"Our Secret Life of Can’t" (part 6 of 10)
(another serial submission of a story hard to sell)
This history of imagining my wife being with another man first took root not long after I had first gotten sober and then my decision to take an anniversary trip back to the town where we had our first sexual encounter less than a decade prior. In preparation for this naive and rather schoolboy fantasy trip I asked her to not bring any bras along and to wear something sexy. My fantasy had us eating in the dining hall of the lodge we were staying at in which a fellow diner would notice her, a sexual chemistry ensue, and with my blessing they would leave together for our room. I wanted to believe that being cuckolded would make me happy. But lucky for me my wife is not like that at all. And over the years I realized that being cuckolded was not at all what I was ever interested in either. But rarely did I ever have a firm grasp on what it was I was actually looking for. Plus I was afraid to tell her of my emerging and rather deviant plans. There were just too many unknowns wrestling inside my head. But I was committed to my sexual fantasy and would spend decades molding it to what I eventually learned about myself, my wife, and the many candidates I imagined in our room. A couple years later for our tenth-year anniversary we drove from Kentucky down to Florida and stayed at a charming beach community on the Gulf Coast. We rented a house there called Jack’s Beanstalk which was basically a tall but compact three-story structure that was painted blue like the color of the sea. My fantasy for this anniversary getaway of course also never occurred. And it really wasn’t the sort of place for this behavior anyway. Neither of us understood the first thing about how to go about something like this. Besides, my wife was never informed of this fantasy either. In fact she was never informed of any of my numerous plans regarding what would be considered a sanctioned adultery. There were plenty of trips we had made in the past in which my mind was entrenched in the gutter and she had little to no idea what schemes I was devising. It wasn’t until around 1995 when I finally got the courage to tell her of these prior fantasies. And in the beginning she wasn’t at all impressed with my deviant ideas as she was raised to believe marriage meant monogamy. She also questioned why a husband who supposedly loved her would want to share something that was exclusively his. And she did have a point which I considered often but left unresolved. I had no defense for my thinking except for the erotic enticement behind each fantasy. It took repeated discussions before she finally decided to join me in my experiment. I had assured her that either one of us could always veto whatever the other had in mind. For the next several years we tried on many different hats but never found the right circumstance in which to consummate what was becoming our mutual fantasy. But we did come close.
…We may believe in sharing as a virtue—we may teach it to our children—but we don’t seem to believe in sharing what we value most, our sexual partners. But if you really loved someone, wouldn’t you want to give them the best thing you’ve got, your partner? It would be a relief not to be puzzled by this.__Monogamy by Adam Phillips
I have written about a few of these prior dalliances. The closest we ever came to having a full blown adultery occurred due to my wife’s initial, and perhaps unwitting, exuberance to please me and actually act on it. That summer, armed with new knowledge of my sexual fantasy, she decided she would have sex with the principal at the school where she taught. And in her enthusiasm to fulfill her assignment went about her seduction without me. In retrospect it was quite an innocent and adorable debauchery. But it wasn’t until she was prepared to actually fuck this guy that she revealed to me her plans, which momentarily enraged me due to my being left out and feeling immediately threatened by the affair. I never blamed her for it as it was I who had set this up by revealing to her my secret thoughts and desires. But we weren’t in this seduction together. And feeling so threatened by this adulterous possibility I worried that it would be very hard for me to ever share my wife with anyone. Later I did realize I was wrong about her principal, and looking back it would have been a kind and loving act as the man had a very sick wife at home and his life had become sexless. He was actually no threat to me and the only reason she had chosen him was he reminded her of me. I never met the man but perhaps he was my doppelganger. His name was Bob and I believe today that he will maintain his status forever as being our safest bet for pulling off this fantasy. Unfortunately, he suddenly died just before my coming to grips with this.