We had a really nice vacation last week, so of course I'm having a bit of trouble getting back into the normal routine. I thought about skipping yet another post, but I have this one that I wrote a long time ago--before the first one on long-term marriages, as you'll be able to tell. I've had second thoughts (and third and fourth) about posting this (that's why it's been sitting in my drafts folder so long), but I'm sure I've told you worse before, so here you go.
This is a story I'm a little embarrassed to tell you: about a year ago, I discovered what I thought was incontrovertible evidence that Dean was having an affair. Actually, I had discovered it several months previously, but Dean is such a solid guy that it took me that long to suddenly realize, OHMYGOD, what is going on here?
So, I won't keep you in suspense--he wasn't, it was just a remarkably odd series of coincidences. But I didn't know that at first.
I had to figure out what to do, and that took awhile. In fact, it was several months before I said anything to him. Which surprised me. If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have told you in no uncertain terms that if my spouse had an affair, that would be the end of our marriage right then and there.
But when it happened to me (leaving aside for the moment that it really didn't), I had remarkably mixed feelings. A long marriage is a complicated thing. It's being tangled up with each other's families, knowing what it was like when you got your first real job, house-hunting together, inside jokes, taking vacations, changing diapers and going to seventh grade band concerts, making mutual friends, and a million other little ways that your lives get tied up together.
It seriously occurred to me that maybe I should just let it go. If I'd been that much in the dark about how he felt about me, and I didn't really want our marriage to end, maybe I'd be better off just continuing to act like I didn't know. It turns out I wasn't quite as adamant about monogamy as I thought I would be. Once I finally talked to Dean, and realized he wasn't having an affair, I still had a lot to think about.
It was after all that had happened that I read Dan Savage's book American Savage several months ago. The first chapter, it just so happens, is about monogamy, about how much our culture prizes it even though human beings aren't very good at it.
It's a very complicated topic, and Savage does a great job detailing all the ways that we are hypocritical about our ideas of what marriage "should" be like. It's thought-provoking reading, and if it's a topic that interests you, I highly recommend it.
Unusually for Savage, he comes down on the side of conservatives in this one area--he thinks marriage is really important, and that preserving marriages, preserving families, is worth doing, even if it is at the expense of strict monogamy. Is someone who has had one brief affair in 30 years of marriage bad at monogamy? Maybe not. Maybe letting that go is better than tearing a family apart.
Savage goes one step further, though, and says that in some cases, maybe it is OK to cheat if doing so will "save" your marriage. I just can't wrap my head around that. I mean, if both spouses have agreed up front that they're OK with this, I'm not going to argue--everybody gets to set up their marriage the way they want. But like most couples, Dean and I don't have that agreement, and I just can't see that all the lies, deception, and manipulation involved in cheating on your spouse can possibly be a good thing.
It's an argument that's far too complex to deal with in a blog post, but it's an interesting topic to bring up with your spouse. If you're like us, we'd never talked about the basic idea of monogamy, it was just a given in our marriage vows and in the way we thought about our marriage. Neither of us has ever been unfaithful, but it was good to actually talk about it, talk about how hard it has been at times, and how much it means to us that neither of us has ever had sex with anyone else.
So there were two reasons I never posted this--one was because it's probably TMI, and the other was because it didn't really go anywhere. Really it's like shooting fish in a barrel to say that hey, I'm opposed to cheating on your spouse. So, I don't have any wisdom to impart. Just stuff I've been thinking about. I will try to be more interesting next time.
p.s. It's occurring to me a day later that talking to your spouse about monogamy might lead to information you'd rather not know (see above). So, a la Hill Street Blues, be careful out there, people.
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