Since coming back to Boston in August, I've been reconnecting with friends who then extend invitations to parties thrown by their friends, getting more involved in an community organization I volunteer for, and spending more time with people from my Taekwondo studio. I figure it only makes sense to meet people doing things that I'm already interested in doing. Even if I don't find myself a boyfriend or a guy who is remotely fuckable in these activities, I figure at the very least the men whom I do meet can introduce me their friends. (Because, frankly, spending all my time with single chicks isn't doing me any favors.) There's only one problem with this strategy: At my age, being out and about and doing athletic shit really results in me spending time with more married men.
And here's the thing with married men, that I had never before discovered: They're way easier to get along with.
Which makes sense, I suppose. A married guy can chat you up, flirt with you, make you feel special, knowing full well that he's always going to have his wife to go home to. Whereas single guys get all anxious about whether or not you find them attractive, whether they're saying or doing the right thing, whether you're interpreting their words or actions the wrong way, married guys can do whatever the fuck they want without putting their egos at risk. If the girl responds positively, talk about validation! And if not, it doesn't matter, because they can always count on wifey to give them a blow job when they get home. (Yes, I realize that was a very sexist thing for me to say, but to be frank, I'm around a lot of super heteronormative couples who, despite their liberal politics, have a strange tendency to replicate really old-school gender roles in their marriages.) Maybe it's for this reason that married men seem to exude a confidence that I rarely find in single men.
Sometimes this confidence is harmless. I have one friend whose husband always says things to me that I wish I had heard more often from my ex-boyfriends. He'll tell me I'm a catch, notice what I wear, and greet me with a "Hi, gorgeous." But since this is always done in front of his wife, I always take it as just platonic flirty flirtykins. While I know that his wife could very well be gritting her teeth at his behavior and ripping him a new one when they get home, I have no reason to believe that his flirtatious behavior indicates any intention on his part. Which, of course, brings its own frustration: DON'T FUCKING CALL ME GORGEOUS IF IT CAN'T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME.
And then there's this other married friend whose wife is never around, and who also interacts with me in ways that definitely cross the line between platonic and intimate. This, of course, is more problematic, because as a single woman who isn't his shrink, I really have no business knowing about his marital troubles. I definitely am in no place to be dealing with his playful jealousy when other guys hit on me or accepting his offers to buy me drinks. I admit that I should be better about turning on my cold bitch mode and walk away the second he pulls any of this, but I also admit that I have more fun hanging out with than I do on most dates I've been on. A part of the reason we get along is precisely because he's married. He can feel free to divulge his inner feelings and play the part of a charmer without risking anything except for maybe a little bit of guilt, and I can also act as I feel, whether that is flattered or flippant, simply because I know our interactions can't mean anything so long as he is married. In some ass-backwards way, it is precisely the illicit nature of our interactions that allows each of us to act more naturally than we would were we simply two single people dating. In fact, when I bluntly told him that a married guy shouldn't be telling a single girl that she's hot, his reply was, "Maybe it's because I'm married that I can be honest." Oh, the irony. And the grossness.
It's no wonder that extramarital affairs are so common.
I refuse to indulge in such a cliche, not so much because of any adherence to some lofty sense of morals, but because of my selfish need to budget my emotional investments. A second spent thinking about some married dude is a second wasted. And that, I suppose, is the lesson I can take away from my experiment with this social butterfly strategy of mine: There are endless ways to waste one's emotional energy without the help of online dating sites.
So that's it. I give up. I'm probably better off joining a mah-jong club.
