How I Became the Other Woman

I married a porn addict, a strip-club regular.

A huge mistake, but I couldn't help myself. I loved him. Still do.

I'm not a stripper. How did I even end up with someone stuck in that world? We met at the library, all very above board. He was 51. I was in my late 40s, divorced from my 20-year marriage and looking for connection. He was too, I think. He said he wanted a “legitimate” relationship. No more strippers. No more body parts. A whole person he could get to know and laugh with and care about. Shop with at the grocery store. Walk with at the park. The problem was, he was addicted to those body parts. After watching properly lit sexual objectification long enough, the brain comes to expect it. Demands it.

After the wedding, he was never that into me. Sex in the shower a few times over the course of a year isn't enough for a new wife on her second go-around. And after that first year, intimacy all but ended. We were still best friends. Still laughed together and had fun. We just stopped touching. I blamed myself at first. Tried losing a few pounds to re-spark his interest. Tried yelling. Cold shoulder. Begging, even. That just made it worse. Eventually, he started getting up in the middle of the night, leaving the bedroom for an hour. I'd see the glow of his laptop in the other room.

At first I was curious. Then obsessed. I snooped and stalked, checking his internet history and watching all the porn videos he'd been watching. I thought it might bring us closer together, on some sort of sexual ethereal plane. It didn't.

I checked his phone for texts. There was nothing there because a man addicted to porn and watching strippers isn't trying to hook up. He's not in it for connection. It's the opposite of that; it's voyeurism. You don't want the woman you're peeping at to suddenly catch your eye.

Eventually, I found the website with the live girls on webcam. I could log into my husband's account when he wasn't home. Four hundred thumnails of boobs and butts and spread-eagle crotch. Just click one and they'll jiggle it for you, live. You tip the girls with tokens if they jiggle it hard enough and fast enough and said just the right sweet thing in the chat. My husband was spending money on these girls. Our money. My money.

I wasn't a prude. I like porn myself now and then. Hell, I like sex! And really wanted to be having some with my apparently horny husband. But he was choosing porn over me. His wife. His best friend. The woman he said he loved. I felt less than dirt. And on that top of that, I started to feel ugly.

Even worse, though, I was feeling jealous about this other, secret world he lived in and wouldn't invite me into. My curiosity grew. I hated that world, and I hated these girls, what had I ever done to them that they wanted to steal my one shot at happiness away from me? But as much as I hated them and their world, a part of me also wanted to be allowed in.

I finally said something to Chad. I was done. Wanted out. But he begged me not to leave. He said he'd stop. He was nothing without me. But he didn't stop, not completely. And the sad thing was, even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. He wanted it. He probably did love me. But I didn't satisfy this one need, I couldn't. I wasn't a stripper. I wasn't vapid. I wasn't blond. I wasn't patronizing. I wasn't 26. And most of all, I wasn't unavailable. I was way too available, and that's not exciting. That's not enticing. As long as they held their power of unavailability over him, his penis belonged to them.

At some point, something inside me snapped. I was tired of being a good girl. I was tired of being an ignored wife. I was tired of being shut out of this exciting world of sex and power, where men were held at arm's length and grocery stores and ironing boards receded into fairy tale. Reality was now the veil and the lowered blouse. I was so tired of that part of me trapped in my boring suburban, sexless house. I called that part of me the “hauswife.” I hated her. There was so much more to me. I could be enticing. I could jiggle. And I decided to enter this world for myself.

My first time in an online sex chat, I found myself typing with a married man. It horrified me. But it also felt like sweet, vicious revenge. I loved it and hated it. I imagined his poor wife; he described their sex as vanilla. What did she look like? What was she doing right then, while I was admiring the groin of her husband? Did she hate me? Because I was starting to hate her.

Me: does she know you do this?

Him: no

Him: [naked photo]

Me: that's hot... she doesn't know what she's missing

His wife embodied that part of myself that I hated. That part of me that got left behind and ignored in our bed in the middle of the night. She was now the hauswife, and I was the other woman. I was the wink and the wiggle and the unavailable woman in the glow of someone's late-night laptop. I could feel my heart pound for the first time in months.

...to be continued...