Monogamy - it works for me
Mind over matter
I wasn’t always a good boy when it came to fidelity; twenty years ago, I cheated on my second serious girlfriend with multiple different women. Now, I still feel guilty about that – not, to be clear, as guilty as I feel about the times I shouted at her – but it’s also never been something I found difficult to explain. I was young, stupidly horny, and wanted novel sexual experience just as I wanted experience of every kind; there was no way to find out that infidelity leads to utter chaos without committing it first. No way to work out three doughnuts are too many without chomping through all of them.
Following that early idiocy, though, I’ve put together a strong run of faithfulness and haven’t cheated on a partner in two decades. In my later years in Berlin – which were also, in fairness, my years of peak attractiveness – situations did sometimes get a bit busy, but I was always careful to be honest with people about what I was up for, and I always made decisions rather than keeping people hanging.
I also, crucially, had a lot of fun; hopefully this was mutual. The fact that I very rarely had a one-night stand but always shared some kind of love affair with my partners argues in my favour, I think. I never slept with anyone I didn’t on some level admire – I just found myself admiring rather a lot of people, for such achievements as having been quite funny one evening or being able to speak.
Anyway, then came marriage and I cashed in my chips; I’ve been entirely faithful to my spouse for seven years now1. I say entirely – there was one incident when I was inappropriately flirtatious, which also left me under new illusions that my wife would literally kill me if she did catch me cheating. An irony of monogamy in LTRs seems to me that people are both more likely to cheat at the beginning of a relationship, single life being closer in memory, and also more likely to be punished for it. You might hear, ‘You couldn’t even stay faithful for me for two months?’ To which you could respond, ‘But it’s only two months – we could be together for years!’
Still, I’m all-in now. I’ve been helped by the advice of older people who’ve trodden the same paths and faced the same decisions, particularly in youth. The old friend of mine who said that they thought cheating had the most negative impact on your life of all bad decisions; you had to move out and change your mailing address just for fifteen minutes of (by no means guaranteed) sexual bliss. The obituaries of golden age film stars which detailed marriages of sixty-years of length inspired my, as did the words of my grandfather who would say ‘If one’s not enough a hundred won’t be too many’. My Dad loves to quote that too.