Livin' Large in the Big Easy

I’ve been over this a thousand times, and it still doesn’t make sense. My husband left his wife because he caught her in an affair. He said he would have rather stayed in a loveless marriage than have it end that way. When his jealousy threatened our relationship early on, he told me that he couldn’t bear it if I cheated on him. How ironic that he was the one who did the cheating.

The turning point, as near as I can tell, was a trip to New Orleans with my best friends. They asked us to join them on a long weekend, when they visited their son at Tulane. My husband and I had been engaged for barely a month, and I had asked her to be my “best woman,” returning the favor I’d done for her more than 20 years earlier.

My husband and I were excited about the trip – he wanted me to see his favorite city through his eyes. I wanted him to get to get to know my friends better. Somewhere on the trip down, we started talking about sex. He said that he wanted me to be happy and fulfilled, and wondered if there was anything that he could do for me that he hadn’t been. “No,” I told him, “you’re perfect.”

He changed the subject to pornography, something that’s always made me uncomfortable. “No, “I said, “I don’t enjoy it. It makes me feel like a voyeur.”

Toys? Bondage? S&M? Role playing? As the list went on, I wondered what he was getting at. “Are you bored?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “But I thought it might be fun to experiment a little. Test some boundaries.”

He told me about a legendary sex shop in the French Quarter that he wanted to visit. I thought I was game until we got there. I had been in plenty of adult stores before and I’m not uptight or overly judgmental, but the people in that store – customers and staff alike – scared me. When I told him I wanted to leave, he started teasing me with an enormous dildo. When I told him it wasn’t funny, he goosed me with a vibrator. When I told him I was serious, he told me that I needed to relax.

“No,” I told him, “I need another hurricane.”

We left the store and met up with my friends at a big party bar in the Quarter. We all got trashed, and other than our raging hangovers, the rest of the weekend went without incident. He never mentioned the sex shop episode again, but something definitely changed after that.

When we got home, our sex life didn’t stop, but it tapered off noticeably. It was as if he thought his life was over, that I’d never be interested in anything new, that he’d be spending the rest of his life with a joyless prude if he married me – all because of my reaction in a skanky New Orleans adult emporium. It was barely a week later before he started his affair.

Thus began our engagement…

The Wife Who Knows