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When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine; it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’d only talked about my issue with any honesty over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and a therapist, they are all men.


So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. When people at dinner parties cried out, “What was Spitzer thinking?” I whispered to a friend that I knew damn well what he was thinking: He wanted some “strange,” to quote the old Kris Kristofferson line. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes. Straying, wandering eye, a blowup. If you have a pulse.”

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One of the leaders in the field, David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire and a professor at the University of Texas, says that men’s genes program them to seek many mates and try to monopolize the reproductive lives of those mates; think of the manners of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints sect’s sprawling compound in Texas, in which the older men ran the younger men off and had as many of the girls—as young as 14—as they wanted. But women are also programmed for infidelity, Buss says. They have a drive to monopolize the economic resources of their mate, according to the theory, but also to keep a man or two in reserve, because men die earlier than women, or men go off, and women need protection. Recent analyses of genetic databases reveal that fully 10 percent of people have different biological fathers from the men they name as their fathers, Buss notes; that’s evidence of women cheating. But Buss says the difference between the genders in the desire for variety is not minor (as, say, the gender difference in height is, about 10 percent on average); it is staggering, “like the difference between how far the average man and woman can throw a rock.” Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by. “Women are going to get bored, just like men, but I don’t think they have this driving constant need,” says Nancy Heneson, a science writer who’s covered evolutionary psychology since its early days.


The point was driven home to me by a transgender man who responded to my ad. Jay was a woman for nearly 50 years till he made the transformation a couple years ago. The testosterone regime he underwent produced great changes in behavior—as well as tolerance of infidelity. “There is a significant uptick in casual sex, a lowering of inhibitions, and far more interest in sexual variety, including bisexuality and fetishes, BDSM, etc.,” Jay said. “Personally, I have noticed I have a newfound ability to completely divorce sexuality from emotional commitments.”

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“Marriage isn’t the problem; it’s the best answer anyone’s come up with,” Squire says. “Men and women are equally oppressed by expectations. Expectations are ridiculously high now. Nobody expected you to find personal fulfillment and happiness in marriage. Marriage can be very satisfying, but it’s not going to be this heady romance for 40 years.” Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion. “What does Bataille say?” Squire continues. “There is nothing erotic that is not transgressive. Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

Our genes also predispose us to eat sweet foods, but do you have this tolerant a view towards someone who stuffs themselves with cookies and ice cream until they are housebound at 600 pounds? We are more than the cravings of our genes. Or should be.

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We talked about a concept Bass had introduced me to, polyamory. She said, “The old open marriage has given way to this.” Polyamory is something of that fantasy I and other men I know harbor, of a community of free-loving people in multiple relationships. Not just dyads, or couples, but triads, or a woman with two “primaries,” a whole community of friends with benefits. “With practice, we can develop an intimacy based on warmth and mutual respect, much freer than desperation, neediness, or the blind insanity of falling in love,” Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, two former hippies, write in The Ethical Slut.


My most liberated male friend has expressed a similar view. He finds my confession of sexual torment backward. “It breaks my fucking heart to hear you talk that way. That any person has to talk about where their sexuality has led them in a shameful manner, in relation to other people. That a person’s sexuality has led them to hurt, and I don’t mean physically, another person— that breaks my heart.”


If we simply got rid of a vow of sexual exclusivity and the piety around “faithfulness,” which is a religiously inscribed misnomer for sexual exclusivity anyway, we have no idea what the family would look like in 100 years, he says. Okay, most people would be sexually exclusive and married. But there would be a party going on at the other end of town, in a community of people of high sexual desire who understood that about one another and didn’t feel jealousy or possessiveness.

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ORIGINAL: Level

Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

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ORIGINAL: sirsholly

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ORIGINAL: Level

Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

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ORIGINAL: lronitulstahp

cheating is human and forgiveable...
      i've been through it.  My ex cheated and i forgave...but then it became a sick pattern; some sort of redemptive kink of his.  i figured, "this is bullshit", and ended my marriage.  i think people are flawed, and may fall, but cheating shouldn't become a habit.  i've also been the other woman in a couple "unhappy" marriages that were supposed to be "nearly over".  Funny thing, how women can become competitive when the 'other woman' becomes a factor...suddenly the rallying cry is given and marriages become worth fighting for.  It hurts both ways, i'm afraid. 

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ORIGINAL: sirsholly

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ORIGINAL: Level

Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

oh really?

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ORIGINAL: BOUNTYHUNTER

LEVEL,men where created with the go forth and multiply gene and soirée to say I have that gene...I cheated in my first marriage and probably would have in my second ,what saved me was finding a woman that told me have as many as you want but don't go behind my back...I am more then a one womans man,I need variety and have it or some thing is wrong..Diane says I have more appetite then she can handle,have your little sluts but remember there is love for only one..bounty

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ORIGINAL: Level

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ORIGINAL: sirsholly

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ORIGINAL: Level

Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

oh really?

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ORIGINAL: kittinSol

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ORIGINAL: sirsholly

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ORIGINAL: Level

Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.”

oh really?

Yeah, I disagree with that quote: marriage is a real turn-on. Perhaps it's because I'm warped?

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ORIGINAL: lusciouslips19

I don't know how to answer this poll. I never cheated in my marriage when I considered us married. But we are not legally divorced. But we do not consider ourselves still married and have been estranged for 3 and 1/2 years. So I guess it depends on what you define as being married.

I would rather swing with my partner than have him cheat on me. I do have more respect for people in open marriages than those who cheat. Cheating is going behind someone's back and having to lie to them.

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ORIGINAL: BOUNTYHUNTER

LEVEL,men where created with the go forth and multiply gene and soirée to say I have that gene...I cheated in my first marriage and probably would have in my second

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ORIGINAL: kittinSol

'Room for diverging needs': what do you mean?