“You can go against it in life, but don’t speak against it. When I decided to write about it, the novelist Frederic Tuten offered a warning about the sanctity in which Americans hold monogamy in marriage. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes.
When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. 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. So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. 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.
Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs.
