Is it cheating if you’ve never seen him naked?
I’m engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a married man. No, we’ve never had sex. But we are intimate. Despite his funky logic and justification, I still consider this cheating.
My friendship with Charlie has spanned almost twenty years. We’ve seen each other through failed engagements, bad dates, good dates, tragic losses and supreme successes. He is my best friend and will always be a part of my life, regardless of who I eventually settle down with. That’s a non-negotiable. We are that close. We are a package deal. Unfortunately, I don’t think his wife would approve. That is, if she even knew I existed.
That’s right. I’ve never met Charlie’s wife. I’ve never even spoken to her. She has a vague idea of my existence, as Charlie and I were friends back when he and she first started to date. That was also around the time that Charlie and I had our first and most sever falling out. He stopped talking to me for 4 years. When we did reconnect in 2004, he and she had already been married a year. Back then, he balked at even the slightest of inappropriate stories or comments.
“I’m a married man” he’d say. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be hearing about your sex life.”
Understood. As the years went on, and as I listened to his occasional gripes about his wife grow to be constant, that boundary that he had laid down disolved into thin air. We were slowly falling back into our old habits. While Charlie and I never crossed the line of our friendship and acted upon our mutual attraction, we did enjoy the occasional round of phone sex. Since he lived in Boston and I lived in Manhattan, the distance made it easy to compartmentalize. We never fought. Well, once.
It was when he told me he proposed to his then girlfriend. I knew in my heart that she wasn’t right for him and that she didn’t make him happy and I told him so. He railed on me for not being supportive. Once their engagement ended, he revealed that I was the only person to tell him the truth about how they felt concerning his girlfriend. Within days of leaving his ex-fiancee, he was in bed with his now wife. We’ll call her Amy. Amy and Charlie dated when they were both in their early twenties. Even after their break-up, she remained in his life as a friend. So it wasn’t a suprise to me when he took up with her within 72 hours of moving out of the apartment he shared with his ex-fiancee. Big mistake. Not only was he emotionally battered from the break-up, he was extremely vulnerable. I knew where he was headed and it wasn’t a happy place. She wanted him and she was going to get him once and for all.
I found myself kicked to the curb a few months later. He’ll deny it, but I think Charlie removed me from his life because he needed to make this relationship – any relationship – work. He needed to believe he was capable of being a Husband. I had already voiced my concerns about Amy, saying he needed time to heal and be on his own. I don’t think he wanted to have yet another of my predictions come true. He just couldn’t handle another failure. Amy may have played a minor role in our disconnect as well, though he’s never confirmed that. It’s funny. She had no problem playing the role of the sympathetic friend when his previous relationship was going down in flames. Which is why, I;m sure, she didn’t care for Charlie engaging in friendships with any woman other than her. She knew better. From experience.
When Charlie and I reconciled, I knew it couldn’t be simply because he missed me. No. There was more to it. He was looking for something. Something his wife was not giving him. Soon I was hearing about their fights over money and sex. A part of me wanted to throw the phone down and walk away after screaming, “I told you so!” But friends don’t do that. Friends listen. Friends support. So I listened. And listened.The lack of sex. The fights over money. The not feeling appreciated. Oprah would have a field day.
Eventually our conversations and our “friendship” morphed into something sexual. Again. The tension and the curiousity has always been there. The underlying attraction always present but never acted upon. We now express our desires openly. He admits to fantasizing about me. He tells me he wants me.
But I know what this is.
This is his way of compensating for what’s missing in his marriage. It’s his coping mechanism, his way of avoiding the real possibility that his marriage is failing. In his mind, I think, he feels he can get the desire and attention from me and therefore endure what might be a sexless marriage. I am his Fluffer. But I truly believe he does not consider this cheating. Of course it is. Telling me he wished I could go down on him, telling me how spectacular my breasts are, expressing his desire to fuck me.That’s cheating. Just because his pee pee doesn’t actually come in contact with my hoo hah doesn’t mean it’s not cheating. Intimacy is intimacy and there is such a thing as emotional infidelity.
I am his Other Woman. I play this role willingly. I make my own justifications. She did it, I tell myself. She lay in wait for his relationship to expire so she could swoop in. He tells me he loves me. He’s my friend. This is something that has been building for years and it was only a matter of time before it became a reality.
I believe that people cheat for various reasons. Some cheat because they feel entitled to it. Some cheat because they secretly hope to be caught and they can get the attention from their partner that they miss. Finally, others cheat because they have already mentally checked out of their marriage and acknowledge that it’s over, and are simply biding time until it finally ends. None of these reasons are right, obviously. In Charlie’s case, I think the sexual nature of our conversations and relationship is a menifestation of the trouble in his marriage. I can’t tell him this. He must confront it on his own. Especially if he hopes to save his marriage.
I do not ever see us ever consumating these mutual fantasies. I take this for what it is – attention. We have a twisted relationship, Charlie and I. The sexual never interferes with the platonic. There is no jealousy. We both can be objective when offering advice and support.
I don’t engage in thoughts of “what if?” There is no “what if?” To use a cliched phrase, it is what it is. When people ask me to define what “is” is, I can’t. I don’t feel I have to. That’s what is so weird to me. I don’t entertain fantasies of some When Harry Met Sally type ending where we finally profess our love to each other. No. That’s not us.
The only question I have is: Why am I so at peace with this arrangement?