I’ve been in love with the idea of being loved by somebody else, and I’ve called that being unhappy in my marriage. That’s the honest version, and it took me until sixty to admit it. It was never really about my wife. It was about wanting to be new to someone—to be looked at by a person who hadn’t yet figured out what I was like. I wanted the feeling of being unknown more than I wanted another woman.
You only get that feeling once with each person. I used mine up with my wife by about 1998, and I’ve resented her for it ever since, which is really like resenting a mirror. She knows my habits, my flaws, my silences, and every version of me I’ve already shown her. I spent years imagining that another woman could give me something my wife couldn’t, when what I actually wanted was to meet someone before they knew me well enough to be disappointed.
The feeling I’ve been chasing isn’t romance. It’s the specific relief of being unknown. There is something intoxicating about being seen by someone who hasn’t heard your old stories or watched you make the same mistakes for twenty years. I mistook that feeling for love and used it as evidence that my marriage was the problem. The truth is that no woman could give me that feeling twice, because the moment she truly knew me, the fantasy would disappear again.
She said something to me in the car in September that I haven’t been able to shake. She said she’d actually liked the idea of meeting me now, at this age, as a stranger. I laughed and asked why. She stared out the window and said she’d thought about it a lot. Then she told me the reason was simple: “Because if I met you now, I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering whether you loved me—or whether you just loved being loved by me.”
