What I’ve Learned from Sleeping with (a Lot of) Married Men

From: Cosmopolitan Oct-18-2022 03:40:am

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What I’ve Learned from Sleeping with (a Lot of) Married Men

I’ve always been pretty unapologetic about the fact that I sleep with other people’s husbands, boyfriends, and fiancés and will quite possibly do so again. The way I see it, what other people choose to do within (or outside) the confines of their own monogamous unions is no business—and certainly no responsibility—of mine.

The first time I ever had sex with a married man, I was a 21-year-old senior in college and he was my first-ever sugar daddy. You just slept with someone’s husband, I thought to myself the next morning, taking an Uber back to campus from one of eastern Connecticut’s sprawling casinos that rise out of the farmland like shining mini-metropoles. I think you are supposed to feel something. But all I could feel, hungover in the backseat of a car that would get me back to school just in time for my first class, was the sharp thrill of the illicit, and a faint, sickly gleam of satisfaction in the knifelike knowledge I’d just acquired: that I would never again have to worry about being enough for a man because there would never be any such thing.

I felt I had discovered an important if uncomfortable truth, one that made me feel smug and superior if also secretly scared and disillusioned—like a kid who just found out Santa Claus isn’t real.