If She Only Knew

A colleague told me last week that she's getting divorced.

Her husband had been unfaithful. She found out. Trust broken, relationship over. The whole painful story.

I listened. I said the right things. I meant them — it's genuinely awful, and she's going through something hard.

And somewhere in the back of my head, very quietly, a completely inappropriate thought appeared:

If she only knew.

Not about her situation. About mine.

Because while she was telling me about the betrayal that ended her marriage, my husband was — in all likelihood — with his lover. And I knew about it. And I had encouraged it. And somewhere underneath my sympathetic nodding was the quiet, slightly embarrassing awareness that I was going to think about it later. In a very specific way.

There's a particular flavor of wrongness that lives in moments like that. Not in the bedroom. Not during a session. In the completely ordinary Tuesday afternoon where your secret life and your public life sit at the same table — and only you can see both.

She talks about betrayal. You think about desire. She talks about broken trust. You think about the text you're going to get later tonight.

Same words. Completely different universe.

Wednesday I'm going to dig into exactly that. The wrongness of cuckolding — why it feels the way it feels, why the gap between public and private is part of the heat, and why Dan Savage asked a question I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

See you Wednesday.