I don't get adultery

For those of you who know the Pompotous personally the title is a bit of a joke. Prior to meeting my lovely wife I spent most of my adult life, as someone once put it, "serially monogamous with the significant others of others." Let me be clear: I didn't go looking for affairs with married or engaged women, they came to the Pompotous, I wasn't the one breaking any marriage vows, and there were no children in any of the marriages. I was just instrumental in helping the women break vows they made to someone else. (In an amusing similarity, all 3 of the wives showed me pictures or videos of their wedding day right before moving to Stage 3 of the adulterous affair (the sexual intercourse bit)).

In the 15 years that these relationships happened I was manipulated and lied to and used and, oddly enough, ultimately blamed for the affair by all of the women involved, who somehow seemed to forget the effort they put into seducing me. Particularly by the last one, the one who had to manipulate and work on me for months to seduce me, and only managed to get sexual intercourse out of me the first time by encouraging me to take a nap and then having at me so that I woke up with the process already begun. From a purely physical standpoint, not a bad way to wake up, but from a question of responsibility viewpoint I never did figure out how that one was initiated by me.

Anyway, in addition to having the "it's not my fault" trait in common, all of the women had been married for 4 years when the sexual aspects of our affairs began. Perhaps because the 4th anniversary gift is supposed to be a household appliance. Well, I've been married longer than that and I have to say: I don't understand adultery.

Which isn't to say that I can't predict it. I pegged that third wife as an adultery risk the first night I met her: she was having to commute a long way because of her husband, she described him as a saint to whom she was totally devoted, the nicest guy in the world, yet there were undertones of resentment and need. No, I know the behavior back and forth, I know the tells that give away intentions, but I still have no clue as to why these women would deliberately set out to screw over their husbands by screwing someone else.

I've now been married as long as they were back then. My wife is my partner, my helper, the one who can drive me crazy in ways both good and bad. She's certainly not perfect nor a saint, nor am I, but if she wasn't like that I wouldn't have married her, if for some reason that went away, well, why wouldn't I divorce her?

At this point, my understanding of adultery has changed, and joined together with my understanding of rape: I don't get it. Why would anyone want to stick their dick into someone who didn't want it? What's the point, what are they getting that they couldn't get with some vaseline, a hand of choice and a good fantasy? Why would anyone want to screw around behind their spouse's back? What are they getting that they couldn't get with either working on their marriage or abandoning it all together? I know what I got out of these affairs: I got the illusion that someone cared about me while at the same time indulging in my self destructiveness. But these women had people who already really cared about them. If I'd had that (and I do now), no way would I deliberately betray that.

I get that these married women were all looking for something. The first ended up with both a string of marriages and a string of affairs. The second eventually divorced and became an alcoholic. The third, after four years, revealed that she'd been "hiding" her intense Christianity so people wouldn't make fun of her, stayed with her husband, who sank into depression, and now home schools the kids she had with him after she ended our affair forever for the third time. I get that they were looking for something. Aren't we all? What I don't get is why any of them thought that lying -- and lies are at the base of all adulteries in my experience -- could possibly be a path to finding what they needed.

As Merlin said in _Excalibur_, "Truth! That's it, it must be truth! When a man lies he murders some part of the world."