The Infidelity Debate
The first time I met her, while sitting at the bar and trying to chat up the woman sitting closest to me, she told me right out in a moment of candor that she had four lovers and if I wanted to be part of that to get in line. I held up my glass, said, "No thanks," and that I would drink to her group of cuckold knuckleheads. She called me an asshole, gave me the finger, then handed me a card with her phone number written on it.
The following Friday night, seven days later, I was on the same barstool and the same woman came in at about the same time. "Oh, look, it's the four-man woman," I said sarcastically. Again, she gave me the finger and sat at the far end of the bar. We exchanged nasty looks for about an hour until my conscience started bothering me for being so hostile and rude to someone I didn't even know. She could be a very nice person who just had a little too much jolly juice and revealed more than she should had cause she was just a little drunk.
Eventually, I moved down the bar and tried to make amends. "Look, I am sorry for being an an asshole, quoting her, being unkind and sarcastic and insulting, for being a total jerk," I said. "Could I buy you a drink? Start over? Try again?"
"You were an asshole. A drink won't get you anywhere, just so you know," she said. "But, okay, I accept your apology." I put out my hand and she shook it.
"Brad Martin," I said. "Single, divorced, not always a jerk. You?"
"Charlotte," she said. "Married, unfaithful, not always drunk enough to tell people things I should keep to myself. Lawyer, nearing forty, sexually active, sometimes too trusting or too candid. Anyway, your apology is accepted," she said, toasting our second attempt at conversation.
For the next month we met once a week at the same bar on the same bar stools and talked about close to everything. We talked religion, politics, the state of the nation, morality, marriage, our favorite books, but we kept coming back to fidelity and what it really meant.
She was married with lovers, so her definition of fidelity leaned more on the side of personal honesty regarding just about everything other than sex. Sex, she felt, was not a good way to define success in a marriage, but it was a great reason to make lots of friends of both genders.
"You can be faithful to someone you are not sexual with, right?" she said. "So couldn't you be unfaithful to someone you're not having sex with?" I nodded. "Then fidelity has little to do with sex. Being faithful has more to do with accepting someone for who they are, right? For being honest with them about how you feel about things, all things, even sex?"
I conceded she had a point, but if someone trusts you to only be sexual with them and them alone, then being sexual with someone else would be dishonest, or not faithful to your agreement with that person. "Okay, sex could be a factor in fidelity, but it isn't the only one, right? So if people agree sex is not the determining factor, then you could be faithful to someone and still have sex with other people."
She studied me for a minute. "Let me asked you this," she said. "You were married, right?" I nodded. "So when you were married, was sex the most important thing for you in that marriage? In other words, could you be happy if your wife was having a good time but not with you? Like enjoying a great meal, or a concert, or something she liked that you may not? Or with someone else, but she still really loved you?"
I argued that if she loved me, wouldn't she want to be sexually faithful? "Okay," she said, "but if she wasn't, would you stop loving her?"
"It would hurt," I said.
"But would it kill the love? If love was genuine, wouldn't it outlive infidelity?" she asked.
"Do you love the men you are having affairs with?" I asked.
"Simple answer, no," she said. "They just pleasure me, but you are avoiding my question. Would you stop loving her?"
"I don't think so, but I would probably find out, right? Do you love your husband?" I asked.
"Probably, yes. We get along. We enjoy one another's company. And we like each other. That may be the best definition of love," she said. "I do have difficulty coming up with a solid definition of love. How would you define it?"
"Probably that you would do anything for that person," I said.
"Anything? Even giving them sexual liberty?" she said, trapping me in my own snare.
"Okay," I said. "In the abstract. I guess. Pure love would probably tolerate that. A parent certainly loves and allows their offspring to love others."
"Unconditional love?"
"Yes," I said.
"My point exactly," she said.
On our fifth meeting, our discussion of fidelity picked right up where it left off the time before. "You ready to concede that unconditional love is the absolute essential definition of the highest form of love?" she said.
"I guess what I am saying is that there is the theoretical and the romantic, emotional and practical kinds of love, what people can actually carry out in their daily lives," I said, "and what they postulate about it."
She thought for a minute, then she took a sip of her second martini of the night and said, "Let me asked you this. Could you have a best friend who had a best friend besides you?"
"Of course," I said, seeing where she was going, "but we probably hadn't made a pledge to remain faithful as our only best friend."
