My Cheatin’ Heart

By Daphne Gottlieb Utne Magazine
Published on March 1, 2006

Let’s just get this out in the open.

I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He
made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix
tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned
that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street. A serious
girl. A girl his age. A girl he loved. Unlike inappropriate, high
school, secret me.

The next time, I was 15 and visiting a friend at college. It was
a friend’s friend’s boyfriend who looked like Jim Morrison and wore
leather pants and burned candles and incense. She was at work and I
wanted him to touch me. She found out. I don’t know what happened
after that.

I was 19 and he was my boyfriend’s archrival. I was 20 and it
was my lover’s girlfriend and we had to lie because otherwise he
always wanted to watch. I was 24 and her girlfriend knew about it
but then changed her mind about the open relationship. We saw each
other anyway. I was 30 when we met — we wanted each other but were
committed to other people; the way we look at each other still
scorches the walls. I turned thirtysomething and pointedly wasn’t
invited to a funeral/a wedding/a baby shower because of a
rumor.

I am a few years older now and I know this: That there are
tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; that there are
times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t
stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe
and I couldn’t be that vulnerable, not again, not with this one.
Waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive, and
there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this
free fall. It is not as simple as we were always promised. Love —
at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love — does not conquer all.
It does not conquer desire.

Arrow, meet heart. Apple, meet Eve.

Call me Saint Sebastian.

Out there in self-help books, on daytime television shows, I see
people told that they’re wrong to lust outside their relationships.
That they must heal what’s wrong at home and then they won’t feel
desire ‘inappropriately.’ I’ve got news. There’s nothing wrong.
Desire is not an illness. We who are its witnesses are not
infected. We’re not at fault. Not all of us are running away from
our relationships at home, or just looking for some side action.
The plain fact about desire is that sometimes it’s love.

If it were anything else, maybe it would be easier. But things
are not as simple as we were always promised: Let’s say you’re a
normal, upstanding, ethical man (or woman) who has decided to share
your life with someone beloved to you. This goes well for a number
of years. You have a lot of sex and love each other very much and
have a seriously deep, strong bond. Behind door number two, the
tiger: a true love. Another one. (Let’s assume for the moment that
the culture and Hollywood are wrong — we have more than one true
love after all.)

The shittiest thing you can do is lie to someone you love, yet
there are certain times you can choose either to do so or to lie to
yourself. Not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire,
is also a lie. So what do you do? Pursue it? Deny it? It doesn’t
matter: The consequences began when you opened the door and saw the
tiger, called it by its name: love. Pursue it or don’t, you’re
already stuck between two truths, two opportunities to lie.

The question is not, as we’ve always been asked, the lady —
beautiful, virtuous, and almost everything we want — or the tiger
— passionate, wild, and almost everything we want. The question
is, what do we do with our feelings for the lady and the
tiger? The lady is fair, is home, is delight. The tiger is not
bloodthirsty, as we always believed, but, say, romantic. Impetuous.
Sharing almost nothing in common with the lady. They even have a
different number of feet. But the lady would not see it this way.
You already know that.

You can tell the second love that you can’t do this — banish
the tiger from your life. You can go home to the first, confess
your desire, sob on her shoulder, tell her how awful you feel, and
she (or he) will soothe you. Until later, when she wonders if you
look at all the other zoo animals that way, and every day for a
while, if not longer, she will sniff at you to see if you’ve been
near the large cat cages. Things will not be the same for a long
time. And you’ve lost the tiger. Every time the housecat sits on
your lap, you tear up thinking of what might have been, the love
that has been lost. Your first love asks you what’s wrong and you
say ‘nothing.’ You say nothing a lot, because there’s nothing left,
nothing inside.

So instead, let’s say you go home and tell your first love,
This new love is a love I can’t live without. What can we
do?
She will say, All right, I want to meet her right
away. I get all holidays and weekends with you, and there will be
no sleepovers with the new love, and I expect the same for myself,
and you are never to call her any of the nicknames you have ever
used for me
, and the whole thing starts to remind you of a
high school necking session — under the sweater, over the bra, but
not under it.

You feel like an inmate all the time, and, moreover, where is
your first love tonight? She’s out with someone you’ve never met
while you’re out with your second love, who once had been amenable
to an affair. She looks at you sadly and says, ‘So you think I’m
only a half-time tiger?’ Her fangs are yellowed and sharp and she
finds herself unable to stop staring at the clock, which shows when
you will have to leave her to return to the lady.

Maybe there is no ‘happily ever after’ here, but I think there’s
an ‘after.’ I have been the first love; I have been the second; and
I have tried to decide between my own firsts and seconds. I have
walked through each ring of fire, and I’ve found no easy answers.
It could be that hearts are dumb creatures, especially mine. It
could be that there are no good answers. Whether we’re admitting
desire, lying about it, denying it, or fulfilling it, the
consequences are staggering, sometimes ruinous.

So, heart firmly sewn onto sleeve, assured that there is an
‘after,’ what can we do but stride forth? It seems clear that no
system — polyamory, monogamy, or stand-on-your-head-for-me — will
sanitize the astonishing highs and the bereft lows of desire and
betrayal. And even if they did, who wants a sanitized heart? So
it’s up to us: to work together, to love what’s so human about us,
to understand that the risk of love is loss, and to try to grant
desire without eviscerating ourselves. I’m not sure how to do this,
but I’m still trying. Because above all, I know this: It’s grace to
try, and fail, and try again.

A version of this essay appeared as the introduction to
Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (Soft Skull Press, 2005),
edited by Daphne Gottlieb
.

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