Mistress Day: the unadulterated reality
Mistress Day is Friday.
It’s a real thing, defined in Wikipedia and in the Urban Dictionary.
If you prefer a more judgmental definition, the New York Post in 2011 defined Mistress Day as “When Pigs Romance Mistresses.”
It’s the day before Valentine’s Day.
The wife gets Valentine’s Day. So mistresses get their day. For flowers. Lunch. And that heartfelt pledge of fidelity.
And with that separate day, the man involved can juggle love and charge-card accounts and not cross any wires. Hopefully.
Mistress Day is Friday the 13th this year.
Some might say that’s unlucky.
As divorce lawyer Kathleen Reeves might say: Be careful out there.
Every town, every day
Emery Goad is a private investigator. Ron Matson is a sociologist. Along with Reeves, they know some of the loony things people do.
All three say that most infidelity starts at the workplace. Two key words to remember, Matson said, are: “Proximity. Opportunity.”
Matson says most extra-marital affairs last longer than one Mistress Day. “Two years is the average.”
Matson says it’s not just about sex. Love lives at the root of much of it. “And love is complicated.”
“I have a friend, married five times now,” Reeves said. “He says he loves falling in love and that it’s marriage he can’t seem to figure out.”
How frequent is infidelity?
“Every motel,” Goad said. “Every hotel. In every town. Every day.
“Go anywhere in town and look in motel parking lots,” Goad said. “You soon figure out where the employees park. So there are these other cars with local plates.”
Mistress Day seems to imply that only married men stray. But Matson, Reeves and Goad suspect women stray nearly as much as men do.
“Ask any male mail carrier,” Goad said. “They’ll tell you.”
Neither snow nor sleet
It actually doesn’t happen on mail routes much, Larry Gunkel said. Twice in 34 years. And he said “no.”
Gunkel carried mail for 34 years and headed the mail carriers union for eight.
He now runs the Kansas Food Bank’s Food4Kids backpack program.
On mail routes, Gunkel saw the same people every day.
“Most mail carriers have stories similar to mine. You carry mail in a neighborhood for years, you see the same people, sometimes you flirt. You have conversations, become part of the community.
“The women in those two times were pretty direct. Blunt about what they wanted. ‘Why don’t you come on in here?’ Or point blank: ‘Why don’t you come by here for a long lunch hour, and join me?’
“People I’d seen on the route for years,” he said.
The U.S. Postal Service has rules. So does Gunkel. He has been married to Denise Gunkel for 25 years.
“The postal service tells you up front that you absolutely don’t have any business ever being in anybody’s home,” he said.
“What I would say was ‘I’m overwhelmed and flattered that you’d ask me to join you. But I don’t want to jeopardize what I have. Or what you have.’ ”
Innovations in infidelity
In the late 1970s, Goad was hired by a spouse to track her husband.
Small GPS devices had not been invented yet. Goad had put a beeper device inside the man’s car and tracked him by following the beeps.
At a gas station at high noon on a weekday, the husband’s car got away from him.
Goad’s beeper kept telling him the car was in the gas station. But Goad couldn’t see the car.
Puzzled, he walked into the gas station’s work bay.
He found the car, raised up on a service bay repair lift.
The straying husband had a co-conspirator. The man who ran the gas station had hit the lift button to raise up the car and was there to lower it when the couple wanted to leave.
“I pushed the button to lower the lift,” Goad said.
“When the car came down, there were two people in the back seat.
“They were nearly as surprised as I was.”
In love. Again.
The first flame of any new love can be so blinding hot that it can derails careers and people, even when there’s no infidelity, Matson said.
“Falling in love is the best heroin in the universe,” said Matson, a sociologist who teaches relationships, gender and masculinity at Wichita State University.
“Love, especially falling in love, is that head-over-heels tumble, that out-of-control-obsessive experience. When it comes, it destroys the rest of your life. You’re never the same. I’ve known people who wrote 20 books, did great research, had significant careers – and after they fell in love the first time, it consumed them. They couldn’t do the work anymore.”
So it always cools off. It’s one of nature’s survival programs embedded within us, he said.
But cooling off with one love can lead to infidelity with another if you liked the ecstasy and want more.
The cooling-off period need not kill commitment, he said. People can choose, can adjust, can stay loyal.
And they should do that, he said.
“There are obvious benefits to sticking with that person who knows you better than anyone.”
Now she knows
Most of the straying lovers Goad tracked over 40 years were men, he said, but that’s because of how he chooses clients.
Nine of 10 clients he selects are women with wealthy husbands. Many clients are sent to him by divorce lawyers hired by wives.
“A lot of what those women want is not divorce but power,” Goad said. “The husband makes money. So they don’t necessarily want to leave. Instead, they want power – knowledge about the man, which is a form of power over the man.
“I have a case right now where we tracked this guy.
“At first we were going to tell the wife that he wasn’t doing anything. The wife is from out of town, and her husband was temporarily assigned to work here in town. But we could see his car never moved at night from in front of his apartment building.
“But then we realized: The mistress lived in a different building. In the same complex.
“So that wife? We were going to try to take pictures. But that’s hard, to catch people.
“So in the end, all she wanted was for us to knock on the door when those two were together. And when he answered the door, she wanted me to just hand him my business card.
“So now he’d know – that she knows.”
Goad dislikes tracking lovers; he makes more income with other work. So when suspicious spouses call, he suggests buying a small, inexpensive GPS tracker instead.
“I suspect the GPS device has really put a crimp in the lives of cheaters anyway.”
It’s simple, he said: Borrow your spouse’s car. Stick the GPS under the mat or the wheel well in the trunk. Track your loved one online.
And then you don’t have to hire a private investigator at $55 to $85 an hour.
Guilt and more guilt
Having an affair is like playing God, Matson said.
“I have often wondered if there isn’t something exciting and energizing about almost living in two separate worlds at the same time.
“Only the two of you know about it. It could be kind of fascinating – like living in two parallel universes. And having to be duplicitous in both.
“Beyond that, freedom is an aphrodisiac; it is incredibly empowering when you do something wrong and realize you are not as constrained as you think.
“It’s easy for us to find ourselves in lives that are – I don’t want to say ‘boring,’ but we find ourselves living in patterns.
“So if you find the opportunity to break through that predictability of 24/7 and 365 days every year, well, you might want to light that up with something different. There’s an old proverb, in deviant-behavioral literature: ‘The forbidden fruit would be half so sweet if not forbidden.’ ”
It gets ugly
“Kids are nearly always the ones who pay the biggest price,” said Reeves, a family law lawyer.
Incompatibility is usually the legal reason a marriage ends in Kansas, she said. So infidelity usually doesn’t affect alimony or other decisions about property much, unless one party gave a lot of jointly owned money to a lover. Such as a man years ago, Reeves said, who paid $40,000 for breast augmentations for his mistress. That guy paid twice, she said.
Infidelity’s big losers are nearly always kids.
“The victim of infidelity gets mad and can’t say the name of the spouse in front of the children without saying another bad name to go with it,” she said. People trash-talk in front of the kids.
There’s retaliation: “The husband had an affair. So the wife has an affair.”
Other victims: friends.
“The husband and wife had a circle of friends. They break up. The husband brings his new girlfriend to the circle; the wife then brings someone new.
“It can get ugly.”
Follow the vows
A lot of married men and women stray, Reeves said. Women cheat less than men, but it’s almost as much, she thinks.
But women and men differ about deal-breakers.
To men, a wife having sex outside marriage is a big deal-breaker: “The guy can’t get past the vision of bodies intertwining.”
Women hate that, too, but less than learning that the husband actually cares about the other woman.
Reeves’ advice: “Follow your marriage vows.”
“If you can’t do that, get out of the marriage.”
Staying together takes effort, but it’s usually simpler and far less expensive than hiring a lawyer.
“Date nights, once a week or more. And if you find a new interest, get your spouse interested also and pursue it together.”
Reeves is sure, despite evidence to the contrary, that men and women can be good friends, including at work, and not hurt people.
“One thing I’ve learned from clients: There’s usually something else wrong besides infidelity.”
Maybe something bad happened to someone. Or the kids are acting out, and it makes the parent feel crazy. Or they can’t balance their budget.
And they meet someone else, who flirts and doesn’t share these problems. Infidelity becomes an escape.
But often the problem stems from one word: communication.
“Talk. Be interested in the other person. That’s usually all it takes,” Reeves said.
The joy of nothing
For her husband on Valentine’s Day, Reeves plans to experiment with ossobucco – veal shanks, slow cooked. “We both like to cook.”
Goad will likely spend Valentine’s Day out of town, on a trip, maybe to Arkansas. He plans to take his wife. Affairs usually start in the workplace; Goad’s wife works in his office.
“So infidelity would be greatly frowned upon here.”
Matson says he and his wife always observe Valentine’s Day, but they like to let the day unfold gently.
Flowers might be bought, a meal might be had, jewels might be considered – at places they select together.
“I never know ahead of time what we’ll do for Valentine’s Day,” he said.
“But I can tell you exactly what I’ll do on Mistress Day: nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Reach Roy Wenzl at 316-268-6219 or rwenzl@wichitaeagle.com. Follow him on Twitter: @roywenzl.
“Tell him his wife is here”
Emery Goad, the private investigator, can tell other stories:
There was the straying husband, who liked to leave work to drink in restaurants on North Broadway, and take different waitresses to their homes after.
Goad got tired of sitting outside a waitress’s apartment one night. He called the husband’s wife in the wee hours, told her where her husband was, and asked to go home.
The wife instead asked Goad to wait there. She showed up.
Goad knocked on the door himself, with the wife nearby. When the waitress answered her apartment door, Goad told her: “Tell him his wife is here to pick him up.”
“So then the guy came to the door. He said nothing had happened, that he had become too drunk to drive, and that the waitress had generously offered to let him sit at her place to sober up before driving home.
“Then he said: ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
*
“Sometimes a suspicious wife cannot afford the charges for surveillance,” Goad said. “So I offer her what I call the $50 special.
“With the $50 special, I deliberately send the husband a paid bill receipt – as though by mistake.
It’s a trick.
“Sometimes the guy calls to ask what this is about. And I say ‘Oh, sorry, I’m so embarrassed, my staff made a mistake; they should have sent that paid receipt to your wife. Sorry.’
“The paid receipt itemizes what looks like my charges to his wife for 50 hours of surveillance, naming dates and times.
The surveillance never actually occurred. But the trick always works, Goad said. Either the husband immediately confessed to the wife. Or he does not confess—but lives his life after that knowing that the wife is on to him. “And if he’s got a business, and money, she’s now got the hammer to bring it all crashing down.”
“I thought that was a brilliant move on my part, coming up with that $50 special,” Goad said.
“It worked every time.”
Why lovers cheat
“Love” and “falling in love” are not the same things, said Ron Matson, a sociologist who teaches at Wichita State University.
Falling in love is where all the fires start, for stable marriages and unstable affairs.
Falling in love can be addictive. Some people, even though married, pair up extra-maritally and serially, with partner after partner, for years, Matson said. Some married lovers juggle time schedules and cover stories with with their spouses and with multiple other loves concurrently.
Cell phones, texting and social media made infidelity easier.
Matson teaches about relationships, gender, and masculinity at Wichita State University.
“The number one thing I hear college kids talk about is whether they can trust their partner.
“Most of them don’t.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2015 at 6:49 AM with the headline "Mistress Day: the unadulterated reality."