Catch and release

A while ago I met a man who is, like me, a liar, cheat, and adulterer. A had put me in touch with him, or him in touch with me, for reasons that are rather sordid - she did not much like the guy, but he had an apartment that stood empty most of the time, and it had occurred to A that if I befriended this man - M - perhaps he would get off on the idea of loaning me his apartment, thus saving me the cost of short-stay hotels.

That project went nowhere. But talking to M merely increased my sense of puzzlement about other men. M has been moderately successful in meeting women through Craigslist and other online sites, but he rarely sees these women more than once or twice. He loses interest, no longer communicates with them, turns his attention to someone new. I suspect that there are a lot of men like M out there. But that is not my modus operandi at all - there is hardly a woman mentioned in this blog who I have not seen repeatedly. When these connections do come to an end, it is not typically because of loss of interest either. L got angry with something I wrote in an e-mail and asked me not to write to her ever again; but I recently had an e-mail from her asking that we not part on hostile terms. F decided she had had enough of purely recreational fucking; but then a while later e-mailed to say she was reconsidering her policy. Z, now back in NYC briefly, is no longer someone I have sex with, but a good friend.

I don't understand men who lose interest after the first or second time. Even if the first time is great, which it can be, the second time is usually better, the third better still, and soon one is having so much fun, giving and receiving so much pleasure, that it is impossible to lose interest. A man like M does not come across as a 'notch on the bedpost' type, but of course that must be how he appears to women who he fucks and then forgets. I like novelty as much as anyone, but for men like M novelty is a matter of adding to a list of women who he has fucked, whereas for me it is a matter of adding to the list of women who I do fuck.

The story of M took a somewhat bizarre turn when it emerged that he had communicated with F and met her for coffee. He pressured her to meet him again, and - this I know from F, who was rather upset by it - then spent his time running me down, accusing me of being a player putting women at risk, etc. In other words, he said anything he could to dislodge me from F's favor and insert himself in my place. A, told about this, pronounced the man a prick and a shit, and that is surely right. I don't care about the slur to my reputation, though I would not act that way myself - I am, after all, a liar, cheat, and adulterer. I do care about the upset he caused F, which is not acceptable. M is, I suppose, like a catch and release fisherman, who enjoys setting up and casting, and hooking the fish and reeling it in. Fair enough. But what is not fair is dumping poison in the water and then scooping out the comatose fish.

On this analogy, I am someone who prefers to add the fish I catch to the keep-net. But the analogy is a poor one, for fish in a keep-net are caged. D, perhaps, is trapped by her emotional dependence, and it is a struggle for her to swim freely. But I have no interest in containment, any more than I have in trickery. A man like M may use lures, but I simply try to be as completely myself as I can, and see what happens. I am sufficiently odd for that to drive many people away, but those who are attracted end up with something honest, and something lasting also. K I have not seen in a long time, and our e-mail contact is sporadic. Yet she wrote the other day to tell me of a charming dalliance she had with a jockey who was completely tiny, and to seek comfort after a little heartbreak caused by falling for a poet.

Alibis

Though my therapist is sceptical, I believe that just about all the thrill of being a liar, cheat, and adulterer derives from the sex itself. The lying and cheating are means, not ends, and not themselves the source of any pleasure. But like any craft, lying and cheating can be done well or poorly, and there is a satisfaction in doing them well.

Lying and cheating in the service of adultery is mainly a matter of coming up with alibis and sticking to them. Alibis are of critical importance for me, for I am practising adultery from home, rather than on the road. MJ, a man who A fucked once (and chose not to go back again) is in a totally different position, as he lives in a state far away - the one that looks like a flaccid cock dangling off the right coast of the US - and travels to NYC on business once a week or so, staying in an apartment he owns here. So he has evenings and nights with no marital supervision of any kind; he can, if he chooses, talk to his wife while a woman is sucking his cock. I, on the other hand, must return home each evening; unless my family is away, I cannot bring women to the place where I live. I must find time to be away from home, and in order to do that I must have alibis. Work provides some of these ready-made, and not much of interest can be said about those, as the details anyway would vary from one job to another. The non-work alibi, on the other hand, is a fascinating topic, of general interest.

An alibi must, above all else, be plausible. But plausibility is itself malleable. My career as a liar, cheat, and adulterer has lasted a little over a year-and-a-half, and in the course of that time I have slowly altered my habits. I now swim regularly, using the pool at work. I go to yoga. I have joined a small instrumental group that gives occasional concerts. In other words, I have been improving myself in ways that my wife could not fail to approve, and these alibis have a special strength because that is so. Three years ago I was depressed, lethargic, took no exercise, had no interests, was miserable, but I was truthful, honest, and faithful. Now I have more energy, am busy at work and with my other activities, exercise and extend my body in healthy ways - these are all changes that my wife supports. Unbeknownst to her, they accompany my becoming a liar, cheat, and adulterer.

Swimming is, in many ways, the perfect alibi. It is a solitary activity, so there are no issues about your wife wanting to meet your swimming buddies. It takes place in the sort of venues where cellphone reception is crappy, and anyway your cellphone bleats harmlessly in the locker while you do your laps, so being incommunicado is neatly explained. Pools are slippery places - that weird scratch must have happened when you fell getting out of the pool. And swimming is followed by a shower, just like sex, so it is hardly surprising that you come home smelling of strange soap and shampoo. On top of all of this, because of the moralism surrounding physical fitness, swimming is a virtuous activity, not one to which a wife can easily object, and so not like, say, shooting little birds.

Yoga is another excellent alibi, and sprains or contusions from complex sexual positions or over-energetic pounding can easily be attributed to some new pose. I know almost nothing about yoga, but I believe that Iyengar is probably the style of yoga that functions best as an alibi, as it involves the use of odd equipment, and so has the potential to explain even such incriminating marks as rope burns. At my yoga studio - well, the one I went to just a few times in reality, but have gone to very many times in LCA-land - the Iyengar studio has a rope wall, and straps are often used around the arms, or the legs. Iyengar is also relatively strenuous, so showering is neatly explained.

A good alibi is a fine thing, but only because of what it enables. Two hours at the Liberty Inn with L and her delightful, grabby cunt is the end; the alibi of yoga is the means. Perhaps there are men for whom the lying and cheating are what gives adultery its zest; if so, they are, to my mind, confusing the means with the end. But they might retort that I am the one who is confused, thinking that sexual delight is the goal, rather than the pleasure of putting one over on the wife or girlfriend. Well, I think I have the better view, and I suspect I am having better sex too.

Thursday through Saturday

On Thursday, D and I spent three hours and change at the Kew. She seems to have entered a phase in which her orgasms (always from oral) are becoming more and more intense.

On Friday, I had enough free time in the late morning to visit F for a brief but very enjoyable session.

This morning, under the pretext of a Saturday morning yoga session, I met with A, who came back from XX yesterday and is off to the left coast tomorrow.

I realise that these telegraphic entries are of no interest to anyone - but I do not, just at the moment, feel that I have a voice with which to talk about details. Perhaps I never did.

Keeping it up

I visited J briefly last Sunday, for perhaps an hour. Fun, but not fantastic - though interestingly I felt like I was on the edge of coming for most of the time that we were fucking, and did eventually come while fucking her from behind.

Monday I visited F for a couple of hours of energetic fucking, and I went back for an hour of the same today.

That is it for the moment, though I did meet a woman for a drink on Monday evening, and that connection might, in due course, develop into something interesting.

Tomorrow, D. Friday is blank at the moment, and I am in alibi drought for reasons connected with work and the time of year. Alibis are an interesting topic and I hope to devote a post of two to them soon.

In the same way as this blog has rather gone dead on me, since I wrested control of it back from HC, so all this aimless fucking has rather palled. It is clearly time for a change of strategy, though my therapist's silly ideas - give up drinking, give up extra-marital fucking, try couple's therapy - are not the direction I intend to move in at all. I promise, though, that I will not terminate this blog without some notice.

2007

It is a few days into the new year, and so far things have proceeded pretty much as normal. On Tuesday I spent a couple of wonderful hours with A; on Wednesday I saw F for an hour and a bit in the morning, and D for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Today I visited F again.

My last significant post was back on December 15th, and so various encounters between then and the enforced hiatus of the holidays have not been recorded. But I have lost all conviction that the mere cataloguing of acts and emissions has any point. So it is unclear whether I should continue with the blog, or transform it into something else, or abandon it altogether.

My original intention was, I suppose, twofold: to keep for myself a record of who I fucked, and how I fucked them, in the safest place imaginable - in full public view; and to place in that full public view one slice of the brave new world of lying, cheating, and adultery made possible by Craigslist, Ashley Madison, Lavalife, and similar internet hook-up sites. Neither goal required that my feelings, my fears, my reactions, my regrets be written down. The blog was to be documentary rather than confessional. But in retrospect it is fairly obvious that those motivations were too thin to support the mission of maintaining the blog, and my reaction to the 'missing person' problem was to allow a narrator to emerge for whom all this fucking without any feeling was second nature. Though I quite liked him, he wasn't me; he did seem to be fucking the same women I was, however.

So now what? I am unsure. It is clear that the dispassionate documentary ideal is no good, and I would like to resume my place as the 'I' of these narratives. But that requires more of me to be exposed than I feel comfortable with, especially given that some people mentioned in the blog - A, Z, K - know of it, even if they do not read it.

While I make up my mind, or fail to, I will try to keep as close to the mere enumerations of sexual encounters as I can. But this week's idyll with A cries out for description, as does this morning's bloody bout with F.