Sex and self-esteem

A couple of days ago I wrote about my confusion over what Wife wants from her multiple affairs, and I speculated that maybe even she doesn't know what she wants. I mean, she claims to consider it just a normal part of who she is at this point: ever since I first found an article about polyamory and brought it home, she has claimed the term as a ... well, I almost want to say "badge of honor" but I suppose I have to add that it only counts as that in a very select group.

But part of what makes this so confusing is that there seems to be a part of Wife's mind that is repelled by her own sexuality. She can't even be a pure polyamorist, because she is in some ways so conflicted about sex.

So at this point I have to wonder: What must it feel like inside: ...

• if (on the one hand) you have had multiple lovers and expect to have more in the future, and if you consider this plenitude not to be some kind of bizarre biographical accident but rather to be a fundamental part of Who You Are;
• and yet if (on the other hand) you are also profoundly embarrassed by your own sexual desires, so that you can't talk about them and and hate to admit to them in front of anybody whose esteem matters to you ... i.e., anybody whom you think at all well of?

I guess that this would be a very tough spot to be in. But I suppose, at a theoretical level, that there would be at least two consequences.

• If you feel embarrased by sex and yet feel driven to have a lot of it with different partners, I think that would have to mean that you feel embarrassed by Being You. Another way to say this is that I suppose you would have to feel a chronic, gnawing insecurity about Who You Are -- a deep-seated belief that the Real You is somehow never good enough.
• If you feel embarrased by sex then you won't want to admit to strong sexual needs in front of anybody you think well of ... because it will matter to you that those people respect you, and you will assume that there is no way they could respect you if they only knew what dark desires lurk under your surface persona. But obviously you have to admit to sexual needs to the people whom you actually fuck. Therefore, logically, you are left with no choice but to fuck people whom you do not admire or respect.

All this is hypothetical. But it is interesting to note that both conclusions seem to be true about Wife. On the one hand, she has a pathetically weak sense of self-esteem. And on the other hand, she only falls in love with losers or weaklings.

Let's start with self-esteem.

I am not the first person to note a correlation between poor self-esteem and infidelity. I didn't even come up with the idea independently -- I read it somewhere. (I forget where I first saw it, but you can find a reference by following this link.) All I have done is to try to analyze this idea in the case of Wife, in particular, to see if it fits. Ironically, nobody who has just met Wife for the first time would ever guess that she has low self-esteem, because she usually comes across as so condescending and arrogant. But I have come to believe that this seeming arrogance is meant merely as a defense against feelings of inferiority. Two examples:

• Wife believes firmly that she is ugly. There's no point trying to argue this with facts; she has had "body issues" for something like the last four decades, and she runs down her own appearance routinely as if it were some basic requirement of polite conversation. Nor does this appear to be part of some strategy to elicit compliments from others. The other morning she was sitting on our bed wearing nothing but a skimpy nightie, and I told her how genuinely attractive I find her ... still, after all the years we have been married. Her response was to curl up in a ball in fetal position and beg me to stop saying it.
• Wife is always comparing other people's intelligence (unfavorably) with her own, but she is gnawingly disappointed in her own achievement. She got a perfectly respectable B.A. from a fine undergraduate college, but she never finished graduate school. To this day, she alternately claims degrees she was never awarded and insists that I must look down on her for not completing a professional degree. (Since she has more years of graduate school than I do, I really don't think I treat her in a way that would justify this belief to the average person.)

For what it is worth, the cripplingly low self-esteem seems to be something she shares with both sisters, and with her mother. Naturally I don't know their complete sexual histories, so I can't tell if the correlation between low self-esteem and high infidelity holds true for all three. But one sister is on her fifth husband; the other was on her third several years ago, when we lost track of her. Wife's mother always claimed to have had three husbands, except that a few years ago she told us there was a fourth -- before any of the others -- with whom she eloped to Mexico so there was no legal record. Oh, and this fourth fellow was the real father of her first child, who had always been called the child of her first [acknowledged] husband. And did I mention that neither Wife nor her younger sister look anything like any of her mother's husbands, but they both look a lot like a good friend who hung around the house for many years? Or that she met each husband in sequence while still married to the previous one? These facts could all be isolated coincidences; certainly they prove nothing in a logical or even legal sense. But they are interesting.

What about falling in love with losers and weaklings?

Well, let's work our way backwards from the present.

• Boyfriend 5 is a terrorist (or rather a family of terrorists). Are they successful? They have to hide indoors whenever a police patrol cruises through town. The only jobs they can hold are doing administrative work for their organization. One of the three of them is a drug addict. I'm not sure there's a lot more I need to add.
• Boyfriend 4 is a chronically unemployed alcoholic. Nice guy, though.
• Boyfriend 3 was already on his third marriage (and probably his hundredth affair) when he frst met Wife. Neither of his two former wives will speak to him any more, and he is estranged from the children they bore him. His current children don't respect him and have trouble staying disciplined in school.
• Boyfriend 2 has never held a regular job in his life. The woman who bore his child lives in another city, and the child will grudgingly speak to her father by phone once a year -- on Father's Day.
• Girlfriend 1 was probably the only one of the lot worth more than the powder to blow her to Hell -- she was smart, organized, and ambitious -- and she was the one (ultimately) to abandon Wife. When Wife has tried to contact her since then via e-mail, Girlfriend 1 has never responded. But at the time they first became involved, Girlfriend 1 was only 18 and Wife was an adult and a professional; so there was still a clear power differential.
• Boyfriend 1? Gosh, that's reaching way back. He had a job and he wasn't chemically dependent, so that means he wasn't quite as bad a loser as any of Wife's other boyfriends since. But he was chronically irresolute: simple decisions between vanilla and chocolate were major life crises for him. His irresolution also seemed to manifest itself (from what I was told second-hand) in a disconcerting tendency to lose his erections in bed, with no ejaculation and no other warning. Wife complained to me more than once that one of the frustrating things about fucking Boyfriend 1 was the risk of "having the car engine die in the middle of an intersection."

On the whole, I guess I find it remarkable that the results are so consistent. As near as I can tell, every single one of Wife's affairs in the last decade (and almost every affair since our marriage) has been with a weakling or a loser. Of course, maybe there have been others I don't know about.

When I first noticed this pattern, my thought was that Wife was trying to cope with her own feelings of inferiority by surrounding herself with people, as Monty Python once put it, "whom almost anyone can look down on." But that didn't explain the sex. I guess nobody wants to have sex with the Village Idiot. I am more satisfied with the idea I propose above: that it is only to such people that Wife can dare to admit her own sexual cravings, because it's not like they have any grounds to give themselves airs or think they are better than she is.

And if that is true, it is really, really sad. I wish I knew an easy cure, and that Wife had any interest in being cured.