In the conspiracies of your illicit adulterous cells, you lovers are pursuing desire, yes, but aren't you also playing closet theorists, vernacular utopians, performatively arguing the minority position that discontent isn't, pace Freud and everyone else, the human condition, or somehow natural?
—Laura Kipnis, "Adultery"

It is difficult to imagine garnering credibility as a woman speaking from the position of having had an affair with a married man without the requisite tone of unalloyed remorse.[1] Mainstream culture would perceive me as someone with no respect for the family and no respect for myself. Feminism might charge me with betraying another woman and the power of sisterhood, shoring up patriarchal privilege for my married male partner by servicing his body and emotional needs.[2] Anne Sexton's 1967 poem, "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman," rues such self-destructive missteps:

She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.

Sexton's biting recriminations seem to be directed at herself, as much as at her lover or the reader. She should have known.

Twenty years later the zany adulteress in When Harry Met Sally . . . finds a receipt for a new dining room table in her lover's briefcase and laments, "He's never going to leave his wife."

"Of course he isn't," says Sally.

Her friend replies, "You're right, you're right, I know you're right."

We all know the story of the other woman, these cultural texts insist. He is using her; she is being duped. The often iconoclastic feminist critic Laura Kipnis notes this tendency to oversimplify the equation of adultery: "Cynics, moralists, and feminists unite in telling us the answer is simply power—either the desire for more or the expectation of its protection." When moralists and feminists unite, I get nervous; in fact, while mainstream culture presents feminists as antagonistic to the family and family values, I cannot imagine many feminists reacting to my other womanhood with anything less than moral indictment. Nobody likes a home wrecker.

Out of this stigmatized space, I want to write a narrative of the Other Woman as a dissenting figure in contemporary marriage culture, a social agent bent on queering heterosexuality—valuing intimacy outside marriage, separating sex from reproduction, recognizing pleasure as a worthwhile end in itself, and resisting the categorization of women as "wives" and "mistresses" according to the state regulation of sexuality—rather than consenting to it whole cloth. Borrowing from Marilyn Frye's work on disidentifying with whiteness and John Stoltenberg's experiments in refusing to be a man, and mindful of Lynne Segal's assertion that there are "many heterosexualities" (260), I am breaking with traditional stories of heterosexuality in which the Other Woman is codified as victim, joke, or psycho; outside this framework lies an alternative heterosexuality not defined by marriage or simplistic theories of gender and power.[3] My intention is not to advocate adultery as intrinsically resistant to dominant cultural values or even to suggest that my experience of it was completely positive. Rather, I have resituated adultery in the contexts of queer theory and cultural studies that inform third-wave feminism in order to extrapolate its socially disruptive capacity from the complicity more often associated with it, thus examining a less familiar part of the story of the Other Woman.[4]

With This Ring . . .

Could some artificer
beat it into bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal or to make promises
living will not let them keep?
—Denise Levertov, "Wedding-Ring"

Paul and I are holding hands across a small table at a bistro near the club where we will hear a mandolin concert in about an hour. I am so happy to be out on a date in public with my married boyfriend that I actually skipped down the sidewalk after we parked the car. This scene strikes me as very Hollywood—fading into the anonymity of a nearby city, staring into each other's eyes over appetizers and wine, intensely focused on the arc of energy passing between us. We almost parody romance in this iconographic couplehood moment, but it feels good and we go with it. Or at least I go with it. Paul seems less bubbly, and I ask why. This pattern will dominate our affair, eventually becoming intolerable to me, but at this point I still cheerily listen to stories of domestic struggle and work diligently to lift his spirits with my illicit girlfriend superpowers.

He recounts a conversation with his wife riddled with unmemorable marital nitpicking. In the story, he was sitting at the kitchen table, a spot that evokes coziness in my mind, not strife. She stood in front of the stove making a grilled cheese sandwich for their son. The son did not finish it and gave the second half to his dad. Paul keeps talking, but my eye stops here, deliberately resisting his narrative gaze; I linger over this image, this grilled cheese sandwich intruding on the romantic ambience of our bistro table. His wife might as well have pulled up a chair and joined us. I had imagined only tension between them, not the relaxed intimacy of grilled cheese.

With this new domestic detail in mind, I go from holding Paul's hand to rubbing it aggressively, wearing a hot groove along his heart line. My possessive angst neutralizes whatever was bothering Paul, and he becomes content, playful. Still immersed in the brine of emotional sadomasochism, I smile and announce:

"I want to wear your wedding ring sometime while we fuck."

I expect him to say no. I expect him to chide me for petty jealousy, for getting hung up on the accoutrements of marriage as somehow meaningful.

"You can wear it now if you want."

My stomach flips over and my cheeks go red. The taboo of it all! I slip his simple gold band on my left ring finger behind a birthstone ring to hold the loose boyfriend-sized jewelry in place. He tells me his wife's name is engraved on the inside. I admire my faux engagement set from the corner of my eye as I drain a glass of Blackstone merlot. I feel wild. At the concert, we overhear a conversation between a woman and a couple sitting in front of us. "So," one woman quizzes the other, "what are you?—girlfriend? fiancée? wife?"

Paul rolls his eyes, leans over to whisper, "What difference does it make? Everybody thinks they have a right to know which label to apply."

I laugh, agreeing: "Like they need the categories established first, so they know how to interact with each other." I like theorizing together about other people's behavior, holding ourselves apart from the sheep-like acquiescence to social roles all around us. We reassure each other and ourselves that we are not like them. We are not part of the marriage police.

At the end of the evening he sees me into my apartment and I hold my breath as he leaves, wondering if he'll really go home without his wedding ring. I wait till his car pulls out of my driveway to take the ring off and look at his wife's name, faded with 12 years of wear. I put it back on, push my hand between my pillow and the cool sheet, and fall promptly asleep.

The meaning of the ring seemed dramatically altered by its placement on my finger (the body of the Other Woman). Instead of representing the sanctity of marriage, or the facile cultural myth that true love never ends, or the symbolic binding of two people into one, the ring worked like a pageant dress on a drag queen, calling into question the cultural codes of state-sanctioned heterosexuality, revealing them as performances and approximations of this socially constructed role rather than natural, inevitable, fulfilling behaviors. It served as a reminder of the widespread inability among the married to live up to the monogamous reproductive heterosexual imperative. It had the effect of queering marriage, opening it to critique, making explicit the hidden agendas and human failings it shelters. It also spoke to the question of entitlement—who is allowed to wear this insignia of social status, what must one sacrifice in exchange for this privilege, what official channels are required to grant juridical and psychological meaning to this token of love—and it broke the viselike hold on social entitlements that wives traditionally have enjoyed (or solaced themselves with).[5] The ring on my unmarried, improper, wandering hand marked my physical embodiment as a space of carnivalesque irreverence for dominant cultural norms surrounding female sexuality, marriage, and the husband as private property. I experienced it as a sign of transgression—going where I wasn't supposed to go, doing what I wasn't supposed to do, wearing what I wasn't supposed to wear—a practice of "creative disrespect" toward the institution of marriage and its attendant stigmatization of single women and others who have not consented to state-controlled sexuality.[6] In fact, I want to emphasize the disrespect of the action as a conscious distancing from discourses of respectability, in particular respectable womanhood.[7]

. . . I Thee Wed

And trying to pretend that one's relationship differs from the farcical stock of conventional marriage is the surest way to become the butt of the joke. Not to recognize one's place in a marriage farce is precisely to be the joke rather than to get it.
—Jane Gallop, Living with His Camera

The ring brings me into unexpectedly close proximity with his wife—her name etched in Greek against the back of my finger. I have never pretended she did not exist, never blanked her out of my image of them at home, never imagined she was any less real or complex or human than me. But wearing the ring conjures the flesh of her, feels like holding her hand. Intimate. It is as if she and I are actually the wedded couple now, queer and committed, Paul the ringless intermediary. This act of adultery on my part could be seen, along these lines, as something that goes on "between women," negotiations with the kinds of women we could be, reflections on the roles most readily available to us.[8] By wearing the ring I meant to parody her wife privilege and pervert his sacred vow, but I knew the ring also marked my body as interchangeable with hers. Just another wife figure in the world. [9]

"If we ever became a real couple I'd just end up being the one you were fucking around on."

"Not true!" Paul insisted he was not a cheater at heart, that it was just me, how great I was, how drawn to me he felt. I did not press the point, leaving this illusion intact for the moment—it felt kind of nice inside this bubble of exceptional womanhood—but I made a mental note of surprise. Did he really believe that? A note of caution to myself as well, not to underestimate the seductive power of this story.

Exactly seven days after the concert, Paul tells me he wants to build a future together. He is not leaving his wife, not leaving his son. He wants to imagine a commitment between us unhinged from marriage (the possibility of ours or the reality of theirs). I feel free and loved and filled with radical possibility. That night I take off their wedding ring and leave it by the door for him to take the next day. He puts the ring in his desk drawer at work. We have both broken, briefly, from the small gold circle of marriage cachet.

Those not currently immersed in oxytocin chemicals will laugh wryly at the next part of this story, but I believed my lover when he voluntarily promised monogamy to me, despite his married status, and the moment I discovered he had, to my inexplicable shock, still been fucking his wife after all, rivals any experience of jealousy and emotional pain I have ever had. I sat there in the Mexican restaurant booth, both palms wet with condensation from the enormous mug of Dos Equis in front of me, and I felt crazy. I imagined turning the booth over to the shock of our close dining neighbors or running out into the rainy evening and laying rubber tracks in the parking lot. It took a lot to sit still instead. I knew, though, that it was over. There is a thin line between imagining heterosexuality beyond possession (all zen and feminist) and just rationalizing in fancy ways the pain of sexual betrayal. The transformation had come full circle as I predicted. I had become the wife, and he was sleeping with another woman.

The End of the [Af]fair

. . . beyond the rather unproductive debate over whether carnivals are politically progressive or conservative . . .
—Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

It can be argued that adultery actually sustains marriage, that, far from disrupting the regime of traditional heterosexuality, adultery allows it to run all the more smoothly, releasing pressure from the husband, who can return to his wife feeling less sexually regulated by her, and releasing pressure from the single woman, who has poached sexual pleasure and companionship from marriage culture and feels perhaps less controlled by and less antagonistic toward it. She has found ways in which it serves her, and therefore need not radically reject it through activism and polemics. In other words, adultery operates as a safety valve for marriage culture, through which errant desires erupt and go limp; the Other Woman's intended disruptive play is actually incorporated by dominant ideologies, her espoused feminist principles co-opted in a project of consolidating the power of marriage culture.[10]

I cannot argue that my role as the Other Woman did not work in exactly these conservative ways, but I can say that in addition to this function, it also worked as a critique of marriage and as an exertion of my will to extricate myself from marriage culture. It was both these things—conservative and progressive, antimarriage and accommodated by marriage. Like most texts, this act of adultery was shot through with contradiction. But I do not want to lose the "contra" part of this contradiction; the against-ness, the critique inherent in it. The affair may not be all euphoria and transformation, but it represents a utopian longing for something other than what we had, or what our culture promoted.[11]

Works Cited

Chancer, Lynn. Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Frye, Marilyn. "On Being White: Thinking toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy." In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983.

Gallop, Jane. Living with His Camera. Durham: Duke, 2003.

Jenkins, Henry, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds. Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Kipnis, Laura. "Adultery." Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998).

Reiner, Rob. When Harry Met Sally . . .. Castlerock Entertainment, 1989.

Richardson, Laurel. The New Other Woman: Contemporary Single Women in Affairs with Married Men. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Segal, Lynne. Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. London: Virago, 1994.

Sexton, Anne. Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

Shrage, Laurie. Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion. Thinking Gender series, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Skeggs, Beverly. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. 2nd ed. London: UCL Press, 2000.

VanEvery, Jo. Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a 'Wife'! Feminist Perspectives on the Past and Present series. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Wilkinson, Sue and Celia Kitzinger. Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader. London: Sage Press, 1993.

Works Cited

1. In rejecting "the obviousness of the impropriety" (33) of this act, I find an ally in Laurie Shrage's Moral Dilemmas in Feminism. Shrage writes, "Because of what it implies about the state of a relationship, an adulterous act can cause third parties (spouses, children, friends, and relatives) a great deal of emotional pain. . . . But within this same context, acts of adultery can imply a need for, as well as the possibility of achieving, greater personal freedom and fulfillment. Which consequences should be given greater weight" (48)? This is an important question. The knee-jerk reaction of indignance on behalf of the wife strikes me as ethically problematic for feminists. Readers inclined to support the wife's position within marriage find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of defending an institution widely criticized by feminists, lending weight to the cultural legitimacy of state-regulated female sexuality (wifehood) and further marginalizing the Other Woman who has not been accorded any equivalent social status. The wife is being victimized only if we accept that the continuation of her marriage should be a communally supported priority. Furthermore, Shrage provides a series of scenarios that illustrate the importance of considering multiple perspectives on the moral dilemma of adultery:

How, for example, might differently situated and positioned agents assess the consequences of adultery? If Carol Gilligan is right and women tend to be concerned with maintaining relationships in resolving moral problems, then women are likely to see the consequences of adultery in terms of its effects on the romantic and familial relationships involved. If men are socialized to take a more atomistic approach to morality, then they may be likely to see the effects of adultery in terms of the personal freedoms and pleasures gained and lost. Those with particular ideals of religious worship may see the effects of adultery in terms of their relationship with God, or in terms of their spiritual development. And persons with a stigmatized minority sexual orientation, and who see the sexual and marital practices of American society as oppressively restrictive, might see mass acts of adultery and casual sex as effecting a destabilization of hegemonic social institutions. And given that these different ways of seeing structure social reality itself, the same activities will not only appear to have, but will actually have different consequences for different agents (50, my emphasis).

While Shrage's "ifs" are big "ifs" (considering widespread criticism of Gilligan's theory as essentialist), her point that the meaning of adultery is contingent on one's position within the social grid and that adultery can in certain contexts be recognized as a politically destabilizing force resonates with my own experience as a single woman, feminist, and adulterer. [Return to text]

2. Feminism can sometimes flatten out the complexity of a situation by insisting on a radical systemic critique instead of noticing the nuanced negotiations of power in women's lives. In the study of popular culture, John Fiske differentiates between radical and progressive politics, asserting that Marxist and feminist cultural critiques too often disregard or denigrate progressive politics but that both forms of oppositional work are necessary to social change. Whereas radicalism focuses on structural critiques in order to change the system that distributes power, progressive politics "is concerned with redistributing power within these structures toward the disempowered; it attempts to enlarge the space within which bottom-up power has to operate" (56). Of particular relevance to my project of respecting the Other Woman as social agent, Fiske warns against heavy-handed applications of radical theory, in which the everyday resistances and negotiations of women with the conditions of their lives are devalued (in favor of positioning women as victims based on structural analysis). Fiske warns against the logical fallacy of equating an absence of radical critique with the presence of reactionary gender politics. In between these poles, much of our lived experience as feminists unfolds. [Return to text]

3. The idea of an alternative heterosexuality diverges from separatist feminist beliefs that all heterosexuality is inherently unequal, asserting instead that there can in fact be heterosexuality without sexism (hierarchies that privilege men over women inside hetero couples) and without heterosexism (hierarchies that position heterosexuality as the cultural norm while marginalizing bi, trans, queer, celibate, and poly communities). See Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger's Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader. While there is of course a range of options besides adultery for creating alternative heterosexualities (open marriages, swinging, sex clubs, etc.), I see no reason to exclude adultery from this list on the basis of moral distinctions between more and less politically correct arrangements. It is perhaps the least radical but also the most immediately available option for many people (especially here in the rural Bible Belt South). [Return to text]

4. Feminist sociologist Laurel Richardson worked in a similar vein nearly 20 years ago in The New Other Woman: "Just as women's sexuality, generally, has been ignored until quite recently, so have the sexual life and experiences of the Other Woman: We know virtually nothing about them" (35). Richardson writes of women who find married men to be comfortable partners because it allows them to build careers and have free time in ways that husbands would not permit. But the interviews with these women show that even when they went into affairs with these desires for some other kind of womanhood, more work-centered and independent, they still became emotionally involved and ended up feeling used, exploited, and mistreated, their time sucked up by waiting for him to call, making themselves available, working around his married life for time together. Sadly, she concludes, "The 'deviant' world of the single woman and the married man is not so deviant after all. Being a part of that world supports, at the personal level, the perpetuation of the social and cultural bulwarks of male privilege" (153). Richardson goes from this point to her conclusion that Other Women are actually supporting the status quo, but she does not consider the ways her data could be used to question marriage as a problematic structure that is not serving husbands or wives well. While Richardson's study makes important headway in understanding the choice to become an Other Woman, I find that her conclusions inadvertently accept the status quo of hegemonic heterosexuality. [Return to text]

5. My own experience as a wife informs this analysis of adultery, possession, stigma, and status. I am working on a longer version of this article, co-authored with Kate Frank, that develops a connection between sexual experimentation and the cultural phenomenon we have called "fear of wifing" (with a nod to Erica Jong). Much of what could be read in this essay as my aggression toward a particular wife is, as the longer article demonstrates, actually directed at the naïve and embarrassed part of myself that once was a wife and might still consider being one, the part of me that has bought into cultural myths of marriage as the epitome of female fulfillment and maturity. [Return to text]

6. This term appears in an outline of the debate over Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque (Stallybrass and White 19). Carnival, as a metaphor of socially disruptive play and excess, the pursuit of pleasure and the resistance to policing, is described "as having a persistent demystifying potential" (18). It is in this sense that wearing the wedding ring struck me as progressive, demystifying much of the marriage mystique it would signify on a wife's hand. It commemorated "a moment when those being moved in accordance to a cultural script were liberated from normative demands" (18). Yet carnival is subject to criticism for "its failure to do away with the official dominant culture, its licensed complicity" (19), a point to which I return in my conclusion. [Return to text]

7. Alice Echols writes, "And, in demanding 'respect,' rather than challenging the terms upon which women are granted 'respect,' cultural feminists reinforce the distinction between the virgin and the whore," and further, "'respect' is merely the flipside of violation" (Vance 64). Beverly Skeggs also makes important connections between the discourse of respectability and the intersection of gender and class in the production of femininity; respectability drapes economic markers (such as the wedding ring in my discussion) in the modest if disingenuous garb of morality. [Return to text]

8. Eve Sedgwick's analysis of homoerotic dynamics underlies this point. [Return to text]

9. In Heterosexual Women Changing the Family: Refusing to be a 'Wife'!, Jo VanEvery interviews a wide range of women practicing alternative forms of heterosexuality, but her study reveals a pattern in which participants often hold "the idea that it is possible to control the meaning and practice of one's own marriage" but soon develop "some recognition, usually gained through experience, that this [control] was limited" because "external factors influenced [the marriage's] meaning and character" (21). [Return to text]

10. The subsection title, "The End of the (Af)fair," connects the adulterous love affair with the history of fairs as sites of social transgression. I am drawing here again on debates in cultural studies over the carnivalesque and the problem of complicity, also picked up in John Fiske's analysis of television culture. Stallybrass and White outline the criticism of carnival as a form of resistance that has no politically transformative effects; the carnival is a "licensed release" that ultimately "serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes" (13). "The carnival spirit," they quote one historian as arguing, "could therefore be a vehicle for social protest and the method for disciplining that protest" (13). This debate mirrors the structure-agency debate in feminism and has been resolved in much the same way, with a commitment to recognizing that "in some contexts, carnival can work to strengthen the social order, but in others, particularly in times of social tension, its effects can be much more disruptive" (Fiske 100). Fiske writes

[I]t can be argued that progressive practices are panaceas allowed by the system to be flexible and to contain points of opposition within it. By allowing the system to be flexible and to contain points of opposition within it, such progressive practices actually strengthen that to which they are opposed, and thus delay the radical change that is the only one that can bring about a genuine improvement in social conditions. . . . Its problem is that it can so easily lead to a pessimistic reductionism that sees all signs of popular progress or pleasure as totalitarian and resistible only by direct radical or revolutionary action. . . . [T]he theoretical focus needs to shift from the structural process to the socially located practice. The emphasis on incorporation may well be theoretically tenable, but it is politically sterile because, in the current and foreseeable conditions of capitalist societies, it offers no hope of being able to mobilize the popular support necessary for such radical social change. . . . Against this is the argument that what is called 'incorporation' is better understood as a defensive strategy forced upon the powerful by the guerrilla raids of the weak. Incorporation always involves giving up some ground, the concession of space; such a continued erosive process may well provide changes in the system that allow significant improvements in the condition of the subordinate (192).

Fiske has been charged with "substitut[ing] the politically conscious and savvy resister of dominant ideology as the typical user of popular culture" (Shattuc et al. 38); I can imagine a parallel charge against my essay for imagining all Other Women as politically conscious and savvy resisters of marriage culture, but I hope I have refrained from generalizing about Other Women based on my own experience, or even overestimating the savviness of my own actions. [Return to text]

11. I owe this point to Laura Kipnis, who borrows terminology from Marxist theory to analyze adultery as a gesture that represents discontent with the status quo of work (both the work ethic in business and the labor of love in which we work on relationships):

What if adultery . . . were construed as a mode of experimentation? Consider that without a proper place (the home), or institutional sanctions (the marital contract), it too relies on improvisation and invention; poaching from established spaces; haphazardly borrowing, rejecting, or inverting its conventions on an ad hoc basis. Like previous bricoleurs and collage artists, it produces new forms out of detritus and leftovers; a few scraps of time, some unused emotions are stuck together to create a new, unforeseen thing. . . . [A]dultery does, in effect, materially rearrange the most fundamental geometry of social reproduction, the couple form . . ."

Adultery, in her analysis, marks resistance to the ethos of renunciation she sees as central to civilized society: "My point is that what is so ordinary and accepted as to go quite unnoticed in all of this is simply that toxic levels of everyday unhappiness or grinding boredom are the functional norm in many lives and marriages; that adultery, in some fumbling way, seeks to palliate this . . ." Kipnis concludes, "Adultery doesn't necessarily present you with models of utopian worlds; instead the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies . . ." She believes we must harness this utopian longing in the service of material social change. [Return to text]