Maybe I'm naive, maybe it's not just a power thing, maybe all the Joe Sixpacks in Kansas do have babes on the side. Such responses suggest that my friends spray the bushes just like Clinton, Gingrich and most rodents, but with a self-awareness that breeds restraint. Most of the gay men surveyed said they would take the drug if their partner did too. Several respondents suggested that the loss of desire would ripple far beyond the romantic dyad. Both these men maintained that insecurity and competition animates romance as well as other achievement, but neither advocated open marriage to foster this.
Happiness is 'always already' relative, even for the naturally sanguine.
Thus we endure our contentment as well as our pangs of lack. Fantasy, trust and the struggle to stay faithful make a bracing cocktail that these husbands would not want to dilute. But my married friends' e-mails cheered me up considerably. These guys suggest that sexual denial can be rich and conscious and paradox-embracing, not just Puritanical repression or blind submission to a social more. Virginia Vitzthum's column appears in Urge every other Tuesday.