When does a woman become a whore? I don't mean professionally. There, at least, the business model is clear. I mean socially. After the third? The fifth? The tenth? And is there some committee somewhere that tallies up the penises and issues a ruling on the loss of moral eligibility? I ask because I've noticed that around here, a woman's past doesn't get retold.
It gets inventoried. "She was with this one." "She was with that one." "Do you have any idea how many she's gone through?" I don't. But I assume we're about to open a land registry. I'm more interested in something else. Why is a woman who has given relationships more than one try more suspicious than a man for whom no relationship was ever interesting enough to sit still in?
Because maybe the woman wasn't changing men. Maybe she was changing her mind. She gets into a relationship because she likes someone. She falls in love. She thinks: I like it here. And she would have stayed. Really. Except that's when what I suppose is now called the male need for freedom kicks in. I wouldn't touch that one. It's a serious diagnosis.
A man wakes up one morning next to a woman he spent months winning over and suddenly feels he's missing - space. What space? He doesn't know. But he needs it. He also needs time for himself. A little time to find himself.
A little time to see where he's at. A little time to not know what he wants. At forty-seven. It's lovely how long men nurture their inner child. And then you realize that maybe the problem isn't the relationship. The problem is that the relationship stopped being new. Because while he's chasing you, you're a challenge. Once he's caught you, you become everyday life. And everyday life doesn't have a stranger's cleavage.
It doesn't have a "seen" at two in the morning. It doesn't have that sweet uncertainty of whether he'll get lucky. With you, he already knows he will. And the poor man's dopamine drops. The tragedy of the modern age. Men used to go to war. Today they battle monotony six months into a relationship. And so our hero develops an urge to explore.
That's an expression I'm especially fond of. Explorer. Because "I can't stay put" sounds hick. Explorer sounds like National Geographic. He doesn't chase women. He's getting to know life. He isn't texting seven of them. He just loves communication. He isn't keeping his options open. He just doesn't like pressure. He doesn't cheat. It just happened.
He isn't repeating a pattern. He's searching for himself. You'd think he lost himself at some airport and has been searching women's breasts for himself for fifteen years now. And all of that would be perfectly legitimate. Honestly. Some people love one person for thirty years. Some people love three people before lunch. Tastes differ.
The problem only starts when Marco Polo gets tired of traveling and decides that now he'd like a "normal" one after all. That's when the job ad goes up. She mustn't have gone out much. She mustn't have "been around". She mustn't have too many exes. She has to be stable. Family-oriented. Measured. She has to know what she wants. Preferably him. Right away.
Free of any consequences of his previous fieldwork. Because unlike her, he didn't get used up. He was building himself. Every woman added to his experience. Every man, apparently, knocked something off her factory value. I don't know who came up with this economy, but the auto industry would be proud. And now we come to my favorite part. Let's say a woman has had seven relationships. She went into each one thinking it would last. It didn't.
One lied. The second cheated. The third didn't know what he wanted. The fourth knew exactly what he wanted, it just wasn't convenient to tell her he wanted two more. The fifth wanted a serious relationship, but without all the unpleasant side effects of a serious relationship, like responsibility. The sixth was "in a complicated phase". The seventh was just an idiot.
And in the end? She's the woman who "went through seven men". How awkward when you take the verbs out of the story. The number stays. The cause disappears.
And then along comes a man who, in the same amount of time, may have had fifteen women, two parallel flings, one ex he never quite let go of and three "just friends" with whom, of course, nothing ever happened - except that it would have happened the second he got the green light. And he's the one judging her.
That's genius, if you ask me. Like a tax dodger grading the government's fiscal discipline. And maybe that's where the whole confusion lies. We branded as a whore the person who left more than once. And we never came up with a good enough word for the person who gets left. For the man who wants a woman, but not the limits that come with having her. Who wants closeness when he's lonely, freedom when things are good, security when he gets scared and adventure the moment security is taken for granted. Who wants someone waiting for him, but can't stand the feeling that there's somewhere he has to come back to. Who asks a woman for peace, and the moment he gets it - he's bored.
Now that's an interesting profile. Because maybe promiscuity has nothing to do with the number of people we've slept with. Maybe there's such a thing as emotional promiscuity, too. A constant need for a new pair of eyes. New validation. A new person who doesn't know your tricks yet. A new version of yourself in someone else's eyes.
Because with the old one, you have to be who you really are. With a new one, you get to be, once again, who you say you are. And that's where the new woman is truly irresistible. Not because she's prettier. But because she hasn't gotten to the footnotes yet. That's why I'm no longer impressed by stories about how many men some woman has gone through.
Maybe she was looking for love. Maybe she was looking for peace. Maybe she made catastrophic choices. Maybe she just refused to turn one catastrophe into a twenty-year marriage so that one day she could say she'd only ever had one. Or maybe she liked sex.
The horror. We'll survive. But if we're going to insist on terminology, let's at least be equal about it. A whore isn't a woman who has had a lot of men. Nor is a whore a man who has had a lot of women. That's far too banal. The male whore is something much more elegant.
He's the man who spends his whole life going through women because he "hasn't found the right one" - and then explains to every woman who has gone through men that her problem was she never learned how to stay. He explored. She wandered. He chose. She put out. He has experience. She has mileage.
And in the end, after all his expeditions, he goes looking for a woman with no history to build a future with. Because, for God's sake, a man has to have standards. Even when he doesn't meet them himself.