I’m in a taxi late at night, drunkenly putting the moves—rusty but surprisingly effective—on a friendly young publicist, when I’m struck by several buzz-killing realizations: My son has swimming tomorrow and his bathing suit has gone AWOL. I have to reschedule a conference at my 4-year-old daughter’s school. There are only two chicken nuggets left in the freezer. And my wife’s birthday is next week.
The last one is really important—the woman deserves something nice; without her, I wouldn’t be getting it on. A few months ago, inching past 40, I was overcome by a midlife crisis the pain of which wasn’t diminished by its being a cliché. On paper, things looked pretty good. I had a job, a family, and a house. But the responsibilities of parenthood had turned my marriage into a sexual no-fly zone. Which made it no less surprising when the person who persuaded me to look outside my relationship was my wife.
“Maybe you need to see other girls,” she’d casually offered one night, prompting my jaw to drop onto the kitchen table. “You should be free.” She added that while she had no interest in sleeping around, if I sowed a few oats she would turn a blind eye.
And thus began, after 15 mostly happy years of marriage, a new phase in our union. Call it negotiated wedlock, open fidelity, or monogamy 2.0. Call it every guy’s fantasy. In my case it’s a limited pass, authorization to tomcat without sacrificing my primary saucer of cream.
The very idea of sleeping with someone else raised a host of thorny issues (commitment, jealousy, how to put on a condom) I thought I’d resolved years before.
Apparently I’m not the only one trying it. Ask around a little and it’s clear the institution of marriage is under siege—not as you may have heard, by all those homosexuals bum-rushing the huppah, but by the growing legions of bored couples who, while perfectly okay with that “for richer, for poorer” stuff, are iffy on “forsaking all others.”
Take Brendan (not his real name), a 31-year-old editor who lives in Manhattan. Brendan has been married for five years to Lisa, his college sweetheart. “We got together young, and neither of us really felt done sleeping around,” he explains. So from the get-go they agreed to see other people. There were a few verboten targets: no mutual friends, no exes, no coworkers. Condoms were required, the deal was limited to one-night stands, and trysts had to happen when one of them was out of town. The final stipulation was full disclosure.