On a Scale of One to Ten

I was twenty-one years old the first time I traveled for work. At the time, I was working for an insurance agency, and the trip felt impossibly grown-up to me. I was young, newly separated from Rafael, and still reeling from the discovery of his infidelities. I had a two-year-old daughter at home, and I was still deciding whether my marriage could be repaired while also trying very hard to be taken seriously in a corporate world where I already felt so young and out of place.

I was very protective of my age back then. Being twenty-one wasn’t information I freely volunteered, especially in professional circles. I was already self-conscious about being a young mother, and I didn’t want clients or colleagues deciding I was inexperienced before I ever opened my mouth. So I let people assume I was older. I intentionally dressed older. I wore pantyhose and pearls. I wore expensive and impractical heels. I wanted very badly to feel like a respectable “adult.”

So when my boss sent me to Raleigh for a conference on trucking risk management, I was thrilled. I had pictured a room full of enormous, burly truckers, but honestly, it was mostly a room full of insurance nerds.

I took my seat in the classroom-style meeting hall, and a handsome man sat down beside me.

“Do you want to see something beautiful?” he asked.

I mean, how does someone say no to an opening question like that?

He pulled out a photograph. In it were three smiling faces: his beautiful wife and their two young children, a boy and a girl, both with freckles and one with missing front teeth.

That was my introduction to Peter.

Peter owned an insurance agency just outside Hartford. He was somewhere between forty-five and fifty, although I intentionally never asked his exact age.

What I remember most clearly was how he talked about his wife.

Denise was beautiful. She ran a successful advertising agency that was taking off, getting magazine attention and becoming something substantial in its own right. And Peter absolutely adored and admired her.

He didn’t talk about her like the obligatory wife waiting at home. He bragged about her. He praised her talent. He respected her career. He talked about their kids with obvious affection. There was never any hint that his marriage was unhappy or lacking in affection.

His affection for her activated a mild sense of warm envy and appreciation in me. You see, I had just discovered that Rafael had been unfaithful. I was a young mother trying to make sense of what his indiscretions said about our marriage and what they said about me.

Had I not been desirable enough? Had I failed in my wifely duties in some way?

Peter’s presence felt safe precisely because he loved his wife so openly. Had he complained about her or given me even the slightest sense that he was prowling for an affair, I honestly don’t think I would have spent so much time with him.

But he didn’t do any of those things.

He was simply affable and charming. I mean, he was an insurance agent, after all. Schmoozing was practically a professional credential.

Over the next few days, Peter became my emotional support human in this scary new world. This was my first business trip, and even though I was excited to be there, I also felt deeply out of my element. There were classes, dinners, drinks, networking events…and a lot of small talk with strangers.

Peter gave me somewhere safe to land. We sat together. We traded jokes. We mildly flirted in a way that didn’t seem particularly consequential.

One night, our group went to the Angus Barn, which apparently was one of those places you were supposed to visit whenever you were in Raleigh. There was a very animated British man at dinner who had been drinking and talking enthusiastically with his hands.

Unfortunately, one of those hands was holding an enormous steak knife.

The person sitting next to him spent half the conversation ducking and weaving while Peter and I sat beside each other trying desperately not to laugh at the scene.

There was a lot of wine that night.

Later, back at the hotel, there was some pretense involving my feet hurting from wearing heels all weekend and Peter offering me a foot massage.

Even while walking to his room, I don’t remember believing anything was actually going to happen. I certainly had never imagined myself as someone who would hook up with a married man on a business trip.

But hook up we did.

I honestly don’t remember many details about the sex itself. It was over twenty years ago, and I was quite buzzed.

What I do remember is the morning after. We both acknowledged a shared sense of guilt.

But maybe not nearly as much guilt as there should have been?

What surprised me was that being with Peter had somehow offered me comfort around the very thing that had devastated me in my own marriage.

Peter had slept with me.

And he still loved his wife.

He had never needed to characterize Denise as ugly, cold, inadequate, sexually unavailable, controlling, or otherwise deficient in any way in order to desire me.

I wasn’t replacing her. I wasn’t winning. She wasn’t losing.

Whatever happened between Peter and me seemed to exist alongside his love for her rather than in opposition to it.

At twenty-one, while still trying to understand Rafael’s betrayal, that distinction felt enormous.

Maybe his affairs weren’t proof that I had been insufficient. Maybe another person’s desire didn’t automatically mean that the person waiting at home was a failure. Maybe infidelity could be about something more complicated than one woman being better than the other.

Peter and I parted ways after the conference warmly but without any plans to stay in touch. We didn’t even exchange contact information. The conference had distributed a sheet with everyone’s details, so technically we already had them.

I went home. I went back to work. I went back to trying to decide if my marriage could be salvaged.

Then, about a week later, an enormous bouquet arrived at the office.

It was gorgeous. There was a giant bird of paradise sticking dramatically out of it.

On the card it said: On a scale of one to ten, you’re an eleven.

Naturally, I called him to say thank you. This was before texting, before social media, before having someone casually available in your pocket all day.

So every now and then, Peter would call on his way into work or on his drive home. We would talk. He’d tell me about what the kids were getting up to, his business, Denise, and whatever else was going on in his life. I told him about mine.

Nothing about it felt dangerous to me.

My best friend knew about him…although she strongly and loudly did not approve. And I understood why...but somehow, he still felt safe.

A few months later, he mentioned that he’d be attending another conference in Dallas. Then he floated an absurd idea: Why don’t I meet him there?

So I did.

And for roughly the next year or so, that became our pattern. We might talk once or twice a week. Every few months, we’d meet in some random city. I had a habit of traveling with such an absurd number of shoes that they required a separate suitcase. Peter eventually started calling me Carrie Bradshaw, and I wasn’t offended by the comparison.

There was something very reminiscent of the movie Same Time, Next Year about our arrangement, except our meetings weren’t annual and there was no carefully scripted romance to them. We had our ordinary lives, our separate relationships, our responsibilities, and every so often we stepped into this little container that seemed to exist outside all of it.

There was sex, but there was also a deep friendship. There were even conversations in which we told each other that we loved each other.

And still, there were never any promises made between us. He never told me he was going to leave Denise. He never compared us. I never asked him to choose. Our affection simply existed.

As time passed, we saw each other less frequently. I think some part of both of us recognized that continuing indefinitely wasn’t a good idea.

But the friendship remained. He encouraged my career. He mentored me. He gave me references. He treated me like someone worth taking seriously professionally at a time when I badly wanted to be taken seriously.

And for most of the time he knew me, he still didn’t know exactly how young I was. The mystery of my age became something of an ongoing joke between us. He guessed I was twenty-seven, and I never corrected him. I often suspected that if he had known I had only just turned twenty-one when we met, he might have hesitated. I can’t say for certain, but at the time, I liked being perceived as older.

Over the years, I kept him updated on everything going on in my life: my attempts at reconciling my marriage, my other adventures in dating and romance, my work, and eventually, how I fell madly in love with Adam.

Adam knew all about Peter. When we got engaged, I had even planned to invite Peter to the wedding. Why wouldn’t I? He was someone I cared about deeply. Our sexual relationship had long run its course, but our friendship still mattered to me.

Adam saw it differently.

“I cannot have your affair partner at our wedding,” he told me. “It would be an insult to the institution of our marriage.”

Put that way, it sounded different: Affair partner.

Not friend. Not mentor. Not confidant. Not someone who had watched me grow up.

Affair partner.

Adam had much firmer ideas about what counted as appropriate boundaries, and gradually I started looking at Peter through the same lens.

One day, I called him and told him we could no longer be friends. And that was that.

Our relationship had already softened over time. Maybe this was simply closure to its natural ending. But I still felt bad about it. Because whatever else he might have been, he was still a dear friend to me.

Years after Adam and I divorced, another business trip brought me to Boston. By then, I was no longer the twenty-one-year-old trying to convince the insurance industry that I belonged in the room. I had built a solid career. I had grown up.

I reached out to Peter and asked if he’d like to meet for coffee.

We met up, and there was nothing clandestine about it at all. No hotel room. No elaborate reunion. Just two people who had once meant a great deal to each other sitting down for coffee.

And Peter told me something I’ve never forgotten: he said that knowing me had made him a better husband.

When we first met, he and Denise were already more than a decade into their marriage. And it was a solid marriage. They loved each other. But they were both busy. They had children, careers, responsibilities. Life had become routine.

Being with me, he said, made him feel young again. Not because I was replacing Denise. Not because she was lacking anything. But because through my eyes, he got to see himself differently. I admired him. I enjoyed him. I boosted his confidence. I reminded him of parts of himself that had become buried beneath being a husband, father, business owner, mortgage payer, and responsible adult.

And when he went home feeling more alive, he brought some of that aliveness back into his marriage. He was more affectionate. More attentive.

And it wasn’t necessarily based on guilt. It wasn’t compensatory flowers or sex because he felt bad about what he’d done. He simply felt more like himself. And feeling more like himself helped him love his wife more intensely.

We hugged when we left. We wished each other well. And that was enough.

We haven’t kept in touch outside of an occasional birthday message here and there. But I've thought about him fondly over the years.

I’m not proud that I had an affair with a married man. And I wouldn’t make the same choices today.

There’s a big difference between what we did and the consensual nonmonogamy I’ve since come to embrace. Denise never consented. She didn’t get to decide whether she wanted a marriage in which her husband loved or slept with other people. What happened between Peter and me was not polyamory. It was infidelity.

But I also don’t regret anything about the experience.

Peter wasn’t my first experience with nonmonogamy. Over the years, David and I had stumbled through our own version of open relating, long before either of us had solid language for what we were doing. But that openness had felt young and experimental to me.

It was carefree in theory but didn’t feel carefree in practice. I could agree that we were open and still feel threatened when that openness became real.

Peter was different. He didn’t introduce me to the idea that a person could want more than one person. But he validated something much deeper.

Here was a man in an established marriage with a woman he deeply admired. His love for me never seemed to threaten his love for Denise. Being important to me didn’t make his family less important to him.

And he showed me that someone could encounter another person, feel awakened by that relationship, and bring some of that expanded self back into the life they already loved.

Peter also helped me understand that Rafael’s infidelities weren’t a reflection of my worth.

Another woman’s existence didn’t make me a failure as a wife. I wouldn’t understand the full significance of this relationship for many years.

At twenty-one, I certainly wasn’t building a philosophy of nonmonogamy. I was mostly wearing uncomfortable heels and trying to make my way through the world while masking as a grown-up.

But somewhere in that messy, ethically imperfect relationship, something I already sensed became more believable. Love wasn’t as finite as I had been taught. Desire wasn’t as black and white as I’d believed. And intimacy doesn’t always fit neatly into the boxes we build for it.