| 19
November 2002
The color of male infidelity
MAYBE it's midlife, the way my friends
and I seem to be talking a lot, lately, about the infidelities in our
lives, how they hit you, and how one might try to cope with the
catastrophes.
It's not a Filipino thing, considering much of the infidelity talk has
been coming not only from Filipino friends but also from Americans,
British, Dutch, our exchanges over e-mail or face to face when we run
into each other in conferences, over breakfast or unhappy happy hours.
Maybe the cliche's right about misery loving company and let's all feel
better by feeling worse together. Translation of all that psycho-babble:
Don't you feel better when you hear someone describing how she refers to
the third party with a stream of invectives and two other women going,
"Uy, that's exactly how I call her (or, lately, him) too."
We're raised to be kind, to be "Christian" (I avoided the term
deliberately because there's chauvinism in thinking only Christians can
be kind), but let's face it, there are times when being kind can be
unhealthy. The studies show that the guys with explosive tempers live on
forever, while the "mabait" (kind) are driven to the grave
early, carrying with them all the pent-up resentment.
Fortunately in this day and age, many women aren't about to play the
martyr role. I'm amazed at how several of my friends can spit out their
scorn and vitriol rather graphically: "I whacked him 'there' and
asked him how he could put his 'it' in her; he could put it in me."
What's so perplexing though is the inability of men to understand all
this, many reacting to their wives' or girlfriends' (or boyfriends')
tears: "But there was nothing in that relationship. It was a fling.
It's you I love. You're still my No. 1."
Men can't seem to get it into their scrotally based brains that
statements like that worsen matters. Suddenly, love and intimacy are
transformed into feelings of defilement and violation. And yes, there
are proprietary notions too. Many partners do feel, appropriately I
think, that your "it" is my "it" and you have no
business going into time-sharing it. Meaning I don't want to be your No.
1. I have to be your one and only.
Then there's the pain from the fallout, which, like those in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, seems to go on for decades. Months after a partner
confesses to infidelity, there will be little revelations, little
discoveries of unconfessed deceit. A few months after her partner had
confessed to infidelity, one of my women friends happened to stumble on
an old cell-phone bill and, working on a hunch combined with dread,
reviewed the itemized calls and realized that there was a whole week
when her partner had been calling her, describing durian and Davao's
many wonders when in fact, as the cell-phone bill now revealed, he was
in Manila.
I think the most depressing stories around male infidelity are the
accounts about finding out, which are usually long-winded stories about
grappling with suspicions over several months, even years, the many late
office meetings and cellular-phone text messages beeping away. Others
talk about how the suspicions built up as they sense changes in their
partners' bodies, especially in the more intimate moments, what with the
awkwardness and distance that come with guilt.
Even more poignant are the stories from those who had no suspicions of
any kind about their partners until one day, there's a moment, literally
a moment, when they know with all the certainty in the world. One friend
tells me how she had been biking in the park one day with her husband,
and passed a woman, also on a bike. In one fleeting moment, she had
caught the facial reactions on her husband's face, and that of the woman
and, like thunder striking down Saint Paul, she knew she had uncovered
an extramarital affair.
All the talk about knowing takes a therapeutic turn as people share
their detection secrets. Filipinos seem to have the largest arsenal for
this difficult task, many of which, Filipino-style, center on smelling.
Clothes are often a give-away, reeking of perfume, or smoke, beer, or
all of the above. Others literally sniff for the body of evidence, alarm
signals flying up if the mister smells too good, too fragrant, which
means he showered, probably with someone, or, as the imagination runs
wild, with several someones.
Maybe we're being too low-tech here. A BBC news dispatch just in reports
that (where else but in Japan?) new inventions are available to boost
sexual forensics. There's "S-check," an aerosol you spray on
your partner's underwear when he stumbles home. If there are
"S" stains, the spray reacts to produce an accusing green
color. The catch here is the 350 dollars for a set of two cans.
Another product -- price not given -- has been dubbed the
"infidelity detective cream." You say goodbye to honey in the
morning, discreetly rubbing the cream on his back. If he dares shower
during the day, presumably after some tryst, the gel reacts with the
water to create a telltale and, I hope, excruciatingly stinging blister.
Alternatively, the manufacturers say, you can rub it on his socks. If he
has it off for more than 15 minutes, there's a chemical reaction that
turns the socks' color, again into a shocking green.
A British forensics expert interviewed about the products jokes by
asking what happens if the wretched bloke goes off to the gym, where he
has to take the socks off and shower. A friend of mine protests,
"What if I take a siesta in the afternoon?" Which takes me to
Lesson 63 from all this: Men will never run out of alibis, grinning
greenly all the way to hell and back.
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