The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives: 27 Women Writers on Love, Infidelity, Sex Roles, Race, Kids, and More

By Autumn Stephens

Some marriages are made in heaven, and others, quite frankly, are not. This anthology collects the private reflections of 25 well-known women writers, some of whom speak under the liberating cloak of anonymity. They reveal the truth about their marriages, their divorces, and sometimes, their decisions to remain single. The essays here chronicle the highs and lows of romantic relationships, the ebb and flow of love and desire, and the many alternatives to traditional matrimony. With topics ranging from infidelity and true love to orgasms, children, career power struggles, race issues, and aging, these are stories that empower women to make sense of their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Library
• Release date: Feb 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781608680047

Book preview

Notices

Preface

This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is only for those willing to entertain the notion that marriage is the most difficult of human relationships, the most exasperating, the most painful, and the most rewarding. Each of the stories attests to the crazy-making potential of living day in, day out with a chosen partner, yet almost all of them affirm the unique value of the conjugal union. As one of the authors puts it: If I try to imagine life without him, I feel dizzy, uprooted.

These stories, born of personal experience, have been honed to express the idiosyncrasies of each couple, their moments of bonding and their moments of separation. Some write of infidelity, divorce, or death, heart-wrenching afflictions that come as often from oneself as from one’s partner, or simply from unkind gods.

Others offer pictures of long-term relationships that have survived great trials. One author considers herself fortunate to have as her husband this kind-hearted and funny and passionate man, and another muses that she and her spouse are unfit to live with any other human being. Except, of course, with each other.

Most of the narratives speak to a post-seventies generation, for whom alternatives to wedlock are readily available: group or solo living, cohabitation, and even single parenting. Yet most people, today as always, crave a soul mate and manage to wed at least once in a lifetime.

Some of these unions fly in the face of traditional prohibitions—that of a Jew and an Arab, for example, or of lesbians—and then must take on society’s ills as well as their own.

As a seventyish woman with a half-century of marriage behind me, I marvel that most of these texts are lighthearted, in spite of everything. They are obviously written by spunky women who know how to laugh at themselves as well as their mates. The essay titled My Marriage Is a Joke relates the tumultuous ups and downs experienced by a narrator whose husband is as funny as she is. Reading the book from start to finish in three sittings, I found myself alternately suppressing tears and laughing out loud.

To say that this is an entertaining book should not belie its wisdom. I kept underlining pieces of advice that would be useful for any couple. This one should be posted above every marital bed: The trick is staying a team in times of trouble.

—MARILYN YALOM,

Author of A History of the Wife

Introduction

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

—KATHE KOLLWITZ

Afew years ago, a friend and I were swapping stories about our husbands’ little quirks.

According to him, I can’t even squeeze the toothpaste right! my friend exclaimed, rolling her eyes.

I know exactly what you mean, I said. For the past quarter century, my spouse and I have been tangling over our differing approaches to products that come in a tube (let’s just say that one of us is awfully anal about these matters). But six months later, when my friend abruptly left her husband for a less critical man, I realized I hadn’t known what she meant, not at all. And it knocked me for a loop to realize how unhappy—our lighthearted banter notwithstanding—she had really been. But then, how could I have known? My distress over the fact that I knew so little about such an important aspect of my friend’s life (she, of course, knew equally little about mine) sparked the idea for this anthology.

Too often, we assume that everyone else’s marriage is more or less like our own—and judge each other’s actions accordingly. Why does she stay with that deranged knucklehead? we wonder. Or, conversely, What a peach he is! Why is she such a nag? But the truth is, only a fly on the wall has insider knowledge of the marital dynamics of any couple—and even then, that fly brings its own insect-sized baggage to the task of interpretation. We can guess, of course, but how can we possibly know for sure which aspects of anyone else’s marriage burden her and which ones bring her joy, or what she makes of it all?

This is not to suggest, certainly, that women don’t talk to other women about their marriages. They do—frequently, and with relish. Indeed, if there’s a female equivalent to locker room talk, it is the wifely gripe fest, full of sound and fury but signifying less about the true state of anyone’s feelings than about how human beings bond. Whoopee, nobody here but us chickens! Let’s complain about roosters for a while, and feel really close! Of course, if you know a person long enough, deeper truths emerge. Your most happily married (or so it has always seemed) friend calls at 2 A.M. to announce that she has just hurled her wedding ring out the window and will be standing on your doorstep, suitcase in hand, in twenty minutes. Or one day it finally strikes you that the pal who chronically trashes her spouse is actually crazy about him, in her own convoluted way: she’s as little apt to carry through on her threats of divorce as she is to run off and join the circus. Somehow, though, there’s not a lot of wife talk that covers the vast territory between pro forma griping and dramatic defection. And a truly contented spouse is, if anything, even less forthcoming about her feelings.

There are plenty of reasons, of course, why the details that we choose to reveal fail to reflect the larger picture, the deeper reality, of our experience. Sound self-protective principles underlie many conventions, including the one that prescribes a perky Fine, thank you! as the only proper response to queries about your well-being. Then, too, loyalties must be prioritized: to some women—including a few who declined to contribute to this anthology—candidly discussing a marriage with a third party (let alone publishing an essay about it) is tantamount to betrayal. And even seemingly glaring omissions are not always deliberate: some thoughts are just too impressionistic or inchoate or subterranean to register on the conversational radar. Sometimes a woman is as surprised as anyone else to discover what she really thinks, or feels, or wants.

On the other hand, though, isn’t truth something most of us have been taught to seek, rather than to hide? When an SS officer interrogates you, or a thief demands directions to the nearest bank, or a friend tearfully inquires whether she looks fat, discretion is the better part of valor. But when expressing the truth can alleviate the suffering or even just the avoidable discomfort of others, then aren’t we obliged to express it? I’ve always admired the colleague who, for a time, refused to tidy her house for visitors: she considered pre-guest cleaning a form of deceit, an unspoken lie that perpetuated a false, stress-inducing standard of housekeeping. Similarly, Secret Lives essayist Gayle Brandeis rocks my world when she flat-out admits that during one difficult phase of her marriage, she wished that her husband were dead. It seemed like it would be easier to be a widow, she confesses, than to talk about what was really going on. My guess is that 80 percent of wives have found precisely this unsettling thought flitting through their minds in a moment of marital distress. My other guess is that approximately zero percent of them have ever heard anyone else cop to it. Too many of us spend too much time in despair because we think we’re the only ones who suffer from our peculiar afflictions, whatever they may be—or indeed, that we’re the only ones who suffer at all.

Every one of the twenty-seven essays that follow offers an intimate, often breathtakingly uncensored glimpse into the marriage of the woman who wrote it. Each is a gesture toward lifting the veil that hides one human face from another. Each is a literary hand grenade, hurled in anger or lobbed gently, with love. Each is a snapshot of a woman’s secret heart.

—AUTUMN STEPHENS

1.

Fasten Your Seatbelts:

The Transformative Crisis

Marriage [is] a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

—KATHARINE HEPBURN

Eight Sizzling Sex Secrets to Keep

Your Marriage Strong

CASSANDRA GREY

1. HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH YOUR HUSBAND

For him, the story begins on a Tokyo street on a December evening in the last decade of the last century. Neon signs wink and wind in pink and purple tendrils up the narrow high-rises. Yakuza toughs bark out promises of earthly delight to passersby: Welcome, come on in, only 5,000 yen. A lone man stops before a doorway, hesitates, then steps into darkness.

For her, it opens with another departure, this time in the soft light of a June morning in the first years of the new century. She leans into her husband, kissing him a long, slow goodbye as he goes off on yet another two-week business trip to Asia. She still smells of sex—he smells of soap from the quick shower for the road—unusual, perhaps for a couple that has just celebrated their seventeenth anniversary. For them, it’s a travel day ritual. Once their daughter is at school, they fall onto the king-size bed, rolling around in ever-changing conjunctions of body parts, filling the house with moans and naughty words.

I love you, the man murmurs. The words slip easily from her lips in return. She doesn’t yet wonder what love really means to him after all. With one last kiss, he turns and walks to his car, grinning, buoyant, the picture of a happy man.

Sometimes, as I replay it, he whistles.

And I—of course that innocent, trusting woman is my former self—smile because I think it’s because of me. I had no idea the reason for the lightness in his step was not so much memory as anticipation.

2. A SEXPLOSIVE START KEEPS THE FIRE HOT

I was twenty-three when I met my husband, although I already felt ancient and battered in matters of the heart. I had just begun a Ph.D. program in classics and comparative literature and was looking forward to spending my Saturday nights cozied up with brawny reference books for many years to come. My high-minded plans were foiled, however, by a twenty-five-year-old MBA student who’d ventured over to my corner of campus for cultural enrichment. From the first, I admired his warm amber eyes, his quiet intelligence, and his willingness to forgo the study of profit for the allure of long-dead civilizations. He was drawn to me because I’d lived in a sun-drenched Mediterranean country he’d only read about and wore black fishnet stockings to class.

Within the month my scholar-nun’s vows were forgotten. We spent entire days in bed, staggering out only to refuel at all-night diners. Trips to the grocery store together only confirmed we were soul mates. Why else would we both feel a sudden craving for Rice Chex without exchanging a word? The bond went even deeper. Both of us had lost parents when we were teenagers. We knew how to make each other laugh. I missed you before I met you, he told me. By Christmas we were engaged. My only worry before our wedding was a fleeting concern that I had no worries at all. We were married in a traditional church ceremony mostly to please my mother, but my last shreds of feminist cynicism dissolved when I found myself weeping at the altar during the soloist’s rendition of One Hand, One Heart.

Later that evening, as we lay in each other’s arms, he stroked my cheek and said my wife, as if the very words were new and marvelous. Strangely moved myself, I shared my musings about wedding nights and how they no longer had the meaning they did in times past. Back then it probably would have been the first time a nice girl like me would open her body to the man she loved— not that I regretted my sexual experience with other men; surely, educated choice is a better foundation for commitment than enforced ignorance. I certainly wasn’t sorry that we’d done plenty of premarital test runs between the sheets. We fit together well, and although I still worried I was too slow to warm up, I always managed to have an orgasm one way or another, a pleasure I couldn’t count on with past lovers. And yet, I envied those virgin brides who had something so precious to give: the potent combination of body and trust for a lifetime. All I had to offer was more of the same.

Lifting me on top of him, my husband whispered, It is different from the old days. It’s going to be better, because I’m going to make you come. The words alone almost did the trick, but then I felt a new sensation: a tugging in my chest, an opening out of my ribs, as if it did matter that we’d joined our lives with formal vows. As if, without knowing it, I had been holding something in reserve for this moment. I’d never quite gotten why all that grunting and hip-grinding was called making love. That night, I did.

Conflict came soon enough. The first years of our marriage coincided with the start-up boom of the late eighties, which for an ambitious young man meant ninety-hour work weeks, vacations cancelled for last-minute meetings with important clients, and ‘round-the-world business trips. I protested, but there was always another deadline or deal just on the verge of signing. I’ll never forget the sight of my husband hunched over on the kitchen floor, a cooking spoon in his hand, crying because I’d given him an ultimatum: Take one day off a week or else. I feel like I’m being torn in two, he sobbed. There’s not enough of me to give you both everything you want.

Capitalism has no heart, but I did, so I gave in and followed him into the office nights and weekends, a pillow under my arm so I could sleep on the carpet across from his desk while he worked into the wee hours. There were practical benefits. I finished a book I never would have written and became good friends with the cleaning lady. Yet there was romance in it, too, to be sealed away together in a golden, lamp-lit kingdom of our own while the rest of the world slept.

In the years that followed, his workload eased as the company grew, then began its slow decline. I left teaching to raise our daughter and found an avocation in fiction writing. Our lives settled into comfortable routine. Yes, my almost-perfect husband regularly forgot to recycle empty cereal boxes. And his halo wobbled dangerously with that credit card charge for a lap dance in Tokyo. He bowed his head as he told me, his voice pinched with fear.

My first impulse was to assess the damage. After all, knowledge was power.

Did you touch her?

Yes.

Did you get hard?

Yes. But the experience wasn’t really very erotic…

Despite his protest, the image taking shape in my mind was too awful to bear any more truth. Sick to my stomach, I ran out onto the porch and watched the season’s first snow flurries reel through the air for half an hour, hugging myself until the late autumn chill finally dulled the throbbing in my gut. For the next three days of torment, I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him, but slowly I began to take a more rational view. It wasn’t as if he’d had any real relationship with this dancer, and his shame made it clear this was a one-time mistake, a simple indulgence of curiosity. Yes, it was a blot on the purity of our love, but I was not so naive as to imagine I could police his every desire. He swore he’d never do it again and I believed him. He was my true love, my best friend, the one person in the world I trusted completely.

3. DON’T BE THE LAST TO KNOW—TELLTALE SIGNS OF A CHEATING SPOUSE

The morning after his return from his last Manila-Jakarta-Bangkok trip, I woke up early and snuggled close to him in bed, enough of an invitation for sex that he had no choice but to bury his face in my shoulder and say, I have something to tell you. I could feel his heart hammering in his chest and fear slashed through me, too.

Don’t say it. I don’t want to know, I hissed. But I recognized the tremor of shame in his voice from the lap dance confession. I knew.

He took me at my word and said no more. Not that he had much of a chance. His request for a hug was met with a shiver of disgust. For the rest of the day, the moment he entered a room, I slipped away like a ghost—and that’s just how I felt: hollow, insignificant, dead.

It was Father’s Day, and I could barely force my lips into a smile as our daughter gave him the card she’d made, I love you, Daddy! printed with painstaking care. Later I handed him my sentiments for the holiday, a note requesting that we go to counseling. He nodded, I’ll do anything it takes, and promised a note in return. This confused me. We weren’t in the habit of communicating by letter when we were in the same house. But in a resurgence of hope, I assumed he meant to make an apology, the more heartfelt for its formality.

The next evening he waited in the doorway of our bedroom just long enough to watch me hurl his note across the room. Where do I start? I guess with the second bombshell, he’d written. I have a rash that may indicate I caught herpes … Still I wondered: Can you catch herpes from a blow job?

The bombs kept falling. The doctor diagnosed the rash as a bacterial infection that would not recur—a relief—but I knew we still needed treatment. A therapist friend gave me the names of four colleagues who worked with couples. Three handled routine infidelities; one specialized in men who patronize prostitutes on a regular basis.

So, what is it? I asked, trying my best to sound jolly. Once or more than once?

I’d come to dread his pauses. It was, in fact, several times. Which means three or four. Right?

A few weeks later, during our second therapy session, he insisted that he was serious about changing his ways. The proof? He’d already deleted the women’s phone numbers from his cell phone.

Yes, the women. Not one woman. Many. A whole database of them. My jaw dropped. But you didn’t have personal feelings for any of them, did you?

My husband met my eyes for a long moment but said nothing.

The couch lurched and I was falling, hurtling off the tallest building in the world while faces watched from the windows, slinky Gong Li call girls smiling into cell phones, my daughter’s half-siblings, dark eyes shining.

A few hours after the session, I called him at work and asked point blank, How long has this been going on?

This time he did answer.

Twelve years.

4. FANTASY FUELS THE FLAME

It is now time for a confession of my own. Like my husband, I have also lived a secret life for many years. When I mentioned a while back that I write fiction, I lied. Well, not lied, exactly, but there is more to the story. I am, to all appearances, a bespectacled, middle-aged mom with a few too many useless degrees. Who would ever suspect that I began writing erotic novels when my daughter was a toddler, finding respite both from mommy duty and a lifelong servitude to coloring inside the lines, by typing up steamy sex scenes while she napped? Indeed, I even published some of my creations for a decent chunk of cash. You could, I suppose, consider me a sex worker of the mind, peddling fantasies under a false name to protect my real-life reputation, just like my sisters in red light districts the world over.

Of course, I like to think there is an important difference between us, that a writer owns her fantasies in a way a prostitute never can. In my books, I am free to explore areas of sexuality that provoke, amuse, or even scare me. The only urge I satisfy is my own desire to create. Still, I can’t deny that my novels, if not my body, connect me with strangers on a sexual level, as my occasional fan mail attests.

But unlike most sex workers—or their patrons, for that matter—I had a spouse who not only knew about but delighted in my secret life. My husband was ever eager to assist with literary research. And no wonder. My body had been slow to heal after our daughter’s birth and for nearly a year, intercourse was as pleasant for me as being stabbed with a red-hot poker. Oddly, considering what I know now, my husband was faithful during that time. When we were finally able to have sex again, it was all the sweeter for that long period of deprivation. The renaissance was