I don’t even know if I should be writing this. Especially not now, when my husband and I are in a good place, and he’s forgiven me for what happened with Christopher over the summer. I think that Christopher and Victoria are in a better place with their marriage now, too, but they are the only ones who really know that for sure.

It didn’t even last for two weeks over the summer, but my affair with Christopher changed the whole way I look at love, marriage, and relationships in general. Prior to this, I was happily monogamous. I’d never dreamed of cheating on my husband. (Okay, that’s just an expression. I did dream about it, but I never seriously considered it. Even when I confessed my feelings to Christopher, I didn’t intend for anything to come of it.) I was quite happy to remain devoted to one man for the rest of my life, till death do us part.

I’m still quite happy to remain devoted to my husband for the rest of my life… but I see now that there is room in my heart for more. Devotion, to me, is unrelated to exclusivity. It wasn’t always that way in my head. I will never stop loving T, and he will always be the most important man in my life. If I ever lost him, I feel that my heart would shatter into thousands of pieces, and I’d never be able to recover.

But…

Isn’t it a bit simplistic to assume that we can get everything we need from one person for the rest of our lives? Is it really fair to that one person we’ve chosen when they are unable to live up to our expectations? Especially when those expectations continue to change and grow as we mature and our circumstances change?

When we get married, we expect our spouse to be the one person we can depend on for so many things other than the concept of love: companionship, friendship, financial support, emotional support, sex, similar morals, similar interests, similar views on parenting, and so much more. We want to be able to enjoy the same foods and restaurants so we can eat together, have similar enough interests that we can spend time doing the things we enjoy, have similar sexual appetites so that one partner isn’t always frustrated and the other partner isn’t always feeling obligated to perform.

I will readily admit that I’m sure I am a disappointment to T in at least some areas. He loves me anyways, of course. But I’m a terrible housekeeper. (So is he.) I have many more neuroses now than when we got married, so he’s had to put up with a lot of volatile emotions over the years. I’ve had panic attacks, postpartum depression, and the lesser but always present forms of anxiety and depression… “In sickness and in health” for him has meant an awful lot of time spent taking care of me when I’m just not feeling…right.

And when it comes to sex, we are in very different stages. When we make love, he knows just what I like and just what to do to me…he doesn’t disappoint. But I feel like I’m always “on,” and he’s just too damn tired to keep up with me. (It’s understandable. His job is very draining, and then he has to take care of me too often when he comes home.) This leads to me being frustrated and him feeling used. Neither of us wants to disappoint the other – he doesn’t want me to go without, and I don’t want to pressure him into anything if he’s not up for it. But there’s really no way for both of us to be content with how much sex we’re having.

I hope he doesn’t get angry at me for talking about that.

If extramarital relationships weren’t so taboo, and it was something acceptable – both in society and in our marriage – then there’s something that could be done about this sexual disconnect. But he’s already told me that he can’t stand the thought of me being with another man. And since I want to remain married to him, that’s something I have to live with.

Never mind the fact that I would need a willing partner who was also allowed to be with me, which isn’t an option for me either. I’ve (mostly) dealt with the fact that I can’t be with Christopher in any romantic sense, and I don’t want to look for anyone else. So even if I magically got permission from my husband to look elsewhere, I wouldn’t. I know what my heart would want, and since it can’t have it, that’s it. I wasn’t actively looking to cheat on T in the first place. It just…happened. And I can’t put myself in that position again because it just hurts too much.

I know what you’re thinking. This is all well and good talking about finding another partner for myself, right? Well, it’s not a double standard. If T told me that he wanted to be with someone else, I admit that it would hurt. But as long as he promised he’d always still be with me, that it was me he’d always be coming home to and we’d always be together, how could I deny him something that would make him happy? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to want, is for our spouses to be happy? If he found that there was someone else he had a deep connection with, how could I deny him the opportunity to find that joy? I wouldn’t want him to resent me for keeping him from something that he really wanted.

Because I remember what it was like over the summer…it wasn’t only stealing kisses with Christopher that made me feel happier than I had in a long time. It was my marriage with T. Christopher filled a hole in my heart, which made me a better wife to my husband and mother to my son. He made me happy, and that made everything in my life brighter. T and I were so happy during that time, until he found out what had been going on behind his back. If Christopher and I hadn’t gotten caught, the happiness would have remained and we all would have been spared a lot of pain.

I no longer understand why people get so angry about cheating when the spouse wants to remain married. I can understand anger over a lost relationship, where the marriage ends in a divorce because the other partner wants to be with someone new instead of their spouse…but I have a hard time seeing now who really gets hurt when a secondary relationship seems to be helping the marriages. Don’t ask, don’t tell maybe?

Yes, lying. Trust issues. I regret the fact that I had to lie to T when everything happened with Christopher. But honestly? I wish I could have been open about it. If I could have told my husband that I wanted to spend time with Christopher, and that maybe it would get physical from time to time, but I’d always be home in our bed each night…that would’ve been…wonderful.

But the summer seems like an entire lifetime ago. And that’s not how this story played out. If T and Victoria suddenly came around and started seeing things the way I do now, I don’t even know if Christopher would want me. Victoria’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t, but would that change if we suddenly had permission to be together? He hated the drama of the aftermath. But what if there was no drama?

Alas, this is only a rhetorical question. I don’t see anyone changing their minds about any of this. I’m married to T. I’m just friends with Christopher. And that’s how it needs to stay. The only thing that’s changed is my entire world view. That’s all.

Orgasms used to be more elusive for me. I don’t know if I ever truly climaxed with the first guy I ever slept with. (My husband and I both refer to him as the Evil One, and I see no reason to change that. At least there’s no Scott Pilgrim sort of thing going on.) I lost my virginity to the Evil One the night before Valentine’s Day back in my sophomore year of college. It was always a quick thing for him. Quick and quiet. Oh sure, I get the need for quiet when we were in his bedroom and his mom was home, but she still knew what was going on in there. But even when she wasn’t home, it was all about him getting his rocks off, and while I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it at all, I never really felt satisfied. (Foreplay? What’s that?)

When I started dating T, back before I knew I would marry him one day, I didn’t realize what a catch I had in him. Not only did he treat me well, something else the Evil One didn’t do, but he knew how to really take care of a woman. He was the first man (only man!) to show me how I could be truly satisfied… cunnilingus.

Oral sex (on me, not by me) opened up a whole new world for me. Suddenly, I realized that sex wasn’t just about longing for more, but about release! It didn’t happen every time in those early days of our relationship, but it happened enough.

As time went on, T and I carried on a long distance relationship that was cemented by the amazing rabbit-like sex marathons we would have when we visited each other. We joined a sex and romance forum back when we used dial-up connections to get onto America Online… and I remember encouraging other young women to keep trying if they found it hard to have an orgasm. I don’t remember exactly what my advice was back then, but I do remember being thanked by some of those women I only knew by eight-letter screen names once my advice worked for them.

I don’t remember when it happened the first time for me – when I first came more than once during sex. Was it before our son was born, or after? All I know is that it changed my sex life forever, and I never want to go back.

I think it’s fairly self-explanatory when I say that multiple orgasms are a blessing. I mean, who wouldn’t want to feel the ecstasy of climax again and again? It’s not just me who loves it; my husband gets hot knowing how much pleasure he’s giving me, and he is always eager to see how high he can take me. If coming once is good, coming four or five times is even better. And just to let you know, four or five times is average for me in a single sex session, and the number has gone much higher than that. I’m actually disappointed if it only happens once or twice.

And that brings me to the part where I talk about how multiple orgasms can be a curse. If you only come once, it’s a letdown. It shouldn’t be. I mean, orgasms are good. Period. One should be enough, right? But it isn’t. Not when you’re using to having so many more of them. You always want more.

Why so greedy? When the goal isn’t just to have that one mind-blowing climax, you start to wonder really just how much you can take. The first orgasm feels really good, of course. But then you get your second one, and it feels just a little bit better. And the one after that? You start to wonder if the first two were really orgasms or if they were just little blips in the building pleasure of the experience. There’s always something more you want. The pleasure keeps building, and it can seem like there’s no ceiling. I will whimper and whine and curse for that “just one more” elusive last climax, even if I’ve already had more than my fair share.

I’m always in search of “the big one.” My husband is, too, because he loves it when I throw my arms out to the sides, or grab onto the headboard with white knuckles and I thrash my head about. My legs and pelvis vibrate against him as I’m in the throes of “the big one.” It’s that one amazing orgasm where I think I just might lose my mind with the power and electricity of it all. It’s when I’m finally and truly satisfied, so much so that I  tell my husband it’s time to give his tongue a rest and get what’s coming to him. Because there’s nothing that brings me back down quite like feeling him hard and fast until he comes inside me.

I think it’s the “bringing me back down” part that causes the trouble. If I don’t get “the big one,” it’s hard to come back down. I don’t tell him to stop after any number of other petit morts because I have a hard time coming back down if I don’t know I’ve experienced all of the bliss that I possibly can. It’s not enough just to climax; it’s about quality. And in search of the quality, I need quantity.

My poor husband has ended up with a sore jaw and stiff fingers more than once because of this.

Can I get a show of hands from the ladies – who else is lucky enough to experience multiple orgasms, or who has to make do with just the one?

As for me, I think I should drag my husband upstairs and see if he’s willing to help me go on another hunt for the big one.

Then I wrote about Spontaneous Orgasm, which involved only fantasy without any actual sexual misconduct taking place. Nothing to get all up in arms about, and one woman wanted to know if I was going to give lessons.

When I wrote How an Affair Can Help Your Marriage, I knew that the title would be quite controversial. I was trying to be edgier than I am in real life. Ava is my extroverted persona. In real life, I’m so not like this. But this is an edgy community, right? So I ran with it. I got scolded in the comments section of that post, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, especially since my husband T and Christopher’s wife had both read the piece and approved of what I’d said. (I’m no longer going to refer to her as A, since she’s started writing as Victoria now. We love pseudonyms.)

I was completely unprepared for the reaction I got to Getting Over an Affair. I’m an emotionally fragile person, and I’ve been spending the last month trying to get over some of the shame and guilt that was eating me alive. The post was published about a month after I wrote it, so progress had been made for everyone since the time I submitted it. And then I got to feel horrible about myself all over again, being condemned by strangers who don’t know me or know any more about the situation than I typed up in its very abridged form where I’d tried to be edgier and more cavalier than I really am.

The funniest part about being branded as an adulteress is that Christopher and I never even slept together. Strangers on the Internet have this mental picture of me as some sort of heartless whore who doesn’t deserve her husband, and I never did more than kiss the man, fully clothed. But please, fit me for my scarlet A. At least red looks good on me.

I’m not saying I’m innocent. I know I did something wrong, and I do take responsibility for my part in my infidelity. But I have to wonder if the backlash I’m getting would’ve still occurred if I hadn’t left out some of the details from our back story. Can people ever see past the words “affair” and “infidelity” and put aside their prejudices to understand that the cheaters are not one-dimensional villains without regard for their partners, to understand the context of the unfortunate situation and see that they’re not bad people, just people who made bad choices?

I wonder if my readers would have been more sympathetic to me if they’d known that, before Christopher and I ever kissed, Victoria had told me that her husband deserved a “consolation fuck” from me because she’d previously cheated on him? That she’d been trying to persuade him for months to find a girlfriend because she felt he deserved it after what she’d done to him? I’m allowed to tell you that, because she confessed as much in the post she submitted to this site last week. Not sure when it will be published, but look for the first post from Victoria Whitechapel. Sure, she recanted the comment several hours later, but not to me. She told Christopher that night that she took it back, but he failed to pass that information along to me.

Would it have changed people’s reactions further to know that, after I’d confessed to T that Christopher and I had this mutual attraction for one another, he would go upstairs at night to give me privacy so we could chat? I told him that our conversations were a bit scandalous, but he was willing to allow me the fantasy. Of course, it is my fault for misinterpreting his laissez faire attitude about the dirty chatting as permission to take it a step further into actual physical contact. When T told me that he’d always take me back if I ever chose to leave him, what I heard was that he was willing to give me the option of exploring things with Christopher as long as I always came back to him. It’s not what he was saying at all, but it’s what I thought he’d implied. In my mind, that was permission. And I admit that was wrong.

But would people still have vilified me so if they’d known that T had had an emotional affair with Victoria some eight years earlier? Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t call it that. But she was single at the time, and I knew she’d had an enormous crush on my husband. I learned from Christopher that T had had feelings for her as well – feelings he didn’t act on, but feelings that existed nonetheless. Victoria didn’t meet Christopher for several years after this happened, but it made enough of an impression on her that she told him about it when they got together. T never kissed her, but they had plenty of intimate conversations together, and he gave her a special gift of a small object that meant a lot to him. He never told me about this gift; I heard about it from Victoria this summer. He kept it from me. That’s emotional affair material, my friends.

And this happened at a time when T had considered the possibility of polyamory but never brought it up with me because I had never expressed interest. I didn’t know about this particular inkling of his until after my affair with Christopher had ended. He said he gave up the notion before our son was born, but the admission was like rubbing salt in my wound. At one time, my husband would’ve been okay with me having a relationship with another man. Unfortunately, I met Christopher too late. My husband and his wife had already given up their apparently mistaken beliefs that they could have polyamorous relationships by the time we found ourselves in a position where we were reconsidering our long-standing beliefs in monogamy.

It’s like a big cosmic joke, you know? Neither Christopher nor I had ever cheated on anyone – not even boyfriends or girlfriends we had in college – and we’d never wanted to. We were happy being completely monogamous even while our spouses entertained notions of having other partners. Until this summer, when things suddenly changed.

Would it make a difference in your mind if you knew that T admitted he’d been emotionally unavailable to me for months leading up to my affair, on account of both of us experiencing deaths in our families? How about my ongoing bouts with anxiety and depression? My therapist says that infidelity is rarely actually about sex. It’s a symptom of a deeper problem, both in the marriage and in the individuals. The four of us have admitted that we had problems in our marriages leading up to this affair – Christopher and I were just the ones to act out and bring them to the forefront. Sure, there would’ve been healthier ways to deal with our problems – like actually sitting down and talking to our spouses about what we were missing from them. But that assumes that we’re all healthy, well-adjusted adults. And I don’t actually know any healthy, well-adjusted adults.

It took our affair to start the conversations we so desperately needed to have with our spouses.

I know it may seem like I’m whining while playing the sympathy card here. I don’t expect anyone to pin a medal of honor on me or anything, but I want to shed some light on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t judge a person based on the limited knowledge you have of the mistakes they’ve made. Four months ago, I judged cheaters as harshly as I’m being judged now. Extenuating circumstances meant nothing to me; cheating was always bad and wrong.

Now I know that it’s a sign of weakness. I’m not a bad person, but I made a bad choice and did a bad thing. If I’d been stronger, this wouldn’t have happened. But if I’d been stronger, I never would have been tempted, either.

I can think of dozens of other reasons why people might cheat and I’d actually feel sorry for them. I’m not going to list them here, but I wouldn’t include my own reasons on that list. I know I don’t deserve pity, but I do wish I could have more understanding.

Would it make a difference to know that the four of us hang out amicably on a regular basis? That Victoria and I chat daily, and she thinks the two of us should go into counseling bored married couples together? That we trade off Saturday nights babysitting each other’s kids so we can go out on dates with our respective spouses and work on our marriages?

This scarlet A on my chest stands for Ava, not adulteress. One bad choice should not define me. Do you let your worst decision define you?

I was a size 8 when I graduated high school. You see, my boyfriend dumped me a week before my graduation, and I got really depressed. According to my mom, I got really thin. I don’t remember looking very thin because I wanted to be skinnier so maybe I could win him back. I started to paint my nails crazy colors – like blue glitter from Hot Topic – because the girl he was making out with the day after he broke up with me wore funky things like that.

I gained some weight back after I went to college. I worked on the newspaper staff, so there were lots of weekends where I ended up eating pizza and fried chicken at 2:00 in the morning. I ended up a size 10. All things considered, that’s not a bad size to be. My waist was small, but I hated my ass and my thighs. That’s where I’ve always carried my fat. That’s where I still carry my fat, and I never fail to point it out when people find out how much I weigh and say, “I don’t know where you put it!”

When I was pregnant, I put on a lot of weight – slightly more than the upper limit for “acceptable” pregnancy weight gain. I had to buy size 16 clothes for the first time in my life. I tried breastfeeding my son because I knew it would be good for both of us, but it didn’t work out. I had to quit after six weeks instead of the six months or so I’d planned on. That made losing the baby weight harder on me, and it gave me something new to be self-conscious about. Despite the fact that my milk supply was never enough to feed my baby, my breasts had ballooned to almost comic proportions. Once the milk was gone completely, I was left with wilted breasts covered in stretch marks.

I lost the weight I’d gained during pregnancy by the time my son was about eight months old. I’d counted the calories in everything I ate, and it worked for me. I can’t pass up baked goods, pizza, and fast food, so I made sure to plan accordingly when I knew I was going to splurge. I’d have a bowl of cereal for two meals to allow myself the extra calories I needed for dessert. It worked.

Then my grandfather died. I hadn’t admitted it yet at that point, but I was struggling with depression. My family came together in their collective depression to keep my grandmother alive in her grief. We went out for lunch together almost every day for months. No one wanted to be alone. It’s a lot harder to make healthier choices when your dining out at restaurants all the time, especially when you’re grieving and want comfort food. I gained a lot of the weight back that I’d lost.

Eventually, we stopped dining out so often because it just got too expensive for everyone. I went back to counting calories. I ended up weighing less than I’d weighed before I got pregnant! I was so thrilled. I was down to a size 8 again, something I never thought I’d see.

But I still have this little “pooch” of extra skin on my stomach from my pregnancy. It’s not fat – just excess skin from getting all stretched out by baby. No firming crème in the world can fix this. The only way to get rid of it is surgery, and I’m not going under the knife voluntarily. I dislike pain too much. But I really hate this skin hanging off of me. I used to be proud of my stomach. I know some women are able to view this pregnancy remnant as a badge of honor, but I’m still feeling rather superficial about it. It’s very difficult to find jeans that are cut high enough to cover this part of my belly but low enough so they don’t look ugly on me. There is a dearth of attractive jeans that will cover up my mom belly. Everything’s either super low rise or else made to be worn by someone’s grandma. So frustrating.

And let’s not forget my ass and thighs. God bless my husband, he says he loves my backside. And another man told me I have an ass like a gymnast. I think he was exaggerating, but it was quite a compliment nonetheless. I’ve had to content myself with the fact that I’ll never like the way my ass looks, but at least my husband does. And that’s what should really count, right? I mean, he’s the one who sleeps with me.

Of course, I’ve focused solely on the shape and size of my body up to this point, but there’s something else that makes me far more self-conscious. I have a hard time accepting when people tell me I’m beautiful, pretty, attractive, hot, etc. I can’t get past my horrid skin condition that has me covered in red splotches every day.

I’ve had the condition since I was a kid. I’ve been to doctors, dermatologists, allergists…none of them could help me. Some doctors ran me through the whole gamut of allergy tests and tried me on a number of drug regimens. One quack told me that I needed to soak in a tub with noncomedogenic bath oil every night. (I tried that. The only thing I accomplished was nearly breaking my neck trying to get out of the ridiculously slippery bathtub.) Nothing helps, so all I can do is live with it.

My husband says he doesn’t even notice my spots anymore, but I can’t see past them. They fade at night while I’m asleep, but they inevitably return every day. They pop up on my arms, my legs, and my chest. I’ve noticed they show up in higher concentration sometimes wherever I have stretch marks: my breasts, my stomach, and my hips. I get spots down my back and up my front. There’s usually a splotch or two on my face, as well.

I’m lucky that they don’t itch. That would be intolerable, and I wouldn’t stop going to doctors and getting tests run until I got an answer, even if it required having to go on national TV to have one of those famous doctors look at me for a primetime special. Well, they don’t itch most of the time. Some days, when they get really bad and cover most of my body, they’ll start to itch or burn. But that’s not very often.

No, my splotches are just ugly. My wedding photographer retouched most of our album pictures beautifully, but any candid shots taken by friends and family were ruined by the plethora of red spots covering my arms and chest. I try to Photoshop any pictures we take with our digital camera to minimize the appearance of my spots, too, but sometimes there are just too many.

So aside from wishing I had less junk in the trunk, I’m fairly content with the shape of my body, particularly when I’m wearing the right pair of jeans and a tight shirt. My hourglass silhouette is amazing. But I’ll never be happy with my skin. I guess that’s why I like fall and winter so much…because I can wear long sleeves and long pants to cover up most of my imperfections. Some of my sweaters are low-cut and show off the splotches on my chest, but at least they cover the spots on my arms.

I can’t even cover them up with makeup. Conventional makeup doesn’t provide enough coverage, and the special stuff they make for people with hideous birthmarks is too expensive and inconvenient to apply on a regular basis because I’d have to apply it over such a large portion of my body. I can’t even do spot coverage because my skin is so pale that the makeup is never light enough, so I have to apply it all over so there’s no obvious line where my skin is suddenly three shades darker than the rest of it.

I know my husband is happy with the way I look. I just wish I could get to a place where I agree with him.