I’ve kept a list in my head of what my life would have looked like if I’d married someone else, and I update it. Not one imaginary woman, but specific ones—the woman from 1993, the one from a conference in 2008, and a woman I spoke to for nine minutes in an airport in 2016 who I’ve thought about ever since. I know what house I’d have with each of them, what kind of man I’d be, and what my evenings would look like.
I have built four entire alternate lives and furnished every one of them, all while sitting across the table from a real person who was talking to me. That’s the part I can’t defend. The women themselves aren’t really the point anymore. They became placeholders for different versions of myself—the husband I might have been, the cities I might have lived in, the person I might have become. I wasn’t comparing my wife to other women. I was comparing my real life to lives that had never been tested by reality.
The strange thing is that imagining those lives has become the only pleasant part of my week. The best hours are the ones I spend somewhere I’ve never actually been, with people who don’t know my name. I know how pathetic that sounds. My wife would probably say I disappear even when I’m sitting right in front of her, and she’d be right. In my head, I have four marriages that never became difficult, four houses that never needed repairs, and four versions of myself who never had to discover what those lives would actually cost.
She asked me last fall what I think about when I go quiet. I said work. She nodded, but she didn’t believe me. Then she told me she’d wondered for years and had finally decided it was probably another woman. I asked her what made her think that, and she said, “Because you always look happier somewhere I can’t follow.” Then she asked me one question: “If you had to choose one of those lives today, would you?” And for the first time, I realized I didn’t know how to answer without admitting that I’d spent years choosing them in my head instead of choosing her.
