On dating a Married Man
Didn’t he know how tough it is to find people you actually like enough to date?
She started out sounding kind of like me, and then she veered off into this crazy late-twenties blend of brash and foolish I’ve never been and can’t anticipate ever being. But I respect her thought process around the subject of men.
While it pains me to bow out, I think it would be best if we didn’t get together. I’m a recent graduate of the drama-seeking missile years of my twenties, and am trying hard to be wise. The fruits of that particular labor so far include and are not limited to dining with married men I find attractive.
Yay, Julie! The easiest way to kill the stupid girl inside you is to stop feeding her with male idiots!
After breaking it off with Leo, she hangs out with a friend, Sam, who, ironically, is going through a breakup with his wife — because he started an affair with a coworker. As they drink beer, Sam talks to her about the guilt for leaving his wife, and how his new studio apartment was lonely, and how despite his feelings for his new girlfriend he didn’t want to commit to her yet because now that he was single, he wanted to play the field a bit. Julie gives her two-cents, letting Sam know his coworker had probably been waiting around for him to leave his wife so, she assumed, he could be with her. That she’d been patient and probably wanted Sam to be a father figure to her kid, but instead, she wound up graduating from an emotional affair to become another girl with soil worth tilling while Sam sowed wild oats.
Sam couldn’t understand why she would sympathize with the coworker and not his ex-wife! “I dunno,” Julie says. “I guess I just feel bad she waited around for you.”
I couldn’t deal with Sam for much longer that night. I was turned off by his view of the world as some crazy mecca, waiting for him to cast off his marital shackles so he could partake in its cartoonish abundance. Didn’t he know how tough it is to find people you like enough to actually date? How “playing the field,” for every girl I know, means “going to bed early at least a couple nights a month to make the loneliness stop screaming for the night” or “occassionally having to try making conversation with a man who’s told you, unironically, how great he thinks Billy Joel’s Glass Houses record is?”
HAHA.
I know there are guys who feel that marriage — to anyone — is a trap and unnatural. I know monogamy is wrong for some people, and certainly it’s human nature— at least as a kid — to want as much as someone will let you get away with. But don’t expect me to side with a bachelor soliciting sympathy for the burden of juggling women devoted to loving him. I will give that guy nothing.
