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“Promise me that you won't judge?” Verena asked me over the phone.
“I knew you were sleeping with him!” I exclaimed.
It's a typical week night. I'm at home, alone, eating cold takeout standing at the kitchen counter. Verena, I imagine, is luxuriating a bath, sipping a glass of wine. We'd been talking about the screenplay she's writing when she'd grown quiet.
The “him” we're discussing is a man we'll call Aden. Aden is a playwright from New York that we both know through our circle of writer friends. He'd come into town for a friend's wedding. He'd come into town for a friend's wedding without his wife. And he'd bumped into Verena at said wedding, who'd invited him out for a drink before his departure to talk about her screenplay.
And one thing had led to another. And another. And another.
“It's perfect,” Verena told me. “He doesn't take up my time. He has a family and I respect that. I don't want to ruin his life. But he provides just what I need.”
Passion and devotion without the more mundane aspects of a relationship. It reminds me of the line that Sabina delivers about Franz in the Unberable Lightness of Being: “He’s the best man I’ve ever met. He’s bright, handsome and he’s crazy about me. And, he’s married.”
Earlier this year, Melissa Burkley and Jessica Parker, two social psychologists at Oklahoma State University, performed a study to determine whether single women are more attracted to men in committed relationships than they are to single men. Though small (their sample consisted of 184 individuals), their results are thought-provoking: 59 percent of single women in the study who were shown a photo of an attractive man and told he was single were interested. When that same man was described as already being in a relationship, of the women who saw his photo, 90 percent expressed interest in pursuing him.
“Single women were more interested in poaching an attached man rather than pursuing a single man,” the researchers said in the discussion of the study. “This may be because an attached man has demonstrated his ability to commit and in some ways his qualities have already been ‘pre-screened' by another woman.”
John Tierney, who reported about this at the New York Times' TierneyLab blog, has suggested that the attraction may be due, in fact, to fear of intimacy.
What is fear of intimacy? Avoiding sharing yourself with another; withdrawing from the discussions of thoughts, experiences or feelings of another; and difficulty in expressing affection toward another.
“I'm not afraid of intimacy,” said my friend Francesca, when I called her to ask.
Francesca has been dating a married man exclusively for two years. She's in her mid-30s, has a six-year-old, and has never been married.
“He and I have the deepest, most open relationship,” she told me. “When something happens, we call each other. We're best friends. I know some things about him that even his brothers don't know. Things his best friend doesn't know. And he knows everything—even about me.”
“How can you be with somebody you can't really be with?” I asked her.
“I am really with him,” she replied. “I don't have to be next to him all the time in order to be with him. I don't need to wake up beside him. I have him inside. Love isn't about possession, it's about growth and fulfillment. He fulfills me.”
“Isn't it lonely?”
“I might be alone sometimes,” she said. “But I'm never lonely. I have a full life. He gives me what I need: understanding, passion, warmth.”
“Do you think he's going to leave his wife for you?”
“Everyone serves a function in a life,” she said. “His wife has a vital role. I don't want to be a wife. I'm a mistress. That's what I like.”
“Why?” I asked her. “What is it about being a mistress?”
“A wife—she's a business partner. You're running a business together. That's a family: a business. A mistress is a vacation. To a wife, you talk about money. You talk about critical decisions. You talk about layoffs and pay cuts. To a mistress, you talk about philosophy and literature, you talk about the color of the ocean and the deepest secrets of your heart. A wife needs you to be there, she needs empirical evidence. A mistress knows you're there, she has faith.”
I wondered, speaking with her, whether the findings weren't a reflection of changing trends in what women desired. Verena doesn't want a family and Francesca has a daughter. Are changes in our society changing our desires? If we, as
