Infidelity Will Be The Death Of My Marriage

The Unbelievably Brave Story Of One Incredibly Sensitive Man’s Intensely Personal Journey Towards Divorce

[A parody freely translated from the original sad boner confessional] By Ian Mackenzie

8.2011 — The Space Odyssey

There is no easy way to open a personal essay by mentioning masturbation. But then, I’ve never been one to take the easy way out. Or to masturbate. I’m too good for that, too pure.

My name is Ian Alexander Mackenzie Real’ness New Paradigm Raven Way and I have short scruffy hair and a fuzzy Riker beard and I wear a button shirt. People tell me I look like Ryan Gosling, and if you don’t know who that is, get the fuck out.

At this moment I am 30 years old, newly married and financially stable, and attempting to have a baby. It’s not been clear to me at any point that I want this, but it’s what one does, right?

So here I am at a fertility clinic, watching but not quite really watching two voluptuous ladies having sex on a screen. I’m so self-conscious about the whole thing. Maybe it’s because I still find something about the act distasteful. Maybe it’s because I can’t help thinking — as I think every man has — that I’m less than five years away from describing this scene in a personal essay on the internet. Maybe it’s because the ladies aren’t that hot, even for porn actresses.

Suddenly: a rush of white light and a reflexive whispered apology, and then I’m screwing the cap back on the container and examining myself in the mirror. I have classic protagonist features. What comes back to me in this moment is ominous warnings about how getting your girlfriend pregnant will trap you and ruin your life forever.

I take a deep breath and square my shoulders and tell myself I am emotionally prepared to impregnate my wife who wants to have children very much.

That’s what you do.

5.2003 — First Blood Part II

I am 22 and a pioneer in the early age of internet dating, an early adopter of loneliness and an innovator in the field of awkward first encounters. No, you’re not traveling in time; I’m just telling this story non-chronologically. Pretty slick, eh?

Those numbers at the start of each section are the month and the year. If no man on earth writes dates in the fashion I do, it is only because no man on earth has suffered as I have.

I met my wife Katherine on Lavalife. What? No, that’s totally a real dating site. You probably haven’t heard of it. It lives in Canada. Katherine? Katherine is real, too. The realest human being I’ve ever met. I saw that her username was a self-deprecating pun that explained itself in the first line of her profile and I thought to myself, “If she likes mildly witty self-deprecation, she’s pretty much going to have to love me.”

I glance at her age. 26. 26 is 4 more than 22. She is older than me. Do I dare? I do. I must. I type her a brief introductory message. This is how human beings describe the act of writing something to someone. I am a human being. Within a day, she types me back. Over the next few days, we type each other many charming emails, as ordinary people do.

Less than a week later, I dial her a phone call. Her voice is sultry. Among the first things I tell this woman out loud is that she could be a phone sex operator. Meticulous in my compliments as I am in all areas of my life, I have previously called many phone sex operators in order to accurately formulate this comparison. I did not masturbate during these calls, because I am too good, too pure. They were strictly research.

I think the ladies — that is, the phone sex operators — with whom I spoke appreciated the chance to talk to a man who saw them as a human being, who was not there merely to exploit them for a rush of white light and a whispered apology.

Katherine arrives in my life on a roar of a motorcycle. She’s cool, a cool person who dates cool people. Look: I’m not going to tell you that I’m cool, but listen to my description of this woman who dated and then married me. She rode a blue motorcycle and took off her helmet in actual, real-life slow motion, shaking out her long, dark hair like the pretty but boring librarian character when she finally lets her hair down.

I look at her standing in front of me, seeing her as an actual human being: her green eyes flashing with vulnerability, her face a beautiful porcelain mask that bespeaks of inner turmoil and old wounds, and the quiet strength she won from it. As I look at her, I think about how this character will fit into the story of my life and what she — that is, her presence — will say about me.

Perhaps to say it was love at first sight would be a touch cliche, but it was that moment that I first knew it: this was the woman about whom I wanted to write personal essays describing the arc of our relationship.

We head for coffee and the conversation flows easily, punctuated by seagulls that follow our footsteps as we walk the trails beside the ocean, and I think this is such a perfect moment that I scramble to remember that thought in perfect clarity so it will be there, years later, for the essay.

She asks me, “When was the last time you cried?” I know this is not an important question, though. The real question is: how many times have I cried? And the answer is that I have cried exactly enough times in my life for her to know that I am sensitive, yet not so many times that she won’t know I’m a man.

She says nothing. In this silence I lean forward, lean into her, putting my face in close to hers.

Somehow, our lips find each other. It is purely spontaneous, completely mutual. Nested within this moment of perfect poetic bliss by the sea, I feel a moment of misgiving: if a kiss can happen so easily here, with her, what is there to stop it from happening later, with other women, who are not her?

A fly in the ointment.

I think maybe there’s a part of me that knew, even then.

8.2011 — City Under Siege

The city lies bathed in dull, flat, monochromatic greys that reflect my thoughts on the day we first go to begin the treatments my wife hopes will allow her to have children, an outcome I am determined to fully welcome.

Katherine is gazing out the window, quiet. I wonder what she’s thinking, but as I cannot decide what would be dramatically appropriate for her to be thinking at a moment like this, I can’t quite decide and have no other means of finding out.

It is the quiet moments like this that I almost feel like she’s another person who lives with me, and not just part of the furniture of my life. It’s strange what marriage can do to you.

We are seeking fertility treatments because my wife had an eating disorder. Anorexia nervosa. Somehow typing it out in full makes it feel less common to me, more interesting, more worthy of inclusion in a personal essay. Because of the damage it’s done to her body, my wife will need to give herself multiple hormonal injections a day. Her first attempt is shaky, halting, wincing. I record it, because let’s face it: this shit is hilarious. Comedy gold, guys, am I right?

Anyway, it’s not like there’s anything I could do to help her.

There are some demons you have to face alone.

The days fly by for me. Katherine becomes better at the whole rigmarole, but somehow her heart is less into it. With nothing left for me to do, I focus on my plans for Burning Man. It’s going to be sweet. What am I talking about? This is Burning Man. It’s always sweet.

35 days in, the treatment has taken hold and the doctors implant my contribution. She doesn’t even say thank you, but somehow I can’t hold it against her. Not at Burning Man time.

Of course I’m still going to Burning Man. What alternative is there: not going? I had plans with my brother. Some things are sacred.

Anyway, if I had canceled my plans, then she would have had another thing to feel guilty about, along with her body’s ongoing failure to produce the children she so desperately wanted. I couldn’t lay that on her. That would be cruel.

Two hours into the trip, as I wait to cross the U.S.-Canada border, I receive a text. Two words: it failed. I picture a miscarriage, blood in a toilet. My chest tightens. Tears well up in my eyes, but I cannot cry. I have cried several times in my life already. I am not quite at my personal lifetime limit, but I’m near the threshold.

Better save it for when it counts, I think. For when it means something.

Over the course of the next week, I will look at that text from Katherine many times and think, no two human beings have ever had the close, deep, emotional connection that we have. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be there for her.

9.0210 — The Voyage Home

As azure fades to amethyst to indigo and back to amethyst and back to azure, I realize that I am a changed man at my third Burn. Before I believed the rituals of loss and expiation at the Temple of Transition were just a bunch of trite bullshit other people did in order to feel deep.

Now I understand. Now I, too, have lost. Now I’m in the club.

I am aflame with the knowledge that I must craft a love letter. Not to Katherine, of course. She has so much on her mind, the last thing she needs is me bothering her.

No, I must craft a love letter to the Temple Herself.

I must have my camera, I must capture this. It is art. I am an artist. What is the point of love and loss if you can’t get a dynamite personal statement film out of it? I watch the Man burn. I watch the Temple burn. My emotions run high, but I do not weep. I must not weep. It’s still not the moment. It’s still not perfect. I know the moment is close, but it is not yet at hand.

Weeks later, I watch my film. I see the Temple, intact and unburned.

This is the moment. I feel it. I know.

I weep.

Nailed it.

10.2011 — Citizens On Patrol

Partying in the desert for a week is such an intense personal, spiritual, and emotional experience that it’s a bit like being in a submarine. You can’t return to the placid, mundane surface of your life all at once. You have to surface slowly, allowing time to decompress. You have to go to more parties.

The hyperbaric chamber of my spiritual awakening this year was hosted in a movie prop warehouse in Vancouver.

Katherine was there, though I lost sight of her quickly. I’m not sure why she was even there. She hadn’t been in the desert. She didn’t see the Temple burn. What on earth could she have gone through that would even come close to paralleling the profound transformative experience we Burners had known?

A young woman with dreadlocks sits in a chair. I crouch beside her, bringing myself down to her level. She tells me she is a poet. “Please share a poem!” I ask her. She shakes her head, embarrassed. I insist. She is visibly uncomfortable, and I understand in that moment that I have been chosen to help her overcome this discomfort.

I lean in, putting my face close to hers. “Please,” I insist again. She relents. Somehow, our lips find each other.

“I’m married,” I tell her, charitably without an ounce of accusation.

She’s immediately apologetic. I tell her it’s fine, she made an honest mistake and I don’t blame her one bit for her conduct. I’m too good, too pure.

“You don’t act married,” she says.

I heave a profound sigh. Tears well up behind my eyes, but I do not cry.

“I know,” I say, trying to convey in those two words just how tragic my dilemma is.

The saddest part of it is, I’m not at all sure in retrospect that I managed to succeed in doing so. Many things about that night haunt me still, but that perhaps most of all.

6.2012 — Dawn of Justice

Somehow, it keeps happening. Somehow, my lips keep finding other lips, always lips belonging to worthy women because I am too good, too pure to commit infidelity for any but the highest of reasons: comforting grief-stricken artists, honoring profound spiritual healers.

Somehow I keep meeting these women who feel things deeply and profoundly in ways that I know my boring, barren wife cannot, and who makes me feel them, too.

Somehow, our lips find each other.

Surely it can’t be cheating,when the women are so interesting and they slot in so neatly into the story of one’s life? I know that technically, on paper, I am going against the vows I made to Katherine because that’s what one does, and so I keep looking for an escape or a way to stop, but nothing presents itself.

Eventually, I craft a confession.

In a brand new house we just purchased together using our joint finances and signing both of our names to the loan, I am forced to tell my wife that other women’s lips keep finding mine.

Milan Kundera wrote, “Loves are like empires — when the idea that they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”

I knew the moment I read those words I would keep them close to my heart, for the day when my love’s foundation crumbled.

As I watch the color drain from my wife’s face, I know that moment has arrived. The words would not leave me yet, though. I would remember them still, for that time in the future when I would write a career-making confessional piece about it.

That time is now.

That piece is this.

11.2012 — Assignment Miami Beach

Six months after my confession and the question of “what to do” about the “problem” of my “infidelity” remains.

With nothing else to do, I agree to try one more time for children. I don’t want to draw a connection between my wife’s infertility and my urge to stray. That would be crass, so I’ll leave that for you the reader to do.

On the eve of the very expensive procedure, my wife looks across the kitchen table at me and says, “You don’t really want to have children.” The words sting. I never thought she would notice this, much less point it out to me. I say nothing.

We try again. The procedure takes hold. We’re having twins.

But in the end, it is for naught. Such a senseless waste. I processed all that grief out in the desert, not knowing a bigger, more life-changing tragedy would await me scarcely a year later. How much more poignant might my love-letter to the Temple have been?

I find myself wishing I could go back in time, find my younger self and tell him not to blow his wad. “You will lose more,” I tell him. “You will grieve deeper.”

I can’t, so I bottle up what I’m feeling and save it for the personal essay I know I will one day write. It will be good. HuffPo good.

1.2013 — The Final Friday

Katherine’s mother takes us on an all-expenses paid dream vacation to Maui, which emboldens me to make my dreams come true. We agree to spend another week at the hotel by ourselves, so we can have space to work through “the question” of what we’re going do, given the elephant in the room that hangs over our relationship like the sword of Damocles.

I.e., what kind of future we can have together if we’re not going to have children.

When I tell this to Katherine, her eyes go wide. It almost seems like she felt there was another question about the future of our relationship that needed answering. To this day, I can’t imagine what it might have been. The possibilities haunt me.

But I know what problem faces us: that we will be a childless couple. And I know the solution: an open marriage. I know in my heart that it goes against the paradigm of the dominant culture that reifies the sanctity of monogamous marriage over all other things, but on the other hand, I really, really want to do this, and if I can’t be true to myself, how can I be true to her?

I’ve brought her a book on it, and alone, together, for a week, we go over it and over it. As I read to her, she agrees with me the way she fell in love: eventually, and reluctantly.

We sign papers and everything.

It’s gonna be super sweet.