Getty ImagesAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowI was 29 when I got married, and I did not expect to be happy in my marriage. Now, 11 years later, my wife and I are one of the happiest couples I know of. A lot of this has to do with witnessing friends commit adultery. Although the outward details of my life are bound to differ from every other life, my emotional life is probably not so unusual. I am ordinary in most ways. I am ordinary in my fears and ordinary in my lusts. Although I could have made other decisions, my decisions, too, are ordinary.
More From ELLEI believed I wouldn't have a happy marriage because I didn't think I would have a happy life. My mother is mentally ill, and growing up with her had left me with shame and fear and anxiety. I remember once, when I was a child, my mother slapping me repeatedly during a family wedding. As her hand landed on my ear, my nose, my lips, I was conscious of all the people watching, and I felt embarrassed for her. I felt literally like two people, one feeling my own torment and one feeling pain for her.
One result of growing up in a family like mine is you lose hope; you don't think good things will happen to you. I proposed to my wife because I thought she wanted me to. I was going away for business, and she said she wanted a ring. Several years later, she told me that I had misinterpreted her, that when she had asked me to buy her a ring, she had meant only that the city I was visiting was famous for garnet jewelry and she would've liked to have some. This part of my story is just a variation of the cliché of a man proposing because he has been given an ultimatum.
When you have a marriage that begins this way and you have a personality like mine, there are bound to be problems. Often, in the early years of my marriage, I felt indifferent toward my wife. I once told her, "I sometimes think I don't love you." We were sitting at our glass-topped dinner table. My wife looked at me over the rim of her eyeglasses. After a moment, she said, "I know you do."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"I see how you light up when I come into a room." Until she told me this, I hadn't known I smiled when I saw her.
Around this time, the first of my friends confessed his adultery. We were standing in the back of a darkened hall, watching someone give a speech. Tom* had a glass of wine in his hand, and he had come from another reception and appeared pretty buzzed. As we chatted, Tom offhandedly mentioned that he was seeing a woman on the side. She was younger than he was and engaged. I asked him where exactly they had sex. He said she worked in the hotel business and so had access to rooms.
For several weeks afterward, whenever Tom and I met, we would talk about this woman. I began building a fantasy of her in which she looked like a movie star. I googled her to try to find a picture. Imagining this woman, I started to find my own wife less attractive. My wife has very light hair on her legs. She usually shaves her legs to just above her knees. Suddenly, I started being annoyed that she didn't shave all the way up her thighs.
It was a while before I saw Tom's wife, Lauren, after he disclosed his affair to me. Lauren has pale skin that she makes even whiter with makeup. It gives her a Kabuki appearance. Lauren, Tom, my wife, Christine, and I sat in a booth at a restaurant, and all through the meal Lauren was unpleasant. Among other things, she scolded Tom for going to the bathroom too many times. Usually I find Lauren annoying. That night, though, every time I looked at her, I felt sad. She was wearing a shawl, and this made her appear shrunken. She did not know that her husband was cheating, yet to me she looked like someone who was ill and suffering. When my wife and I left and were walking down a sidewalk, I put my arm around her. It is hard after you have known someone for a while to see her afresh. Sometimes when I have done something that hurts my wife so much she cries, I can suddenly see her with new eyes, suddenly see her without preconceptions. That night, having seen Lauren being harmed, I was able to look at Christine as if she were a stranger. I could see her as someone who could be hurt, someone wanting to be happy. I lifted my wife's hand to my lips and kissed it. "I love you," I said.
The image of Lauren in the booth that night, wrapped in a shawl, her face ashen, has become a touchstone. I think of her, and a rush of protective love for my wife floods into me. What happened that night was not just that the door into adultery got heavier, but that I began to understand how much I loved my wife.
One of the things women don't realize is that most married men live in a culture of adultery. We see it all around us. We have friends who have cheated on their wives. We have been on business trips where we went to strip clubs and our colleagues went into the back for hand jobs or more. We don't tell our wives, of course. A lot of husbands still operate with the idea that what gets revealed among men stays among men. Part of this is based on boyhood ideas of not snitching. Part of it, however, is based on a more cynical motive: If we were to tell our wives, they would begin watching us more closely, and as most of us married men keep in mind the possibility that one day we too will have an affair, to tell our wives would be to diminish this chance.
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