In London alone, there are 80,000 prostitutes. What are they but . . . human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy?
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
A guy walks into a bar, takes off his wedding ring, pulls out a wad of cash, and motions a pretty girl to come dance for him . . .
I can imagine what you’re thinking. Perhaps you are getting turned on; perhaps you are disgusted. You may be quick to judge or justify. “Men are pigs!” “Guys need sex. Maybe his wife doesn’t put out.” “Asshole.” “Horndog.” “Addict.” “Prick.” One word you’re probably not thinking is “love.” Women cheat for love, the common assumption goes, but men? They cheat for sex. And this assumption is all the more strongly reinforced when the sex in question is anonymous, transactional, or commercial. Such encounters are designed to be free of emotion. Isn’t the fact that he’d rather not remember her name proof that sex is the exclusive commodity being traded?
In the twisting tale of adultery, however, things are not always what they seem. Plenty of women’s affairs are driven by physical desire. And plenty of men’s escapades are fueled by complex emotional needs—including many whose brand of infidelity tends toward casual or commercial conquests.
Garth, fifty-five, has had chronic erectile dysfunction with his wife, Valerie, for years. “I didn’t want him to feel bad, so we stopped even trying,” she tells me. “Then I find out he’s been going to strip clubs, sex parties, and prostitutes, throughout our marriage!” Valerie, also in her fifties, is beside herself. “I believe he loves me. But how can he be two people—a loving if ED-damaged husband at home and a compulsive seeker of anonymous sex outside? And to think that I gave up my sexuality for that?”
Scott, twenty years younger than Garth, is in a fairly new relationship with Kristen, thirty-one. They used to have sex every day, he says, but then about six months in, he just couldn’t get into it anymore. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel horny—he just preferred to retreat to his man cave and satisfy himself with porn. Kristen was worried by the drop-off in their sex life, but she knew he’d been going through a tough time, as his business was struggling and his mother had just passed away. Her empathy turned to horror, however, when a girlfriend told her that she’d seen Scott getting into a hotel elevator with two girls. “He admitted he found them on Tinder looking for a threesome. One of them gave him an STD.” As Kristen began to dig, she was broadsided by the extent of Scott’s porn habit, his Tinder matches, and his occasional splurge on thousand-dollar-a-night escorts. “If I had been shaming him, nagging him, or rejecting him, I would understand, but this makes no sense to me.”
And then there is Jonah, also in his thirties, married to Danielle, his college girlfriend. They have two kids and their sex life just seemed to have faded out, when Danielle discovered Jonah’s weekly massages were of the “happy ending” variety, and his hours on the computer were not spent playing World of Warcraft.
Jonah, Scott, and Garth are three among many men who’ve shown up in my office with their confused, shocked, and often disgusted wives. This particular breed of adulterer is almost always male and heterosexual. They are usually married or in a committed relationship, and want to stay that way. They are responsible, loving fathers, sons, boyfriends, or husbands, the kind everyone turns to when they need help, cash, or advice. They could have an affair without opening their wallets if they were so inclined. And contrary to popular belief, there is often an attractive woman waiting at home, eager to sleep with them. Yet they are outsourcing their sex lives to hookers or hookups, strippers and online sex workers, erotic gaming or porn.
Why do these men export their lust, and why do they do so in transactional encounters? How can their wives reconcile the gentle man they know at home with the guy who slinks out of the gentleman’s club?
In the past, going to a prostitute was often considered less egregious than cavorting with the neighbor’s wife. It hurt, but it didn’t endanger the marriage because he wasn’t going to leave his wife for her. In fact, many people didn’t even count sex workers as cheating, and some went so far as to declare that hookers exist so that men won’t stray.
Today, however, many women view cheating with a prostitute as worse than a noncommercial affair. It immediately raises much broader and more distressing questions about the kind of men they are married to. What does it say about him that he would pay for sex or seek it in what they perceive to be such a degraded and degrading form?
It’s easy to condemn these men, both for abandoning their wives and for participating in an industry that, in its darker forms, traffics, exploits, and subjugates women. There is an urge to write them off as entitled, misogynistic, hypersexed boys. And some of them are. But working with men like Garth, Scott, and Jonah has compelled me to delve deeper into the insecurities, fantasies, and emotional turmoil that can drive nice guys to moonlight in a shady world. What are they seeking in their fleeting trysts? If they pay, what are they really paying for? Clearly, there’s sex sans strings. It’s fun, it’s different, it’s exciting, it won’t be interrupted by a crying baby. But is that the whole story? These men strike me as an interesting subsection of the unfaithful with something to teach us about the intersection of masculinity, infidelity, economics, and culture.
“You’re going to think I’m a complete jerk.” It is my first session alone with Garth. He proceeds to tell me a “sordid” tale of the assorted infidelities that have played out, not just with Valerie, but in each of his two prior marriages.
“The same thing has happened each time,” he notes. “It starts out hot and heavy. But after about a year, I lose all interest. I can’t even get it up. This may sound strange, but it almost feels wrong to touch her.”
His last comment is not so strange to me—it’s an important clue to his impasse. It’s one thing to lose interest; there are plenty of people for whom voraciousness mellows into tenderness. But what he describes is more visceral—an aversive sexual response to his partner, almost as though it would mean crossing a forbidden line. This sense of taboo alerts me to the possible presence of what therapist Jack Morin calls a “love-lust split.”
“One of the key challenges of erotic life is to develop a comfortable interaction between our lusty urges and our desire for an affectionate bond with a lover,” 1 Morin writes. I suspect that Garth’s quest for sex on the outside is a manifestation of his inability to integrate closeness and sexual passion. Men in his predicament are not just bored, looking for novelty, ready to move on. “Believe me, I don’t like it this way,” Garth tells me. “I don’t want to be the kind of guy who cheats. Plus, I feel very bad that I’m not able to satisfy Valerie, and I try to make up for it by taking care of her in all other ways. She thinks the ED is because of my diabetes, but this happened to me long before.” Furthermore, he has no problem getting hard when he seeks pleasure on the lam.
Garth is not proud of his dalliances, but he had resigned himself to the idea that for him, love and lust could not exist under one roof, and he’d always been discreet. It was only Valerie’s discovery that prompted further self-reflection. By the time we meet, he has already figured out that it has nothing to do with either his wife’s attractiveness or the intensity of his love for her.
I affirm the conclusions he’s come to so far. “For the record, I don’t think you’re a complete jerk. But clearly, there is a pattern here that has caused a lot of pain—both to your wives and to yourself. Listening to Valerie, I believe you know how to love. But something in the way you love makes it hard for you to make love to the woman you love.” Helping Garth to put a stop to his extramarital forays will have limited value unless I can also help him to understand what drives his inner split.
I ask him to tell me more about his childhood. Where there is a repeated sexual shutdown, like his, it generally indicates the presence of underlying trauma. Our erotic proclivities and inhibitions originate in our early experiences and develop throughout our lives. Sometimes it takes a bit of psychological sleuthing to uncover sexual blocks, but very little in the erotic psyche is happenstance.
Garth’s is a long, sad tale in which his father played a central role. An alcoholic and a violent man prone to bursts of wrath, he left both visible and invisible marks on his firstborn son. More often than not, Garth chose to take the blows to protect his helpless mother and his younger brother.
Terry Real, who has written extensively about men in relationships, describes a particular “unholy triangle” between “the powerful, irresponsible, and/or abusive father, the codependent, downtrodden wife, and the sweet son caught in the middle.” These sons, he expands, become unhealthily enmeshed with their mothers, and as adults, they “become afraid of their own range of emotions.”2 They are kind souls who feel they must curtail their own feelings and take responsibility for the happiness of Mom and the women who follow. Real calls this “intrusion trauma,” which lives not just in the psyche but in the body—hence its power to inhibit physical intimacy. Garth fits this pattern well, and it goes some way toward explaining why he feels so beholden to the women he loves, yet is unable to be aroused by them.
The emotional resonance between his relationship with his parents and his relationship with his wife is so strong that it leads to an unfortunate cross-wiring. Hence, the feeling that sex is “wrong,” almost incestuous. When a partner starts to feel too familial, sex will inevitably be the casualty. Ironic as it may seem, at that moment the taboo of infidelity feels less transgressive than sex at home.
Love always entails a feeling of responsibility and worry about the well-being of our beloved. But for some of us, these natural feelings can take on an extra weight, especially when a child has had to parent his parents. Finely attuned to the fragility and brittleness of the one he loves, he carries a sense of burden that impedes the letting go necessary for erotic intimacy and pleasure. Think of the trust game we play as kids, where we let ourselves fall back onto someone who catches us. So too in sex, you can let go only if you trust that the other is sturdy and will be able to receive the force of your desire.
For people like Garth, their outer behavior reflects this inner divide. There are many variations on the love-lust split, for men and women alike, but in Garth’s case, it is an extension of his childhood wounds. Many boys who were beaten by their fathers promise themselves they will never be like that and try very hard to repress any form of aggression. The problem is that in attempting to control this disavowed emotion, they end up stifling their ability to be sexual with the ones they love.
I explain to Garth that desire needs a certain degree of aggression—not violence, but an assertive, striving energy. It’s what allows you to pursue, to want, to take, and even to sexualize your partner. The prominent sexuality researcher Robert Stoller describes this kind of objectification as an essential ingredient of sexuality—not treating the other as an object, but seeing the other as an independent sexual being. It creates the healthy distance that allows you to eroticize your partner, which is essential if you want to remain sexual with a person who becomes family.
For men who are afraid of their own aggression and seek to segregate it, desire becomes alienated from love. For them, the greater the emotional intimacy, the greater the sexual reticence. Men with extreme versions of this split often end up affectionate but sexless with their partners, while avidly consuming hard-core porn or engaging in various forms of transactional sex. In these emotionless contexts, their desire can manifest freely without the fear of hurting a loved one.
Some may associate the love-lust split with Freud’s madonna-whore complex, and they are certainly related. However, the way I conceptualize the divide is not only about how the woman is perceived but also about a split in the man’s identity. The part that loves, that feels intensely attached and responsible, is the good boy. The part that lusts becomes the bad boy—ruthless, subversive, irresponsible. I could sum it up as follows: They can say “fuck me” sexually only when they have said “fuck you” emotionally. Callous as that may sound, every man who has lived with this relational framework recognizes it on the spot.
When I talk with the partners of these men, I often find myself unpacking the appeal of the girl on the stage, on the street corner, or on the screen. The obvious explanation is that he’s after her physical assets. But is this really the primary draw? What they highlight in our conversations is not her looks but her attitude. Her act presents a woman who is anything but fragile. She is sexually assertive, even demanding, and never reminds him of his victimized mother or his overwhelmed wife. Her confidence and availability are a turn-on that frees him from any caretaking responsibilities. As psychoanalyst Michael Bader has written, her lustfulness allays the fear that he’s imposing his primitive, even predatory, urges on her. Hence, his inner conflict around his own aggression is temporarily lifted. He can safely let go in ways that he is unable to do with the wife that he loves and respects.
Love-lust splits come in many forms. For some, it occurs when the partner is enlisted—willingly or not—in a parental role. This may be the classic “I married someone like my mommy/daddy,” or it may be quite the opposite: “I married someone who could be the mommy/daddy I never had.” It may simply be the role of motherhood. One woman told me that with baby number one, her partner didn’t touch her from the moment she started showing till the moment she lost the weight. With baby number two, same thing. She hungered for touch, let alone for sex, but he seemed repulsed. By the time baby number three came along, she filled the vacancy with a lover who delighted in the erotics of fertility.
However it occurs, the over-familialization of an intimate partner spells disaster for sex. The person becomes divested of his or her erotic identity. The relationship may be very loving, affectionate, and tender, but it is devoid of desire.
The love-lust split is one of the most challenging infidelity scenarios I confront. It’s easy to think that if these men didn’t have their side action, they would simply bring their libidos home. But I’ve seen many who extinguish their parallel flames only to find themselves shut down and unable to reignite the home fires. For some, the divide is so vast that it’s difficult to help them find a way out.
More often, there’s a lurking trap. One of the roving husband’s flings turns more serious. He falls in love and thinks he’s found the holy grail: for the first time in a long while, he loves and desires the same woman. Convinced that he must have just been with the wrong person, he leaves his family and his marriage for his new sweetie, only to find himself back in the same predicament a short while later. Garth is on his third time around.
His wife, Valerie, knows the odds are stacked against her. She saw this happen before in the role of his last lover. Now she’s the wife, and she’ll be damned if she sits by and waits for him to divorce her. First she takes a pragmatic approach. “If you’re going to have a lover, I’ll have one, too! I don’t want to spend the last thirty years of my life home alone eating Chocolate Cherry Garcia. I intend to have a great third act.” But Garth won’t hear of it.
“That’s not a marriage!” he counters. So often, the same man who won’t touch his wife can’t bear the thought that someone else might do so. There is a little boy inside, terrified he might lose his mommy.
“I won’t live with him constantly blowing smoke up my ass,” Valerie fumes. “It’s so demeaning, and it weakens him! He’s just a skeevy little lying fuck. How am I to build intimacy with someone I can’t respect?” She files for divorce, hopeful that next time she’ll find a man in whom love and lust have come to a better understanding.
Scott comes to see me alone. Kristin has told him flat out that none of his explanations make any sense, and he’d better “deal with his shit fast.” My task is to help this young man understand why he lost interest in his beautiful, accomplished girlfriend, and instead is spending hours every day swiping and watching porn.
Scott grew up in Houston, Texas. A popular football player in high school and college, he’s always had plenty of girlfriends and has always supplemented his sanctioned engagements with plenty of extracurricular flings. He and Kristen, a model turned physical therapist, have been dating for almost two years.
“Tell me about the beginning of your relationship. You didn’t have any trouble making love to her at first?”
“Not at all. We had sex every day—sometimes a few times in a day.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, well, that’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? If I don’t have sex with her every day, she’ll think I’m not into her.”
“But did you want to have sex every day?” I probe.
“To be honest, I didn’t always feel like it, but I did it anyway. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it, but sometimes I would worry that I wasn’t going to last very long. I didn’t know if she came or if she enjoyed it as much as she had with other guys. So I got a prescription for Viagra, which Kristen didn’t know about. Sometimes I would take it even when I was naturally aroused, just to impress her.”
I inquire as to whether he had ever asked Kristen what she wanted, or was he just assuming she was looking for some kind of stallion? He admits he never asked.
“So what happened when the stallion got tired?” I ask. “How did it stop?”
He tells me it was gradual at first, but over time, he found himself spending more time on his phone than in his bed. At first he was not even concerned—after all, he’d been watching porn since he was twelve.
Scott’s sex ed started in the locker room. “One of my older teammates showed me some good sites.” Girls were plentiful, but he wasn’t too confident, so he got into drinking “to feel less tense.” In college, he pledged to a fraternity—full of guys who bragged about scoring every night. “I’ve always had a sense of not really measuring up,” he confesses.
For Scott, masculinity is equated with sexual performance, and he carries a whole set of expectations about love, men, and women that are impossible for him to live up to. Meanwhile, his girlfriend has her own expectations: She wants him to be more tender, communicative, and open about his feelings. But he doesn’t want to be a puddle, either. This leaves him with a bunch of competing ideologies about what it means to be a man.
New definitions of masculinity are fast emerging, and modern men are encouraged to embrace a whole new suite of emotional skills that were not traditionally part of their repertoire. At the same time, the old definitions die hard. Too many men are ensnared in outdated and self-defeating ideals of male sexual prowess, which sire shame and humiliation. Advice columnist Irma Kurtz sums up this predicament: “Men are finding it ever more difficult to squeeze themselves and their erections into the shrinking maneuvering space between being a wimp or being a rapist.”3
A guy like Scott has grown up in a macho culture, where all he heard from his frat brothers was that dudes always want sex. He’s also read a bunch of articles that make the same case. I inform him that most of these studies are done on young college students; hence we actually know very little about the sexuality of mature men. No wonder so many men are confused about themselves and each other. Most men don’t know what the next guy is dealing with sexually, and there’s a huge pressure to boast. The day a group of guys in a locker room start talking about how they feign headaches when their girlfriends are jumping them, the world will have changed.
In the meantime, it’s little wonder that men like Scott are obsessed with performance—so are all the researchers. Studies of sexual desire are vastly skewed toward women. Why study male desire if we assume that it is always in ample supply? Hence, if the erection isn’t there, it’s a mechanical issue. We think of women’s arousal as being on a spectrum, but for men it’s all or nothing, hard or soft. None of these stereotypes is good for men’s self-esteem or their relationships.
Scott is impatient to get to the bottom of things. “So what about the cheating?” he asks.
“We’ll get there,” I reply. But digging deeper into his ideas about masculinity will help us more accurately decode his sexual acting out. On the surface, his behavior plays out the stereotype of the “man on the hunt.” But if we take it at face value, we end up reinforcing the very image of masculinity that has contributed to his erotic block in the first place.
Scott has bought into the oversold definition of male sexuality as being biologically driven, uncomplicated, ever ready, and always in search of novelty. The late psychoanalyst Ethel Person captures it perfectly: “This macho view depicts a large, powerful, untiring phallus attached to a very cool male, long on self-control, experienced, competent, and knowledgeable enough to make women crazy with desire.”4
Much good research has come out in recent years to highlight the multidimensionality of women’s sexuality—its subjectivity, its relational character, its contextual nature, and its reliance on a delicate balance of conditions. However, an unintended by-product is that by contrast it has served to oversimplify and reinforce the reductionist notions about men. Once we grace both men and women with a more nuanced understanding of their sexuality, we will have a better grasp of their infidelity.
When it comes to desire, men and women are in fact more similar than they are different. Nothing in Scott’s sexual blueprint makes me think that his sexuality is any less complicated or less emotional than the female version. Nor is it less relational. When I hear the pressure Scott puts on himself to please his girlfriend, the way he grades himself by the number of her orgasms, and his fear that she liked it better with previous boyfriends, I hear shame, performance anxiety, and fear of rejection. “What else should we call these emotions if not relational?” I ask him.
I help Scott to make the connection between his bedroom troubles and these unacknowledged feelings. The sadness and depression that he felt upon losing his mother no doubt play a role. We also talk about his anxiety, and in particular, the feeling he has of being a fraud—projecting a confidence that is only an act. He admits that he’s not told Kristen or any of his entrepreneurial friends that his business is teetering. “I don’t want them to think I’m a loser.”
Men’s sexuality is dependent on their inner life. It’s more than just a biological urge. Sex, gender, and identity are deeply interrelated for men. If a man has low self-esteem or feels depressed, anxious, insecure, ashamed, guilty, or alone, it has a direct effect on how he feels about himself sexually. If he feels dissed in his job, too small, too short, too fat, too poor, it can directly impact his ability to become aroused.
I let Scott ponder these new thoughts for a while. It helps him make sense, he tells me, of why he lost interest in Kristen, especially after his mother’s death and during the tough months with his company. “But how come I was still interested in sex anywhere but with my girlfriend?”
This is where men and women differ. Men are much more likely to soothe their inner rumblings by turning to less emotionally complicated forms of sex, including solitary pleasures and paid ones. In fact, I can imagine that the level of dissociation that they bring to their sexual fixes is a direct response to all these uncomfortable emotional pulls. I would suggest that precisely because male sexuality is so relational, many guys seek sexual spaces that are the exact opposite, where they don’t have to confront the litany of fears, anxieties, and insecurities that would render the biggest stallion limp. The degree of freedom and control they seek in their anonymous encounters is often proportional to the depth of their relational entanglements.
Perhaps it should not be surprising at all that in a world where men are receiving such conflicting messages about who they are and who they should be, so many of them prefer porn, paid sex, or anonymous hookups over relational intimacy. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve observed an increase in emotionally disengaged acts of infidelity in tandem with the rise of the emotionally engaged man. Sitting in a strip club, hiring a hooker, swiping right, or watching porn, guys can take a break from the tightrope of modern masculinity.
Part of the appeal of paid sex in particular is the promise that, at least for the sixty minutes the hooker is on the clock, she’ll take away these complexities. And the girl on the screen is irresistible because he never has to seduce her and she never rejects him. Neither does she make him feel inadequate, and her moans assure him that she is having the best of times. Porn entices with a momentary promise to shield men from their basic sexual vulnerabilities.
A lot can be said about the differences between prostitutes, strip clubs, full body massage, and porn, but in this sense they all yield common emotional dividends. They put men at the center of the woman’s attention, relieved of any pressure to perform and in a position where they can fully receive.
After listening to the stories of men, I’ve come to understand the following: In light of the multiple emotional transactions involved in marital lovemaking, the simple equation of a few bucks for an anonymous fuck starts to seem like a better deal. When he prefers to pay to play or opts for a solo porn session, he buys simplicity and a seemingly uncomplicated identity. He purchases the right to be selfish—a brief hour of psychological freedom before hopping on the commuter train home. As more than one man has said to me, you don’t pay the hooker to come—you pay her to leave.
Even so, can we really call it “just sex” when the entire enterprise is set up to avoid certain emotional pitfalls and fulfill a host of unspoken emotional needs? When a man feels lonely or unloved; when he’s depressed, stressed, or disabled; when he’s caged by intimacy or unable to connect, is it sex he buys or is it kindness, warmth, friendship, escape, control, and validation all delivered in a sexual transaction?
Sexuality is the sanctioned language through which men can access a range of forbidden emotions. Tenderness, softness, vulnerability, and nurturance have not traditionally been encouraged for men. The body is the place where they have sought to satisfy these needs disguised in a sexualized language. When we say about men that all they want is sex, maybe we shouldn’t take this literally. Sex is the entrance to their emotional antechamber.
Interestingly, the opposite may be true of women. Their sexual needs have not been culturally sanctioned, but their emotional needs are well acknowledged. Perhaps hidden in women’s pursuit of love lies a host of physical yearnings that can be justified only when wrapped in an emotional package. This turns the old adage that “men use love to get sex, while women use sex to get love” on its head.
Both men and women turn up in the therapist’s office when their disavowed desires lead them to the wrong bed. But if we take their behavior at face value and label them with the old tags—men as cheaters, sex addicts, or worse; women as lonely and love-starved—their true motives and longings are driven deeper underground.
“It was only a hand job,” Jonah told himself, “so it wasn’t technically cheating.” This was how he justified his penchant for full body sensual massage, or FBSM, otherwise known as massage with a happy ending. Like Scott, he’s in his early thirties, lives with a woman he loves, and procures his orgasms with a click or a credit card. But that’s where the resemblance ends. While Scott’s gender template is based on machismo, Jonah is the quintessential “new man.” Raised by a single mom, he has been drilled in the arts of empathy, emotional literacy, consent, and equity—which makes it all the more interesting that these two young men have ended up in such similar predicaments.
After a few months of visiting the masseuse, it was no longer enough for Jonah to lie on the table. He initiated oral sex with his favorite practitioner, Renée, and she gladly reciprocated. Jonah continued to rationalize. “I was paying for it, so it wasn’t an affair. There was no risk of falling in love. I was getting release that I wasn’t getting elsewhere, so I was preserving my marriage.”
The marriage in question had become part of the growing phenomenon of professional wives and stay-at-home husbands. Danielle and Jonah, both in their thirties, have been together since their junior year in college. They have two young kids and live in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Danielle recently stumbled upon the evidence of her husband’s alternative erotic portfolio.
Jonah’s sexual escapades were inspired by a compendium of familiar insecurities. “I was a geek, didn’t think of myself as very sexual, and couldn’t last very long. I hadn’t had many girlfriends before Danielle.” He’d felt so lucky to be chosen by this outgoing, smart, pretty girl, but intimidated by the studly boyfriends who had come before him. “I knew she had been with jocks, and I was quite the opposite,” he says.
Danielle tells me that she loved his sensitive side. While she admits to occasionally hankering after a more assertive lover, she felt she had picked the perfect guy in every other respect: loving, loyal, and emotionally available, and frankly, too insecure to pursue other women like her philandering father had done. Or so she thought.
I examine the emotional back end of their relationship. While to the rest of the world Danielle presented herself as a confident go-getter, she longed to not always have to be “on.” With Jonah, she felt she could drop her guard, express her ups and downs, and even let herself fall apart, trusting that he would be there to pick up the pieces. His emotional reliability allowed her the luxury of vulnerability. It was well worth the sacrifice of any sexual mismatch.
For his part, Jonah had felt affirmed as a man by this powerful, sexy woman, and hoped she would redeem him from his geeky self-image. What a surprise, then, when he slowly realized that she wanted him to remain that guy. He had been recruited for a role he was all too good at—taking care of a woman’s needs, which was exactly what he’d done when he supported his mom through her divorce. But secretly he resented the hegemony of her wants. To be clear, neither Danielle nor his mother had ever asked for such sacrifice, but this is what loving boys do.
For years Danielle and Jonah wished for more erotic zest, but both colluded in creating the vacancy. Danielle had a real stake in keeping Jonah in a caretaking role and assuming he was incapable of roaming. By desexualizing him, she made him safe. And Jonah’s problem was not that he couldn’t sexualize his wife, it was that he couldn’t sexualize himself.
When I ask them to describe to me their erotic erosion, Jonah says, “I just wasn’t that into it.” Danielle took frequent business trips, and he started frequenting the growing world of Internet porn. He didn’t even have to leave the house, but it was a journey nonetheless. “Twenty minutes of searching for thirty seconds of watching,” he comments. It was that same sense of adventure that eventually led him away from the screen and into the massage parlors.
Why would a guy like Jonah rather go and jack off to porn or get himself a rub and tug than be with the wife he loves and once couldn’t keep his hands off of? Just as I did with Garth and Scott, I seek to analyze the emotional economics of his erotic ventures and thus better understand his infidelity.
In his parallel lust life, Jonah found escape from the constraints of the nice, sensitive, domesticated guy. “I felt like I’d never fully developed sexually. For the first time, I could express myself unabashedly. I felt desirable, powerful, more than adequate, manly. I wasn’t just a nice guy—I could be a womanizer and a cheater and a liar, and there was a major thrill in that. I felt bad—but in a good way.”
And where does this leave his wife? Danielle too had been sexually unsatisfied in the marriage. The twist is that while her husband pursued his own sexual awakening in the socially condemned environment of the massage parlor, she had been lying at home reading the socially sanctioned Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m not making these a moral equivalent, but in the world of fantasy they have something in common, as I point out to the couple. She’s reading about the guy that he is trying to be somewhere else—the guy she doesn’t want him to be at home.
These are confounding times for couples. Eroticism is not always politically correct. The great gifts of contemporary Western culture—democracy, consensus building, egalitarianism, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when taken too punctiliously in the bedroom, result in very boring sex. The rebalancing of gender roles represents one of the greatest advances of modern society. It has improved our sexual rights immeasurably, but as Daphne Merkin writes in the New York Times Magazine, “No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless and untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.”5 Sexual desire doesn’t always play by the rules of good citizenship. That doesn’t mean we should head back to the dark old days of siloed gender roles, patriarchal privilege, and female subjugation. But it’s important to analyze our sexual choices—both sanctioned and illicit—within the frame of the culture of the day.
So what’s a woman to do when she discovers that her seemingly vanilla husband has a hidden spice cabinet? In some instances, realizing that one’s partner has an entire sexual self that one has never met is irreconcilable with the rest of one’s reality. In others, it can be the beginning of a new shared space. Some partners cannot get over their repulsion at the form the infidelity has taken. Their finger is pointing directly to the door. But I’ve also seen times when the discovery of an unknown erotic being elicits curiosity. Jonah and Danielle were lucky enough to fall into this second category. His infidelity hurt, but it also showed her that he had it in him—he could be manly, after all. Her perception of him as “a relatively low-libido guy” changed dramatically. Their sex life boomed. And along with the increase in sex came something even more important: an increase in sexual honesty.
Sexual honesty isn’t just about divulging the details of your infidelities. It’s about communicating with your partner in an open and mature way—revealing core aspects of yourself through your sexuality. Sometimes it means bringing out of the closet secrets that have been hidden for a lifetime—for both partners. While emotional transparency is touted everywhere as the crux of modern intimacy, I am amazed at the paucity of real sexual communication between partners. Part of my work in post-infidelity involves direct coaching as to how, why, where, and when to talk about sex.
Jonah took this advice to heart. Once Danielle let him know that she was ready to hear, he told her what he had learned about himself as a man in his sexual explorations. They both invited each other into their personal red-light districts. “Things that I thought would spell disaster for our relationship—for example, telling her that I fantasize about having sex with someone we know—have instead opened up a new dimension,” he says. “As I felt more accepted, I felt more attracted to her.”
On her side, a greater understanding of the recesses of Jonah’s erotic interiority helped to put his infidelity into a different light. While it didn’t take away the pain, what was once seen as sexual defiance became a portal for the disclosure of long-standing hidden wishes.
As their sex life became more engaged, they started to be more experimental. They watched “ethical porn.” They went to a strip club together and Danielle got a lap dance. She told him she had always fantasized about being with another woman. “At some point we arrived at the idea of trying FBSM together,” he says. “I wanted her to experience what I loved so much—the joy of being 100 percent at the center of someone’s sexual attention and being able to just lay back and be pleasured.”
Danielle chose the practitioner, and Jonah dealt with the logistics. That way, he says, “I was still able to experience the thrill of arranging and anticipating an FBSM session, and I could do this without risking my marriage and my family.” They both found the experience to be quite a turn-on. What was once forbidden and hurtful has become “a joint, shared adventure.”
Jonah feels more integrated, and as a result, is less likely to take his libidinal needs offshore. For this couple, it was true that, as Janis Abrahms Spring provocatively suggests, “You may eventually discover that you needed a nuclear explosion like an affair to blow your previous construction apart and allow a healthier, more conscious and mature version to take its place.”6
To be clear, I am not prescribing infidelity as a solution to marital gridlock. Nor am I suggesting that a threesome is the healing balm for every broken heart. I could never have anticipated the innovative path that Jonah and Danielle took in reimagining their relationship. Although their choice is certainly not for everyone, it speaks to the resilience and the creativity of couples.
When Danielle asks him if he would ever do it again, Jonah confesses that he misses the exclusiveness he felt when he was the center of Renée’s attention. And sometimes he longs for the bad boy he had just gotten to know. “I miss whatever part of me was stimulated by the secrets, the danger, the thrill. But I have decided that the great place you and I have arrived at is too valuable to put at risk.” His honesty, rather than scaring her, calms her. She understands him better now, and their trust is buttressed by a freedom to share their thoughts and desires truthfully, without shame. The growing sense of acceptance they both feel is one of the strongest protectors against future betrayal.
Each of these infidelity stories embraces a complex conundrum of personal, cultural, and physical factors. But in discussing these cases with my colleagues, they would often furnish a different explanation: sex addiction. Garth, Scott, and Jonah each fit most of the common criteria for this malady du jour—all organized around the notion of “excess” and lack of control.
Sex addiction is a hot topic in therapy circles, and it is not my intention to get entangled in the contentious debate. However, I could not complete a chapter focused on men who compulsively seek out sex without at least spending a moment on the matter.
While there is no official diagnosis for sex addiction, many researchers and clinicians have rushed to define the disorder, borrowing criteria from clinical definitions of chemical dependency. An entire industry has sprung up in response, including expensive rehab and treatment centers. Some clinicians welcome the label as evidence that what was once considered “men just being men” is no longer normal or acceptable. Others point out the lack of scientific evidence, and see the sex-addiction diagnosis as a medicalized mask for therapists’ judgments about what kind of sex is or is not healthy.
Whatever we call it, sexually compulsive behavior is a real issue for many people, and both they and their loved ones suffer tremendous pain as a consequence. Lives, reputations, and families have been destroyed by it. For some men, being able to name their behavior as a disease is a positive step, lifting the shame enough to enable them to seek desperately needed help. But even if we call it a disease, it hasn’t lost its stigma. I have sat with more than one mother who struggled to tell her children, “I’m leaving your father because he’s a sex addict,” whereas she wouldn’t have faced the same mortification over an alcoholic spouse. Another wife insisted that she preferred the medical label of addict—rather than compulsive—because it meant that her husband had a bona fide condition. But the husband in question had his own preferred label: asshole. At least that way, he had agency over his behavior and wasn’t just an out-of-control compulsive.
To be sure, the diagnosis of sex addiction has become the latest spin on an old culture war. The issue of what is too little or too much sex—what is normal or aberrant, natural or unnatural—has preoccupied and polarized humankind forever. Every religious or cultural system has regulated license and abstinence, permission and prohibition. Sexual norms and sexual pathologies have never existed apart from the morals of their time, and they are inextricably bound up with economics, gender ideals, and power structures. As a case in point, when female chastity was prized, women used to be diagnosed as nymphomaniacs; today we prize female sexual assertiveness, and we invest millions trying to fix the new curse, “hyposexual desire disorder.” Similarly, the rise of the diagnosis of sex addiction is a fascinating study in the social construction of ills. It echoes an age-old fear that too much sex, especially for men, is a slippery slope to a life of deviance. (Interestingly, women are rarely diagnosed with sex addiction; we prefer to see them as being addicted to love—a no less slippery slope, I would say, but a more flattering one.)
When we medicalize behavior like Garth’s, Scott’s, and Jonah’s, we should be mindful of the pitfall of “premature evaluation,” as my colleague Douglas Braun-Harvey calls it. The broader range of their motives—personal, familial, and societal—needs to be taken into account if men are to better understand and integrate their own sexuality, and if their partners (and their therapists) are to respond constructively to their infidelity.