Today on Your Tango, some busy business man makes excuses for his strip club addiction, telling us that it "helps" his marriage.
His other reasons are equally unbelieveable...
Let's be clear: if your man plies his trade taking client abuse or has ever attended a conference that finds him in a hotel banquet hall for 12 hours of Powerpoint torture, you can assume your honey has blown off steam, at least once, by contributing to some gal's plastic surgery fund, one crumpled bill at a time.
I am the garden-variety business-traveling strip club patron, for whom a lap dance with a client is like a harmless game of golf. You tuck a dollar bill or five or 20 inside a G-string, sit back for an innocent bump n' grind, have a few laughs with associates over the thundering drums of a Motley Crue song, wonder where your money went as you comb the sticky carpet looking for stray bills around your seat, and leave the joint lighter of both heart and wallet.
My wife knows she has absolutely nothing to worry about, and neither do most women. She knows I would not blow her trust by paying a scantily clad woman $500 to take my pasty, fat married ass into some back room for an hour. No good can come of that. Plus I'm too lazy to bulldoze my tracks and too cheap to burn a good Brooks Brothers shirt when perfume and glitter won't come out of the fabric.
Now, that's not a wholesale guarantee of good male behavior, and I don't pretend to represent mankind as a whole. My wife and I have been married for 16 years; the drama quotient is remarkably low, the passion remarkably hot and we've never needed any chemical or psychological intermediaries to keep it that way.
"You can take care of yourself to your heart's content in a hotel room, but you best not bring that filth into my bedroom," declared one of my wife's friends when I intentionally brought up the subject of shaker bars at our holiday party. Interestingly, she said this to no one in particular at maximum volume, avoiding the repentant gaze of her husband. From my vantage point, it looked like the mini-qiuiche he was swallowing suddenly turned to broken glass.
Do I bring my stripper-induced sensory overload into the bedroom? You bet I do! My wife and I have known one another since college, and over the years we have achieved the perfect blend of familiarity and mystery by sharing fantasies without breaking trust. Though she doesn't bring a director and makeup trailer to bed, I'm sure that some nights after a Mad Men episode I am her Jon HammSex is not only about love, but about play as well, and if she closes her eyes once in a while to pretend she is riding someone's see-saw, that's OK by me. understudy.
After years of monogamy and two kids, sexuality is not the stuff of romance novels. It's not that easy and never that clean. Some men fish off the company pier.
But not this dude. He just finds that jizzing in his pants at a strip joint is better than masturbation and/or just waiting till the damn business trip is over. Does anyone else out there care or are strip clubs too harmless to worry about in a relationship?
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