Honesty is the best policy.
(Except when it comes to This Question.)
Relationships are hard enough.
Add Sex into the ‘interpersonal relating,’ and yes, it gets even harder. Add the Question of Who and How Many… And yes, that potentially ends the Relationship.
My last Wife asked me this question. And stupidly, I answered.
“Oh. So I”m the hundred and first,” she said, without the least humor in her voice. Add the dripping inflection of icy disapproval, and… Yes, it started to go downhill from there.
Now, my wife didn’t exactly have any reason to have that drippingly icy tone. After all, the man who introduced me to her — “Robin. I have a favor to ask.” Yes, he as one of my best friends.
He had come to the dance that we were at with the woman that I saw from the other side of the room, whom I was and thought, ‘My God. Who the hell is that?’ She had the proverbial look of the deer in headlights on a dark road that you ‘encounter’ in the beams of your headlights when it’s too late to stop. I’d seen that ‘look‘ before. And it wasn’t good.
I took her home that night. We had a pleasant but tense conversation in my car. I gave her my phone number as she got out. Big mistake. I knew that it was an even bigger mistake to pursue her.
One thing led to another… And. Well, I became husband Number Three. She was all of 45. I should have know better, but I didn’t.
When I met my father-in-law, he was involved with his latest woman. He was 72, and this woman (who was also his lawyer) was all of 42. Younger than his daughter; my wife.
He had been a serial Womanizer and Marryier of Wives, a charismatic Alcoholic, who was always sleeping with the next ‘wife’/woman while he was still married to the current one.
So therefore, when my wife asked me That Question, I made the mistake of answering. Honestly. I fell into the Trap that I did not see. I became… Her Father. I was ‘going to cheat.’ That’s what Men Do.
I am a Child of the Sixties. Even though I grew up in the Seventies. Even thought I did not become the ‘man’ I was going to become until Late in the Seventies.
