The Man Who Loved Married Women

Joe's a good name for a good guy, and Joe indeed was a good guy -- a veritable catch, actually -- compared to most of the denizens of perpetual bachelorhood I'd met through the online dating site I'd joined. Joe was all-American handsome with thick brown hair and shockingly beautiful brown eyes. He had a prestigious job that yielded a decent salary, and his hobbies and interests -- SCUBA, travel, sailing -- were appealing to the outdoorsy, adventure-seeking woman, which is what attracted me to him. At 40, Joe had one serious relationship of eight years from which he had recently recovered. However, I soon found out that ours was not a relationship that was meant to be. Something about our interaction registered an ominous sonar ping. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I had the sense that despite his protestations, Joe was not good to go.

Joe eventually slipped up during one of our conversations: " ... my girlfriend's husband ..." I'd put this phrase in context if I could actually remember what we were talking about at the time, but as soon as I heard him utter it, the sonar ping turned into a full-scale alert, complete with sirens and red flashing lights. My girlfriend's husband. Whoa, Joe! What are you saying here? You were involved with a married woman for eight years --?

When someone utters something shocking, I've always been slow to respond. Such was the case here. With some gentle prodding, I found out a little more about Joe's married paramour -- to his credit, he kept her identity confidential. Much of their years-long relationship was devoted to navigating the complexities of her being married and him not being married; their disparate marital statuses seemed to be the "glue" that bonded them together rather than drove them further apart. As Joe told me the reasons why various single, available, personable women he had dated hadn't worked out, it was apparent why he too was still single. The women he'd dated had children. They had crazy ex-husbands. They didn't make enough money. They were too clingy. There was always something.

I have some thoughts on single people who get involved with married affair partners. You probably don't want to hear my pontifications, because they do indeed have a moral bias. Joe might have been a stellar guy, but what good did that do me -- or any other woman -- if he actively chose a married woman as a long-term mate? So my determination of Joe as a prospective partner was not merely based on his unwillingness to commit to someone who was free and clear; he had shown me that he was willing to get himself into a sticky situational which demanded a moral judgment. Affairs just aren't ethical, regardless if one is the married party or the Other Man or Other Woman.

My conversations with Joe remained quite candid for some time, and as I found out more about his dating proclivities, it became even more obvious why he was still unattached. Joe set a high bar for his prospective significant other, and in fact, his list of preferences verged on fetishism. He wanted a woman who fell in the age range of 35 to 45, was tall, had long blond hair, medium-sized breasts, great legs, who worked out, who was well-educated (but not lethally so), who had her own money (a lot of it), who didn't wear too much eye make-up, who enjoyed the same activities, and who lived within a five-mile radius. This, of course, cut the list down to almost nil when it came to his choices on the online dating site we were both members of. And oddly enough, among his many expectations, one of them was not that the woman in question be unmarried. His married girlfriend, on the other hand, met every one of his criteria.

In 1955, Sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey addressed the topic of the habitual bachelor who secretly fears the responsibility of a life commitment or imposed such specific demands and expectations on a future mate as to be impossible. With prostitution under attack despite the availability of barrier-based birth control and new drugs that treated STDs, terminal bachelors had to find another outlet for sexual release: The married woman. This suggests that single men enter into a relationship with a married woman not with the intention of scoring a home run, but rather just getting to third base. Was this the case with Joe?

Despite the mutual attraction between us, Joe decided that the distance between our residences was too problematic -- I lived in town, and he lived in the 'burbs, a 30-minute drive in optimal traffic conditions. My friendly chats with him slowed down and then ceased. Last I heard, he'd stumbled across a college girlfriend on a social networking site. She was, of course, married and had three young children. The two of them had started meeting for long lunches, during which Joe shared his dating woes. "She was the one who got away," he told me ruefully.

I get a really bad feeling about this.