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Is It OK to Have a Fling Just Once?
And do you have to tell your romantic partner if you do?
Imagine you’ve been married a long time (or maybe you actually are). You haven’t been with many — or perhaps any — sexual partners before you wed and suddenly at midlife, decades into your relationship, you realize you’d like to have sex with someone else. You’re not interested in opening up your marriage or having an affair — you just want to experience sex with someone other than your spouse one time.
What should you do?
That’s a question that was presented to the New York Times’ ethicist a bit ago.
A happily married woman who’d only been with two men before she met and married her husband, to whom she says she’s been faithful (he has not but she has forgiven him) finds herself with a raging sex drive at midlife (yes, this happens to middle-aged women, no matter what the narratives say about menopausal and post-menopausal women) and wants to scratch that itch before she gets too old or dies, she tells The Ethicist. And she has a plan:
“This man would have to be someone I don’t know and will never see again. I have researched a plan as follows: 1) Fly to a major coastal city; 2) Hire an escort from a reputable service and have sex with him in a nice hotel; 3) Fly home and get an S.T.I…
