Sam Suggests an Affair

Shortly after the “why the hell not,” question, my wife, “Erin,” and I decided to send our son to a wilderness program, followed, until Covid, by a therapeutic boarding school.  With my son out of the house, Erin and I began to try to deal with the aftermath of three or so years of his disruptive behavior and its impact on us. When she was pregnant, we had agreed that we would always be a team as parents and that agreement had been tested and at times fallen apart entirely. Among the casualties was our sex life.

Though some of the dreams I described to Sam (she was a psychoanalyst, after all, and I dreamt often and in detail) involved sexual themes, Sam and I hadn’t spent much time on my second goal—reconnecting with my wife—since our son had been such a dominant issue. I started a session with Sam by saying, “It’s time for us to talk about sex.” “Oh, goody,” she replied, rubbing her hands together. I didn’t know if she was looking at this as a Freudian breakthrough or if she just dug sex talk.

We talked about the declining frequency of Erin’s and my sex life. She adopted a very serious look. “Frequency of sex is the key indicator of a strong marriage,” she declared.

I took the implication: my marriage was weak. Not long afterwards, she began asking me if I had ever considered having an affair. I think in any long relationship, at some point you at least fantasize about it, but I told her it’s not something I would ever really consider because I didn’t want to be divorced and I couldn’t even imagine how one might get away with having an affair.

“Oh, Matt, people do it all the time. You’re creative. You’d figure it out,” she said.

Was my therapist actually counseling me to have an affair? With who? I’d brought in no stories of crushes or opportunities I thought I had. I’d expressed no such desires.

And people do it all the time. Had she? Her husband?

Yes, I’m creative, but I’m not a liar. Or, I should say, I have the skill to be a very good liar, but I’m smart enough to know that lies become more complex the longer you try to keep them up and one slip and the careful tapestry you’ve woven is now a pile of disconnected threads. Lying is almost always more trouble than it’s worth.

But it put a seed in my head, given the source.