I got a call from an old girlfriend recently, and we agreed to meet for lunch. It had been a good relationship and an amicable parting. Catching up for old time’s sake seemed like a fun idea—each of us was curious about how the other had turned out after all these years.
If there is a little place in your heart for each of your former lovers, I’ve learned to think of it as fond memories and selective sentimentality, nothing more. After ten years of connubial bliss, I don’t carry a torch for anyone but the wife. Even so, it can be hard to separate memories from other kinds of more complicated feelings—like lust. And there were enough messy endings that might have been happy ones, if only I’d had my act together when I was younger. Maybe that’s why my first impulse was not to tell Mrs. Greene about lunching with my old girlfriend. Also, she can be an awfully jealous woman.
But the more I thought about this, the more I became annoyed: What did I have to hide? I had no reason to feel guilty, nor did I have to take responsibility for her jealousy. Besides, she’s still friends with a few of her old boyfriends. I don’t find that threatening in the least. To be fair, though, she’s as loyal as she is jealous, and if I had to be objective about it, I’d admit that between the two of us, I’m the more likely to have unclean thoughts about a past lover.
Claire was a knockout when we dated fifteen years ago. Everyone has that first relationship with someone they learn the ropes with. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve got time on your hands, you’re horny as a billy goat. Claire and I had a lot of fun together, though within about six months we realized the only thing we really had in common was our mutual appreciation for frequent sex—one of life’s pleasures that is wasted on youth.
I didn’t realize it then, but now I’ve come to believe that Claire is probably addicted to sex. I realized this because, as we dug into a banana split with two spoons, she was astonishingly frank about her love life, which sounds a bit like Valleyfair for adults. She’s married, but claims it’s an “open” thing. She and her husband frequently invite others into their bedroom. I was curious about how this worked, and Claire admitted that it’s really her thing. She’d had relationships with women over the years, and she liked going to bed with both sexes—at the same time. Her husband has been a willing if not enthusiastic partner.
Of course, this is just about every man’s fantasy. A lot of women fantasize about going to bed with two men, too. But we all know by now that fantasy and reality are frequently polar opposites, and if you’ve been silly enough to try to make your sexual fantasy a reality—especially if it involves bringing another person into the bedroom, either in addition to or in place of your spouse—you have probably been disappointed at best or deeply hurt at worst.
This was not the case for Claire. She said she and her husband had a perfectly healthy and normal relationship, other than the fact that she liked to pick up other women and bring them home for kinky three-ways. I found it interesting, though, that there were some pretty strict rules about the scenario. Claire said that her husband was free to ogle their playmate, but he could not touch her. This seemed unfair to me—but only within the parameters of what was a pretty screwy larger picture.
Most sexperts these days seem to have a laissez-faire attitude about such activities—as long as no one gets hurt and everyone has a “safe word,” nothing too awful can happen. On the other hand, the ones who aren’t afraid to delve deeper into moral and psychological issues seem to agree that humans are essentially monogamous by nature, and that this type of sex-play is usually evidence of some kind of dysfunction, often something very serious and hurtful.
I can’t speak for others, but to me Claire seems still to be obsessed with sex after all these years, and her obsession is apparently doubled by her bisexuality. It seems like she’s setting herself up for lot of long-term pain for a moment’s pleasure.
Lunch was fun. Despite the dirty conversation, Claire confided in me in a way she never had—in a non-sexual, just-friends manner that never made me uncomfortable. Still, I remembered the main moral of our story, the Affair of Me and Claire: Great sex does not make a relationship, just like split bananas don’t make a banana split.
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