Dating Married Men

Dating a married man is a bad idea. (Yes yes, I know. Duh. But before you get too comfortable on your high horse, don't assume you know why unless you've also had several unfortunate experiences with married men or women. Then ride 'em cowboy. My hat's off to you.)

Dunno why or how, but I have the tendency to attract married men. I chalk it up to the absence of anything remotely similar to a wedding ring. My friends theorize it's because I also have this tendency to be somewhat naive about a man's intentions. Either way, whatever. Married men love me.

My first experience was in college with one of my former instructors. We dated (after I was done with his class) for about 5 months. I don't remember why we broke up, but it had nothing to do with a wife, whom I didn't meet until 3 years later. She called me one day while I was at work.

"Hello?"

"Is this S.G.Loughlin?" asked a heavily accented female voice.

"Yes. Who is this please?"

"I'm Ramon's wife. Have you contacted my husband lately?"

Shocked. Utterly shocked. I'm opening and closing my mouth silently like a fish.

"Uh. Yes? I guess I just emailed him a few days ago."

"Well I want you to stop. Never contact him again. He is my husband. You leave him alone or I will be forced to do something to you. Did he tell you I am his wife and I have his baby? Leave him alone..." Her English was good enough to threaten bodily harm but not quite good enough to explain how the hell she got my number or what the royal fuck?

According to her, they'd be married for the last five years but she had only recently come to the U.S. (they're both West African) and learned he had been having affairs. Mind you, she's calling me years after we dated, threatening physical violence, though I'm not sure she meant to actually threaten me given English was her second, maybe third, language. Either way, I'm not going to investigate the matter too closely.

I agree to never contact him again - "No problem! I'll be sure to lose his and your number as soon as we hang up! My apologies! Have a nice life!" - and hang up.

A few days pass. I'm walking home and Ramon passes me in his car. He pulls over, smiling and asks why I haven't called him back.

"Are you kidding me? Because your wife called me. She threatened to beat me up Ramon. Um, hello. You're married?"

He sings me a song and dance about her actually being a crazy ex-girlfriend who hacked his email account and contacted all his friends to find out if he'd been cheating on her..blah blah blah...it's not true...yada yada.

Whatever dude. What. Ever.

Epilogue: She called me about a year after that asking for help. Evidently she tested positive for a STD and he had left her and the baby high and dry. As an undocumented immigrant, she didn't know where to go or how to get help. I gave her the number of a Planned Parenthood, wished her luck and raced to get my own test. Thankfully he caught it after we had broken up (whew!) and I was clean. I changed my number and email address.

Stay tuned for Dating Married Men: Part II.

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Dating Married Men : Part Deux

As promised, the second installation of why it's a really bad idea to date married men:

I didn't realize it was a date until he saw a female friend who looked first at me in confusion then at him questioningly then back at me in disgust and then turned to him and said, "How is (wife's name)?"

It wasn't that I didn't know he was married. I've met her. And their two kids. It was that he asked me out to drinks to discuss "work." Or so I thought.

"I'd like to run some ideas by you about my book business," he wrote in an email. "And it'd be nice to catch up over some whiskey."

Now if you've followed this blog even a little bit, you're aware I love whiskey and hate bad pick up lines. I'm also a bit of a geek so a book discussion over whiskey invite is heaven. It's also a brilliant cover.

We met at a swanky bar downtown and ordered top-shelf scotch-bourbon with a tasty appetizer. The conversation meandered through the usual catching up then veered towards discussion of building crushes. Evidently the men in his office had crushes on the various young women in the building (I used to work there). I feigned ignorance and ordered another.

He kept asking me about my personal life - what I was up to these days, what did I like to do on the weekends, etc. - and was reticent when asked about his wife and children, whom I asked about frequently. Truth be told though, I was alright with having a few drinks on a married man's tab until his female acquaintance walked up and gave me the stank eye like I was the one in the wrong.

Tangent: women, instead of blaming each other when a man's being a dog, blame him. This seems obvious to me, but for whatever reason, the majority of women will go after the other woman like she's the one cheating. I have a few stories about this as well, mostly about being physically threatened and harassed by crazy girlfriends who think their boyfriends are cheating on them with me, but I'll save that for another post.

At one point I asked if he had to go given that it was getting late and a school night and he said that he had told his family he would be working late. Sketch.

As the third round of drinks were finished, I thanked him for a pleasant discussion, pointed out we hadn't even once mentioned books and wished him well. No mention of the possibility of meeting again, nothing about the awkward tension introduced by female friend, just a nice and formal "thank you."

"I'm sorry we didn't even talk about books! We'll have to go out again soon," he said.

"Thanks again. Tell (wife's name) I said hello," I replied.

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Hitting On A Married Woman

**Editors' Note: This guest post came in late last night. I happened to be around for this one (funny how often that happens) and was one of the unfortuante fools suffering the Nikki-Six wannabe. After reading this, I'm glad I got him and not the ass hitting on the married chick.**


Dating may be weird, but believe it or not … marriage can be pretty damn bizarre, as well. But those are stories for a whole 'nuther blog. I've been out of the dating scene for years, and while I do visit the bars (ok, one bar) from time to time I am not usually privy to an insider's look at the dating/pick-up scene in the 21st century. My fortunes changed one evening not long ago.

I met some friends at "the" bar for drinks and conversation. The four of us—three of us female and one male—sat at the bar for a spell, making small talk over our beers and whiskeys. When the linear arrangement of seating made conversation difficult we picked up our drinks and moved down to a table. Things were busy that night, with a table down the way quickly filling with people and growing in size as more tables were dragged over to accommodate the blossoming number of drunks gathering there. They were young, for the most part … and granted I'm older than everyone in this story so a bunch of early-20-somethings made it look like frat-boy night at the bar to me. Though, NONE of these people looked like ever they'd seen a college, let alone a frat house.

The four of us minded our own business, drinking and talking, laughing and drinking more. Eventually the youngsters outgrew their accommodations and went looking for more seats. They found them at our table, and instead of picking the chairs up and dragging them over to their soiree, three of the guys plopped their asses in chairs around our table. At first I was sure one of my companions knew these guys, despite the fact that one of them—the ringleader, it seemed—looked like a Nikki Sixx-wannabe, and the other two looked like they were Nikki Sixx-wannabe wannabes. Aim high, young men … aim high. Needless to say, my companions did not know these boys.

Wannabe One placed himself at the end of the table, between me and my male friend. Wannabe One looked at me and said, "You're married, aren't you?" To which I replied, with a sarcastic flash of my ring finger in front of my face, "Wow, what ever gave you that idea?" Give the young man props for his astuteness. His answer? "Because you're so sexy." Wow again. And thus began Wannabe One's heavy-handed charm … from his sharing of his pay stub with me (he had a job!) to his drunken slurring of my name whenever he could fit it in a sentence. Boy was all of 24 chronologically, but not a day over 16 emotionally. At the end of the table, one of my girlfriends was getting the suave treatment by Nikki Sixx-wannabe and Wannabe Two. At one point Nikki Sixx-wannabe looked at me, trying for his best deep and smoky look, and asked, "Where are you from?"

So I'm from California … I don't always share it up front because I get some ribbing for it, but with this guy I was more than willing to do some verbal sparing. "California," I said. "Ah, me too," said Nikki, sealing our common bond, "I'm from Huntington Beach." "Oh," I replied, "Huh. I'm from Northern California … we don't typically like the SoCal bunch."

And what do you do when a woman makes a point to show she has no interest in who you are or where you're from? You try to impress her with your rock-star credentials, of course. "I'm just up here with my band," says Nikki. "Oh?," I say, "What's the name of your band?" To which he replies:

"Slut."

Honest to god. (No, this is not the same band as the German band Slut … in case you music lovers were wondering.) "You must get a lot of girls with that," says my girlfriend who's been stuck with these two hacks hovering over her. But they still don't get the hint. Obviously our acid is not acidic enough. Finally, after disturbing our peace for a good 20 minutes, Nikki Sixx-wannabe asks, "So, what are you guys doing tonight?" To which my friend and I look at each other and reply dryly and in unison: "This."

They didn't run away immediately, but they apparently heard chastity belts locking because they pulled back on their assault, slowly filtering back into their own crowd of hairspray, black leather and ear piercings. We continued with our night.

I told my husband the story when I got home, and he just laughed. Which, on one hand, was nice … he wasn't going to blow a gasket over me being at a bar with random losers hitting on me. On the other hand, he could have shown a little concern. I mean, really? Your wife is at a dive bar and you have zero territorial instincts when you hear she's been hit upon? That's just one way in which marriage is weird. But again, that's a story for another blog.

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Little comforts

I’ve been thinking a lot about exes lately.

And don’t tell me you haven’t. I’m not interested in that. Really, can’t we please, for just a moment, admit, all together, that it’s weird, so very weird, to have exes in the universe? I don’t want to pretend that I’ve moved on—which I have, in a sense. I’m not stopped, I’m not waiting, or weeping. I’m just thinking.

Isn’t it strange that there are people in the world that you used to lay next to every night (if you’re a cohabitating type of serial monogamist, at least), who now have these lives that don’t involve you? They have wives and girlfriends and fiancés and children, and you have new loves, and you live somewhere else, and why does that have to mean you can’t still call his mother? Why does that have to mean that you’re a stalker if you want to see a photo of his new family?

One reason I’ve been thinking is because I’ve been hearing a lot from an ex who was an item so long ago I hesitate to think of him as more than a very old friend. I was visiting home not long ago, and he randomly called. He didn’t even know I was in town, but he instantly started pushing to see me. I agreed to dinner at his intense insistence—he hinted at some sort of trauma. He promised he’d be pathetic, and offered to buy.

We got in the car, and I said, “So. What was all that? What’s up with you?”

“Right,” he said. “So, my wife left me.”

Of course she did. Although there was one point in my life that I’d considered him my backup plan, my safety, in case my life didn’t go the way it expected, I gave up that plan about four years ago when he told me he was having a baby. Since then, I’d been firmly in the camp that supported his relationship, and I’d even been charmed by his wife – and while we’re being honest, I’ll just put it out there. I’m prettier than his wife.

“Oh, buddy,” I said. “That sucks.”

“For her teacher,” he said.

“Yikes,” I said.

“Who is a lady,” he said.

“Oh, fuck.”

At dinner, he told me the whole sordid story. It’s pretty fucking tragic.

He knew our server, it was why he’d picked this particular restaurant. When the server walked away, my friend confessed, “he doesn’t know yet.”

This break had been sudden, and the whole thing had only gone down about three weeks prior. My friend described to me how he understood depression for the first time in his life.

“I wake up in the morning, and I can’t think of a reason to get out of bed. And even when I can, I just can’t think of how in the world I’m going to make myself do it.”

I hugged him, and got a little drunk with him, and said what little, weak things you can say to comfort a friend whose family has just been torn apart. Mostly I listened to him. And when our server asked what the wife and kid were up to, he got the bad news. When our bill arrived, I think it was $5.

“I’ve been getting a lot of free meals lately,” he confessed.

What little things we can do to comfort a friend.

Later, after I’d left town again, he texted me, saying he wished he’d been able to spend more time with me when I was in town.
“I have a lot of friends here, but none like you,” he said.

I’m not sure what he meant by that. In a literal sense, he doesn’t have any other friends who took his virginity. In another sense, he probably doesn’t have any other friends who have considered making a life with him. I’ve thought about what our kids would look like. I’ve considered whether I would take his last name.

But he probably didn’t mean any of those things.

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Dear Joe Rogan...

I have a confession to make. Okay, I guess it's two confessions.

One - I follow Joe Rogan on Twitter (@joerogan). I don't think this is a bad thing at all, but some people may judge. I don't know. I'm proud.

Two - I missed it when Joe Rogan linked to us here at DIW. This is a fact I am NOT proud of. We missed him linking to our Mormon Soaking article.

I've learned many great things about Joe through his Twitter account.

For example:

1 - He is hilarious.

2 - He likes to get high.

3 - His UStreams are incredible.

4 - His tattoos are gorgeous. I mean.... beautiful. Incredible.

4 - He is passionate about UFC. This is perhaps the most important thing I've learned about Joe. Listening to him comment on fights is golden. He's made me enjoy cagefighting. I know, right?

So, Joe - Here's to you. Our first - and for now only - celebrity appreciator.

We hope you and your friends and followers keep coming to visit us as we try hard to keep the good stuff coming. We know you're married and a dad and stuff, but because it's our mantra...

HAPPY DATING!

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