The Truth. Neil Strauss

or even a hooker, just so I can remember what it feels like to have my dick sucked?

      “So what do they expect?” Exasperation pushes the words out of me with unexpected force. “It’s just common sense. If your partner hasn’t had sex with you for a year, you should be allowed to get it elsewhere without having to throw away your entire relationship.”

      “Sex isn’t something you’re entitled to just because you want it,” Charles admonishes me. “Pretending like this is common sense and natural is a form of denial. If you want any hope of overcoming this, you have to recognize and intervene on your distorted thinking. When I see another woman, for example, I just tell myself, Bright red apple, wrong orchard.”

      As the guys laugh over Charles’s orchard, I’m overwhelmed by a crushing anxiety. A vision forms in my head before I can stop it. I grab my notebook and sketch it for the guys. They gather around to look:

       THE MALE DILEMMA

      1. Sex is great.

      2. Relationships are great.

      3. Relationships grow over time.

      4. The sex gets old over time.

      5. So does she.

      6. Thus the problem.

      It’s a horrible thing to write or even think. No one could ever say this in regular society. They’d be destroyed for it. But it seems to be the reason most of these middle-aged guys are here. “That just about sums it up,” Adam says sadly.

      Troy shakes his head resolutely. “You wanna hear something tragic? I was still having sex with my wife four times a week when I started my affair.”

      “And that’s the problem with what Joan’s been telling us.” Calvin flashes a big, guilty grin. “Sex isn’t always about intimacy. Sometimes you just want some dirty sex.”

      Charles jumps out of his seat and announces, “This is not good for my recovery.” He grabs his tray and walks away, looking for another table without women.

      The counselor supervising the anorexics turns around and scowls at us, so we take it down to a whisper. We’re rehab insurgents plotting a revolution. “Wanting variety is natural,” Troy says quietly as the guys lean in. “Look at porn: Guys don’t watch the same girl every time.”

      I think about one of the books the attendant confiscated when I checked in: James Joyce’s Ulysses. The main character is an advertising salesman with a gorgeous wife at home. And he wanders around Dublin, worried that she’s cheating while he gawks at and fantasizes about women of all ages, shapes, and sizes. At one point he starts wondering what his problem is, until he concludes very simply, “The new I want.”

      Santa Claus looks up from his food and speaks for the first time today, acknowledging morosely, “That’s why I kept going to Tijuana. You could walk around a club with sixty women and have any one of them. And the things they could do …” Then he drops his head again.

      “You know who the best girlfriend would be?” Calvin interjects, his eyes lit up as if he’s just had the perfect picnic. “That mutant from X-Men who can turn into anyone she wants. I’d never get bored of her! You could have sex with Megan Fox one night and Hillary Clinton the next.”

      “Hillary Clinton?!” Troy asks for all of us.

      “Why not? Just for the experience,” Calvin says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

      None of us has.

      I’m intoxicated by the discussion. But in the back of my mind, I wonder: Are we a bunch of junkies in denial—addicts bonding over our favorite drug—or is this just a natural by-product of high testosterone? In a book on evolution I once read, the writer cited research claiming that gay women have fewer than ten partners on average in their lifetimes whereas gay men have more than a hundred. So I ask Paul about it.

      “I’ve been with over a thousand guys,” he confirms. His voice is raspy and gruff, and he has the permanent look of someone who’s had a rough night partying. “But it’s different in our world, because everyone wants to have casual sex. So, literally, guys would come over to my place and instead of hooking up, they’d go online and invite more people. I’d have a dozen guys fucking each other in my living room sometimes.”

      “I once interviewed a woman who was going through a sex change to become a man,” I tell him. “And she told me that as soon as the testosterone therapy kicked in, she suddenly understood men, because she wanted to fuck everything that moved.”

      “Imagine if women were wired like men,” Calvin says dreamily.

      “It would be sexual pandemonium,” Troy replies with a big smile.

      I ask them the ultimate question: “So if your wife allowed you to sleep with other women, would you allow her to sleep with other men?”

      And much to my surprise, every guy except Adam says yes. “I wouldn’t like it, but I guess I’d have to suck it up,” Troy says.

      Adam appears uncomfortable. We may have gone too far for him. Unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t yearn for casual sex or variety; he just wants the love and passion his marriage is lacking. “Here’s the thing you’re all missing,” he says, laying his huge hands on the table. “We’re not here because we had sex. We’re here because we lied, because we wanted sex so badly that we violated our own moral values.”

      He has a great point. No one is actually here for promiscuity. They’re here solely for cheating. Except for Calvin, of course, and for Paul, who came to get off crystal meth but was placed in our group when he mentioned sex parties in his intake interview. “You’re right,” I tell Adam. “If we were single and behaved exactly the same, we wouldn’t be here. It wouldn’t be considered an addiction. If the rule was that you’re not allowed to eat sushi once you’re married, we’d all be here as sushi addicts.”

      “So maybe the answer to your male dilemma is that you sacrifice,” Adam replies. “You tough it out and stand beside your wife, for better or worse, as a choice that you’re led to by faith in your family and God.”

      “But why should you have to make that sacrifice?” I ask. “A relationship should be about what you both want, not about what you both don’t want each other to have. There must be some way in which we can have freedom and our partners can have security—or we can all have both freedom and security.”

      Troy points a long finger at me. “See, that’s the kind of thinking they want to stop here.” He stretches an arm along the back of Charles’s vacant chair. “The problem with therapy is that they try to normalize everyone and keep them in the middle of the road. But if you do that to a society, there’s no innovation. Nothing new is created. You need that one caveman who said, ‘We can’t just keep waiting for lightning to strike every time we need fire. We have to make fire ourselves.’ They probably thought he was crazy, rubbing rocks and sticks together. Today they’d diagnose him as obsessive-compulsive. But then he gave them fire, and all of a sudden everyone was doing it. You can’t get anywhere as a civilization without that kind of original thinking and focus. It’s people with compulsive behaviors who change the world.”

      As Calvin fist-bumps Troy, I wonder if maybe life has led me here not to cure my supposed sex addiction, but to take on a mission for the betterment of my peers and the world: to redesign relationships so that the needs of both sexes can be met. Because they don’t seem to be working as it is.

      Chicago, Twenty-Eight Years Earlier

      Sigh. You’re the only one I can talk to around here.

      What about your friends?

      I can’t trust them.

      Not even Denise?

      She’s the worst of all. Never tell