pity that she could see that. But still, she kicked him to the curb. Maybe there's just something about pride kicking in here. Maybe it's just too hard to have people see us forgiving someone who is unfaithful.
I like Edith and I think she might find someone else, but I hope she gets back with the hubby. Abby says no way. Anyway, recently I was with her and a few other people at a local bar and she said something about chopping a guy's dick off. It was supposed to be a joke, I think. I was surp
rised. Not shocked that she would say it, but surprised by my own gut feeling that there was some underlying anger toward men in her.
I challenged her with something like "why do we joke about mutilating a man but if someone said something about cutting off a woman's breast, we'd all be horrified?" I wasn't trying to be clever or contentious or even argumentative. In fact, I'm surprised I even said it. But she got really mad at me and said that men rape women. I was trying to digest this since it was so unexpected from Edith because she is incredibly smart and knows better. I mean, by extrapolation, should we lock up all Muslims because some are murderers?
I hope I'm making sense out of all of this. It just bothers me that people fuck up their lives so profoundly by being so quick to end a relationship because one of the two has a higher sex drive than the other. Am I being too simplistic here?
Chapter 8: Dewayne Does the Dirty Deed
Now back to two of the main protagonists in this saga, i.e. Abby the wife and Lara the internet lover. Sorry, the ex internet lover.
First let me recap, since I like to recap. Lara has vanished into thin air after a very hot and heavy month of mutual sensual and emotional exploration. And Abby is, or has been, fucking her biking buddy Dewayne. Did I tell you they were biking buddies? I don't think so. Well they were, and still are. Abby loves to ride and she has a group of biking friends, men and women, some very young, and she's about the oldest, and the prettiest, I might add.
I'm George, mwm, 52 Page 3
