This is a bit of a rehash of a response I made to a thread several months ago about infidelity. I’ll repeat the story here.
It was about 10 years ago. I was involved in a community theater production in which my character and a younger female character renewed an old affair with a series of onstage kisses that were played for laughs. The actress (whom I’ll call Lisa – not her real name) was a beautiful, vivacious, hilariously funny young lady, and sister of the director. During rehearsals both of them pointed out to me that my kissing seemed to lack fervor. While we didn’t spend any extra time on it, over the course of rehearsals I perfected my lip-locking technique. And I’m here to tell ya’, you cannot passionately kiss another person several times a night for six weeks without having it affect you. I’ve sometimes thought those steamy love scenes in the movies are as responsible for Hollywood marriage breakups as anything.
My wife was completely aware of what was involved in the play, and even attended all of the performances.
Unfortunately, by the time the play closed, I was pretty badly infatuated with Lisa (yes, I know I was confusing her with her character; didn’t make it any less real to me.) Imagine my shock when, at the cast party (which my wife did not attend) Lisa’s brother confided in me that she had developed a major crush on me. Lisa and I spent much of the party in close proximity to each other, but never actually touched.
In the weeks that followed, I came to believe that I was desperately in love with Lisa. When my wife confronted me about my obviously distracted state, I confessed my feelings to her. Being the organized, no-shit woman she is, she made a few phone calls and, within hours, I was sitting in a marriage therapist’s office. I was utterly amazed (though I shouldn’t have been) to discover that my wife felt deeply betrayed; I was stunned to hear the therapist refer to my wife as having been cheated on. After several weeks of “marital intensive care” and months of less intensive care, we declared our marriage healed. There have been other bumps along the way, but the therapy taught us how to handle those, and we’ve never been happier.
The thing is, except for those on-stage kisses, I never touched Lisa. And the kisses weren’t even particularly romantic – we hammed it up because we had to get laughs with them. But the intimacy of the act, regardless of how unemotional it was supposed to be, triggered a deep emotional response in both of us. And my wife has said she felt no less cuckolded than if she’d found us in bed together.
I still dabble in community theater, but I’m a lot pickier about the roles (Markinson in “A Few Good Men” was my last – no kissing there, unless you count the sidearm.) And I’ve been extremely wary of all relationships with women. Once burned, as they say, twice shy.
