"No, my husband hasn't refused to come see you with me. I haven't told him I'm seeing a marriage counselor. I'm just not sure what's to be done for the best, so I haven't said anything."
The counselor nodded and gestured with her pen that her new client should continue. "My husband and I have had a rather traditional marriage, with him working in corporate management and myself raising our three kids at home. You might say the two of us were on cruise control until the day he announced he'd been offered a big promotion...in Dallas.
"Well, the kids and I went ballistic. All my family and friends are here. Our oldest is a senior in high school and was looking forward to a great final year on two varsity teams. The last thing he wanted was to move and become the unrecognized newbie at a new school. Our daughters, one and three years younger respectively, felt the same way about moving.
"The four of us drove home the point that there was no way we could leave our home. We argued both
en masse
and by tag team until we wore him down. He said, 'All right already. I'll tell them I can't accept.' The kids acted immaturely like teenagers will; when they thought they were out of earshot they told each other they'd avoided a disaster by finally managing to explain a simple point to the 'rent. I tried to behave better, thanking him for putting us first. He was pretty damn quiet for a week or two, but then he seemed to get over it.
"A few weeks later, he talked to me one night after dinner. He said, 'I bumped into a guy I used to work with and he had lost an awful lot of weight. I asked him about that and he said the trick that worked for him was to prepare all his own food. I asked why that made a difference and he said that it forced him to be more cognizant of what he was eating.' He said he wanted to try it, and promised he'd not let his experiment create more housework for me.
"He started in on the experiment, generally cooking for himself while the kids and I ate what I had cooked. Since we usually eat in a space right next to the kitchen, it wasn't as if he wasn't present for family dinner. He could join in the conversation just as well a few feet away while he chopped and stirred. The meals he made were small, but healthful, and he usually cleaned up my mess as he went.
"It was working for him; he was losing weight. He added a gym regimen as I'd long nagged him to do, and it went even better. He was dressing better, looking younger, and I approved. He started to go out on Thursday nights; a group of guys invited him to join their board game club, he said.
"Matters drifted through the summer and into the fall. Then a neighborhood tailgate party brought my husband into the view of some of my women friends for the first time in a while. They seemed to me to be uncomfortable. After a few beers, one of them became uninhibited enough to blurt out the reason: in their experience a middle-aged man suddenly getting into shape and dressing more sharply raised red flags.
"Their suspicions made me think back. Our sex life
had
been diminishing. Not dramatically, just an extra day or two between one interlude and the next, but that trend had slowly added up to an alarming degree. My libido has never been too high, and the lack had not registered on my consciousness. And there was certainly time in his schedule I couldn't account for. My neighbors' speculations, and all the cautionary tales I remembered from Dear Abby... By the time we got home, I was sure he was having an affair.
"After the party, the beer and the home team's victory put my husband in the mood for sex. I refused him, lying about the reason. His face made it was clear I'd lost a few wife points sending him to bed unsatisfied, but I couldn't care less. Getting tested for STD's had to be task one.
"I got in to have blood drawn that next morning, and then I started to plan how to catch him in infidelity. A simple Google search revealed a myriad of possibilities. There were logging programs you could hide on a cell phone or a personal computer. I bought one of each. It was easy to get the password for his phone − I just left mine at home when we went to see my son's football game. I asked to borrow his. 'Oh, hon...what's the passcode?' It took a bit longer to access his computer, but unless you're totally random, your wife can probably figure it out.
"I seethed when I saw a large subdirectory of porn pictures, megabytes of big breasted women singly or in lesbian groups. I bypassed that and looked for incriminating e-mails. I didn't find any, there anyway.
"That evening, he tried to get me into bed, and again I demurred. This time, with the images I'd seen conjuring up the scenario of him fantasizing about someone else... Well, I was rather rude about it.
"After he was asleep, I crept out of bed and accessed the phone calls and e-mails my spy program had logged. Nothing there, either.
"The next day I rented a logging GPS. Late at night I hid it in his car. If he was going on a tryst at lunch or on Thursday night, I'd soon know about it. I recruited a woman friend of mine that he doesn't know about to go to the health club at the same hours as he did to keep an eye on him. This also turned out to be a dead end.
"Thursday night late when he came back from wherever, I downloaded the information from the GPS. I'd be ready next week. Next morning I also got the results from my doctor: all negative. I thanked goodness for little favors.
"Each night I checked his computer and phone. I pored over the family financial records, looking for missing money. I paid for a full credit statement to see if there were any credit cards I didn't know about. I checked our tax forms (that I've always signed, unread) looking for accounts in an out-of-town bank. None of these steps yielded me anything.
"When Thursday rolled around, I pulled out of our driveway about fifteen minutes after he had. I drove through the night to the address from last week's spying. His car was parked on a suburban street in front of a house. I was deliberately dressed in dark clothes and I crept towards the side of the house away from the street light. I steeled myself for what I was about to see.
"I peeped in the window and beheld the last thing I expected. Ten middle-aged guys around two tables, pushing little plastic pieces around on cardboard maps. He really was playing board games with the guys!
"A bee was in my bonnet for sure, and I began to spend real money for professional surveillance. I had him tailed and skip traced. Nothing. At last I paid to have him honey-trapped. For my trouble, I got a video of him flashing his wedding ring at the actress the agency had hired on my behalf. After I'd spent about $6000, the lead PI gave me the good news: 'Congratulations, your husband is completely faithful.'
"At last I accepted it. Freud said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.' And sometimes a middle-aged guy getting in shape is just a middle-aged guy getting in shape. I hid the money I'd spent as best as I could. It will resist casual scrutiny, but if my husband ever looks hard enough, he'll find it. Fortunately, I handle most of the bill-paying in our house.
"Now I had the challenge of trying to turn 180 degrees. Since our wedding night, we'd never gone nearly this long without sex. I figured that after such a wait, he'd be eager for me, but matter proved more difficult than I expected. I had to make it totally obvious that
I wanted sex
. And we did go to bed, and he took good care of my body. I came, and he did, too. But after the lights were out, I was unsettled. The event lacked a certain
je ne sais quoi
