I was reading a novel starring a couple, Dwight and Deborah, who had been married for 1 or 2 years. Dwight had a crush on Deborah since childhood, but had gotten married to another woman as a an adult, had a son with her, and later got divorced.
At the end of the novel, Deborah says something about “our son.” Then she says how she has come to think of the boy as hers. Dwight says, paraphrased, “He actually is kind of yours because every time I had sex with my ex I was thinking of you.”
Deborah (and I’m assuming the author) thought this was heartwarming.
It’s neither horrifying or heartwarming. It’s a weird type of compliment, hardly believable, kind of a head shaking kind of thing. I don’t see how it would be horrifying unless you are under the mistaken impression that people never have sex with someone while fantasizing about someone else.
I wouldn’t be weirded out if my lover confessed that she occasionally fantasized during sex about some random dude she’d met. That’s normal.
But if I found out that for all the years of our marriage, every time we’d had sex she’d been fantasizing about a childhood friend, to the extent that she fantasized that our child was magically his–hell yes I’d be weirded out.
That’s why I said it’s hardly believable and weird. It sounds like an exaggeration intended to be nice, but comes out strange sounding. But I don’t take it literally, just as a clumsy way of trying to convey a nice sentiment.
The issue here seems to me is that it was degrading to the ex-wife to be consistently viewed as used as the physical surrogate for an imaginary lover. OK, a lot of people do that at least for a moment sometimes (though even if so it’s a prime example of things better left unsaid). But if it’s to the point described here it wasn’t fair to the ex-wife, and I’d expect the ‘once and eventual one true love’ to also feel badly for the ex-wife and question the ethics of the guy.
‘Creepy’, ‘icky’, ‘weird’ or even ‘horrifying’ (if on the implied basis of creepy/icky/weird) about sex stuff is becoming IMO too prone to hypocrisy now that people are called immoral for personally finding various other sexual practices disgusting, feelings they might actually have no control over. Maybe it’s better to just throw out the concept of community expressions of what’s ‘creepy’ etc. when it comes to sex, stick to whether or not somebody is being demeaned as a human being, and otherwise everyone keep to themselves what they think is icky.
If I were in Deborah’s situation, I’d be asking “WTF?! What took you so long to figure out you shouldn’t have been married to her? How did you even marry her in the first place, if this was happening before you two got married? Didn’t you ever sit down with yourself and think, ‘something is really wrong here’?”
My paraphrase made it sound like the fantasies were during the whole marriage/relationship, but I don’t remember it clearly enough to claim that’s what the book actually said. It was definitely when the son was conceived. My apologies for inadvertently misleading anyone!
My immediate reaction was “EEEWWWW!” As far as I’m concerned, a person’s past sex life is solidly in the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell column. It’s not denial - it’s just something I don’t want or need to know. As long as there’s no chance that you’re bringing diseased bits into the relationship, I’m fine being spared all the details.
The reason really is critical to deciding whether or not what he said was creepy. People find themselves in all kinds of situations and they do in their own mind what they must to get through it.
This made me laugh out loud. He’s really the child of Deborah and a guy named Harold from Omaha!
This was a book in a series and I’m not sure I ever knew the answer to that question. I definitely don’t know it right now. For me, I don’t think that would make a difference, assuming we aren’t talking about someone being forced to marry at gunpoint or the like.
