Excusing John Updike’s Serial Cheating Because He’s a ‘Great Man’
A reviewer of John Updike’s letters finds his serial cheating droll. Women pick me dancing for a Great Literary Icon is just how the story is supposed to go.
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A common side effect of chumpdom is media-induced infidelity intolerance. After you’ve had your world upended by a fuckwit, you often fail to appreciate sexy affair storylines or find cheaters to be sympathetic characters. But this antipathy is a matter of degree. I can still enjoy Willie Nelson’s music even though I know that his former wife once sewed him into a sleeping bag and bludgeoned him for his philandering. Yet, I completely reject the dreck of Bridges of Madison County.
The problem is, I just can’t enjoy cheater romance because my mind always wanders back to the unknowing chump.
It doesn’t matter that person is portrayed as a frigid harridan or hapless milquetoast, it makes me queasy to see people conspired against. I question the storyteller’s motives.
Which brings me to John Updike. If you’ve never heard of him — good. He deserves obscurity.
That’s very cancel culture of you, Tracy.
I have loathed John Updike since I was 18 years old and read “Rabbit, Run” as a college freshman in an American Literature class. “Misogyny” wasn’t a word on small Midwestern campuses in 1984, but John Updike was my first literary introduction to it. I was sickened by the way he described women, but then I felt foolish and ashamed for feeling that way because John Updike was part of the literary canon. His Rabbit series won TWO Pulitzer prizes! What the hell did I know?
Rabbit, Run is a story about a middle-class schlub (“Rabbit”) from a small town in Pennsylvania, who’d been a star athlete, but is bitterly disappointed by adulting. In particular, his spousal appliance Janice frustrates him, how she fucks, how she fails to serve him properly. So, he abandons her while she’s pregnant and shacks up with his mistress. Hey, he is TORTURED BY MIDDLE-CLASS CONVENTIONALITY. Rabbit sexually assaults the mistress, denies her contraception, and she becomes pregnant too. But ultimately our hero returns to Janice just as she’s about to give birth. Pick me dance won!
We’re supposed to identify with Rabbit.
Hey, it’s post-modernism. All I remember from reading this book as a teenager is the bathtub scene. He’s describing his pregnant wife, how repellent she is, yet how he desires her. The ape-like hair on her arms. Her mottled skin, her distended belly.
I thought then: “OMG. He hates her.” But then my young self wondered: Is that how men really look at women?
As I was putting together this column, I was flailing about to find anyone as disturbed by Rabbit as I was. Instead, I found this in the Guardian by Julian Barnes in 2009.
Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments – for example, preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra.
But not for cheating on his pregnant wife and raping his mistress (in fiction). Okay. Under Wrong-Headed Judgements we have Perry Como?
Rabbit is a fictional character, of course. But then Dwight Garner wrote about John Updike’s collected letters in yesterday’s New York Times (gift link).
You’ll be shocked, just shocked to learn that John Updike was a prolific and enthusiastic serial cheater.
Not that Dwight Garner is the least bit bothered by this. No, it’s just a bit of droll commentary on a beloved literary titan. Hey, this was midcentury misogyny. It’s not like men’s sexual entitlement is something we have to worry about today!
Come for the love letters, dedicated to wives (Updike married twice) and to lovers he freely took, especially near the end of his first marriage. These are wonderfully filthy. “Will I ever be able to suck hard enough to please you?” is a rare line that can be printed here. Sexual dysfunction is recounted. He wrote to one lover that he planned to buy “Superballs” for a son’s birthday present, then joked about how his own were not so super during a recent encounter.
Yeah, children’s birthday parties always make me think fondly of my fuckbuddies.
Mr. CL would like to interrupt today’s column to state that absolutely no one cares about literary criticism and John Updike. “THAT WORLD IS DEAD!”, says the man who has a useless masters degree in comparative literature from Columbia University.
“But excusing John Updike’s serial cheating IS NOT!” I replied. Why do we keep normalizing this shit? Why doesn’t anyone care about the women The Great Literary Man used and abused?
Show me their Pulitzer prizes, Tracy.
Sigh.
Updike was ‘upfront about his affairs.’
He was usually up front about these affairs. Shortly before their marriage in 1977, he confessed to Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he would spend the rest of his life, about having an apparent threesome in Australia. In another sort of accounting, he tells her that she is the 13th woman he slept with. The divorce letters to his first wife, Mary Pennington, are a painful reckoning. Mary once knocked Martha to the floor at a neighbor’s house.
What you’re excusing as unvarnished frankness, Dwight Garner, is deliberate mindfuckery. John Updike writing about all the other people he enjoys having sex with to his current sexual partner is the pick me dance. He’s saying: Don’t you want to compete for the Great One’s favor and beat out the competition?
Come to hate-read, if you suspect Updike’s letters will be an electric subset of what might best be termed dead white mail. You will mostly be disappointed, though Updike was a man of an earlier era, and a colonoscopy of such creatures generally turns up polyps. Witness his comment about Edna O’Brien’s novel “Night,” which he admired: “It seemed to me a beautiful brilliant book, although a bit like being inside a cow’s vagina during a warm May rain. Awfully liquid, somehow, her vision. Miss O’Brien’s.”
If this is admiration, what’s disdain?
Updike famously trashed Toni Morrison for essentially being a bummer. On her book Mercy: “A betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures.”
Toni, you should smile more. But hey, he got to say “betranced” so there’s that.
B*tch Be Crazy
Or this one, to Mary during their estrangement before their divorce: “I am left with the sad possibility that women who suit me sexually are necessarily crazy.” He was an imperfect father and grandfather. There are more arrows in Updike than St. Sebastian, and this book will help add a few more.
The women put up with Updike’s degradations, and he respects them less for it. Wow, what a charmer.
Look, all three people out there who care about John Updike and literary criticism, STOP PERSECUTING JOHN UPDIKE. St. Sebastian was a Christian martyr famously tied to a tree and shot to death with arrows. (In other tellings, he’s clubbed to death, which is a more Willie Nelson sort of exit.) But the point is, you all just want to take pot shots at a GREAT MAN and use his own words against him in your vile judgements.
I leave you with these words by Saint Sebastian Updike.
“Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You’re a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don’t.”
John Updike
Absolutely dreadful. The Rabbit poem (read the Wiki summary just now) reminds me of what I endured in my marriage. The similar details are disturbing.
When I was young and yes, even for most of my adult life, I did not know and/ or really understand that some / many men literally do have such contempt, hate and disregard for women as their fellow Human beings. Well I’m the wiser now. Finally.
Dwight Garner is of a piece with Updike. Not just a sneering misogynist but a slack-jawed idiot. And a terrible writer.
Thank you, CL. I read Updike’s Rabbit books during my formative years and was horrified also. I still remember one passage where Rabbit’s wife asks him after they met an attractive woman, how badly he wanted to f— her? And Rabbit replies “hardly at all” and tells his wife he is disturbed by that. This conversation apparently sophisticated marital dialogue. But real women do not speak like this, and the snaphot look at the mind of a misogynist is still with me all these years later. Yes, you can feel his hatred and disgust for women. That Updike abused the women in his own life is no surprise.
I so dislike the convention that saying crude things is sophisticated and a necessary part of literary brilliance. It is not, and it doesn’t age well. At the end of the day, it is no different than the drunk partygoer who announces in a loud voice that he has to take a shit and asks where the bathroom is.
RIP Updike. I’m not sure if Updike is still alive, but same sentiment if he is.
Well said.
He died years ago, but his fanbase lives on.
According to Wikipedia, he died of lung cancer which isn’t a pleasant way to go. I know because that’s how my mom died.
Never read him, never will. I do remember reading some acclaimed works as a young woman and thinking that if the thoughts and behaviors written about were an acceptable part of adult life I was in for a rough ride. And I was correct. I now know that if Cheaty McLiarface’s thoughts had been written on paper I would have never given him the opportunity to speak to me. He knew his thoughts were unacceptable and so began a decades long manipulationship based on misleading and misdirecting. What a waste for all parties involved.
Brilliant! “Manipulationship” I want to borrow that term. Describes my marriage to a T.
When I read it, I remember thinking that there is no way someone can create a protagonist as vile and entitled as Rabbit and it not be somewhat autobiographical. It made me feel icky to read it.
Updike, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Camus … There is a rather lengthy list of literary icons who have been elevated to god-like status who were pretty rotten cheating bastards at their core. It seems society has a rough time distinguishing between glorifying the works instead of the crappy guy or gal who created them. (Am I the only one who cringes at life advice memes that quote a despicable person like child rapist Oscar Wilde??)
You can add Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the “ick” list and file him under “probable pedophile.”
I’ve noticed some of my US lefty friends are afraid to diss Marquez these days because Latin Americans are being so heavily scapegoated. But I spend half the year in South America with my kids and can attest that feminists there have no such qualms razzing GGM.
I thought you were maligning Oscar Wilde, whom I’ve always loved. But then I found this article by Carolyn Gage, a playwright (who is lesbian, so it’s not LBGTQ bashing.) The father was a monster. And the rent boy habit puts the emphasis on “boy.” Wow. https://carolyngage.weebly.com/blog/oscar-wilde-his-fathers-son
I did not know this about Wilde.
Oscar Wilde is another one. Yes as a lesbian I appreciate his activism but not his pedophilia.
In Fun Home Alison Bechdel writes about her coming to terms with her father’s predatory behavior with teenage boys and the need to keep that in mind along with her sympathy for his closeted life. Just because he was a gay man with all the discrimination of the 1970s didn’t make his behavior toward these boys ok (and his cheating and bringing home STIs to his wife).
Once when a late friend and writing coach– a former NY Times reporter and prominent AIDS activist– was visiting with his husband, I mentioned (apropos of something or other) that FW (whom they hadn’t yet met in person and was not there at the time) had “hesitated” to report experiencing sexual harassment from a male boss because he (FW) didn’t want the individual to get scapegoated for being gay.
I’ll never forget how both my friend and his husband scowled incredulously and said something along the lines of “gay or straight, abusosexuals (fab coinage) have their “own team.” Then they basically conveyed that they don’t want creeps like that on their team either and no one should protect predators and think they’re being woke because all predators tend to single out the most politically marginalized victims, even those in their own identity demographic.
It’s interesting that, after this, my friends didn’t express as much enthusiasm about eventually meeting FW and arranging for all of us to hang out together. Only later did I realize that they’d just stuck a red flag on FW because they seemed to intuit that his motives weren’t so much humanitarian but more about a tendency to defend his “fellow (abusosexual) teammates.”
Yes, I wrote a long-form nonfiction narrative last year about the abuse of chloroform in sexual assault (and one murder) cases during the Gilded Age and came across the case against Wilde’s father during my research. I already knew about Wilde’s crimes against young boys, but discovering his father’s grotesque ness was eye-opening.
I’m honestly on the fence regarding whether Nabokov was secretly a pedophile or if Lolita was an analogy for the Cold War battle over Cuba. After all, Invitation to a Beheading also includes a little tangent about a tween girl’s supple legs (barf).
In any case, the character of Humbert Humbert is created to be so repulsive and hypocritical that, if Nabokov was himself a pedophile, the book is basically an ode to self-loathing and self-denouncement.
The confessional thing isn’t unprecedented since some of Roman Polanski’s earlier films are among the most victim-perspective-centered stories in cinematic history. I think anyone who watches Rosemary’s Baby, Tess and Chinatown could see how Polanski rats out the most diabolical and covert methods predators use to silence and discredit victims. I’ve almost wondered if, deep down, the guy actually longed to get caught and stopped or just had a split personality.
Not that I think Polanski should be spared criminal consequences but the existence of “confessional” literature and cinema is the only reason I hold out very tiny exceptions for cancel culture. The one exemption is when the work is staggeringly brilliant and so radically psychopathic that the creator actually exposes their own evil in great detail.
It’s extremely unlike that Polanski will ever face consequences for his actions because the countries he’s lived in have refused to extradite him to the US. And he’s 92 now, so he’ll probably die before that changes.
As to whether he’ll face punishment in an afterlife, who knows. If there’s an afterlife, I hope he does.
Yes, the refusals to extradite a child rapist were incredibly shameful. And now France seems to be having quite the rape culture reckoning.
My daughter’s college class read “Lolita” in 2023 and then the class of young men and women discussed its merits with the male professor.
Tell me the name of a male “literary great” who didn’t discard or physically or emotionally brutalize women and/or children in their real lives. I’ll wait.
Victor Hugo was an exemplary man who adored his wife and daughters, served as a French elected official at a time when that could get you executed or exiled, and opposed the death penalty. So there’s at least one
Depends on what you consider a literary great. John Irving, AFAIK, seems to be a pretty good guy. He has been married twice but his second marriage came many years later, so no overlap that would suggest cheating. He was a victim of sexual abuse and there’s nothing to suggest he’s abused anybody. While he may not be regarded as a literary great, probably because he wrote too many best sellers, he’s certainly a much better writer than Updike.
William Blake??
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mark Twain.
Or are you talking about 20th century only?
Okay, Mark Twain for the win. He worshiped his wife and her progressive abolitionist family.
Yes! Mark Twain, I think that’s true. And I love him. And Hawthorne… ok! Thank you!
I gave our first born son the middle name of Clemens.
The OW in my story used to sign her emails to me “Samuel Clemens.” I refuse to smear the name.
That’s weird, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
So for her pen name, she stole the legal name of perhaps the most famous pen name?
LOL. Yes.
Mark Twain was scathing about Jane Austen. I can’t see him as an ally, and I’ve managed to dodge his books all my life (faked my way through it for freshman English in high school).
Well, that doesn’t mean he hated all women, does it? I think he just didn’t like her writing style. He was devoted to his family.
Kipling is another. And Tolkien. Good people are out there.
Kipling, author of “White Man’s Burden”?
I’ve never seen a racist who wasn’t misogynist which makes sense since both involve the enforcement of artificial hierarchy. In any case, being one of the two is more than bad enough.
Tolkien got some criticism for making “good” Ring characters “fair,” and “evil” characters darker skinned. But politically he was anti-racial pride and against Nazism.
Since you mention Tolkien, I’ll add fellow Inkling CS Lewis. He was kind-of unconventional in relationships for a conventional guy, but biographers seem to think he treated people well. I’m an engineer though, so you might know better…
They have to be “great” right? Not just enjoyable or clever? But exalted? I’m coming up blank too.
Charles Dickens is failing the test. Class, anyone? Anyone?
Gah. I wish I could un-read that book.
riiiight? What the hell are we doing, assigning it to 21-year-old girls as part of college curriculums? Like, assign another Nabokov book, if you love his writing that much.
You have to wonder about intentional normalizing / conditioning when an infamous book on child abuse is mandatory syllabus reading for children. There are plenty of “masterpieces” of literature that could be assigned for the purposes of teaching and learning. That Lolita is able to persist as a staple in the education system for the underaged — across a large swathe of Western countries at least — is both deeply concerning and sinister.
I’m legit trying to think of one: Rohinton Mistry, perhaps? Shakespeare?
Also, why does Willie get a pass? The soulful/funny/stoner/counterculture ones get away with the worst stuff with their little acts!
I’ve never read John Updike, but I remember the disappointment I felt as a young adult when I realized how many of the “great,” “classic” authors I loved and admired absolutely detested women. It felt like such a betrayal.
Yes, me, too. Reading Kate Millet’s “Sexual Politics” felt like a breath of fresh air.
Yes, it was pretty much the culture of the day. People like to rail about how universities have rejected the classics. Well, if that’s all you read, you’re lacking the diversity and nuance that make modern life better in some ways.
I really, really hated Max Frisch’s novel “Homo Faber”, which I had to read in Catholic (!) school. The protagonist is a very misogynistic guy who, at the start of the novel, has an affair with a young married woman (a model). He talks very disparagingly about her (in ways that made me – as a schoolgirl – feel bad about being a woman myself). Later on, he ends up sleeping with his own daughter (unknowingly), and somehow the readers are supposed to sympathize with him anyway. I never understood why other people appeared to love that book so much. Reading his Wikipedia bio, the author appears to have had at least one relationship that overlapped with his first marriage (although supposedly, he and his wife had been separated for a few years). Later on, at the age of 51, he started a relationship with a young student who was about 23 at the time (and became his second wife).
Edit: And apparently, “In April 1974, while on a book tour in the US, Frisch launched into an affair with an American called Alice Locke-Carey who was 32 years his junior.” (he was 62 at the time and still married to his second wife)
I still remember how, early in the book, the protagonist complained that his young married affair partner was very “clingy”. He argued that this was very fitting since her name was Ivy. As a young woman/girl, the message I took away from this was: As women, we should never be clingy (= have emotional needs), because otherwise we would end up driving our partners into the arms of their own daughters. Looking back, it’s frightening how much messages from books like this one shaped my relationships with men decades ago.
I immediately looked up Barnes, wondering if he had a backstory to explain why he was a cheater apologist. There was. He, too, was a celebrated and successful author. As a teen, began an intense, multi-year relationship (at the very least an emotional affair) with a married woman in her 50s. Later, his own wife, who was also his agent, chumped Barnes. They reconciled and remained married until her death. Much of his fiction deals with infidelity. It’s detailed in an article, “A Very Grownup Affair” that ran in The Times in 2018.
I’ve started to wonder if cheater apologists are cheaters, and how many are chumps who remain with their cheaters and are desperate to justify their decision.
Updike was never more than a third-rate hack, the Dan Brown of mid-century Angsty Bad Boy Lit. Happily, no one today under the age of 50 has heard of him, and he’s as irrelevant as NYT click-bait “feature” articles. #RabbitDone
He is consigned to the WASP museum of mid-century FWs.
I would like to nominate several people to that museum.
It’s a pretty big building.
Reminds me of trying to read On the Road by Kerouac at 17. Women were only valuable if they served his sexual desires. I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to articulate what was just a very uncomfortable feeling that seemed to be everywhere in the world.
I often feel lucky to be a lesbian even though I’ve seen some shitty lesbians.
Yes! I too have LOATHED Updike since I first read him at 17. Misogynistic FWit!
In “A Round-heeled Woman,” the late Jane Juska mentions a very famous writer who replied to her personal ad and enclosed a full-frontal nude pic. Juska did not reply, and as far as I know, she never named him. My money has always been on Updike.
More recently, the brilliant Patricia Lockwood wrote about him. She compared him to “a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.”
How did i not know Patricia Lockwood? New fangirl here! I love this! https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot
Yup, that’s the piece. Sheer genius.
That was a brilliant read, thank you!
Check out her poem Rape Joke. https://web.archive.org/web/20170514014523/https://theawl.com/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke-2e9bd41d80b1
I love Patricia Lockwood and never ever could read Updike- he sucks on many levels. Terrible writer, person, gross! Will google her take on him now. It is harder for me to with other horrible male writers.. but not him because he’s a bad writer as well as a bad man.I have problems when they are “good writers”..although recently have been able to let go of Nabokov..but not Hemingway.. anyway. F Updike. On many levels. He hated women and he was proud of that. Sadism. We have fancy things like OCPD, or even “sociopath” but nothing wrong with an old fashioned Sadist as a term. I’m leaning into it as I encounter so many people whose main pleasure is causing suffering.
Sadists are really having a moment, huh? I’m interviewing Dr. Peter Salerno again for the podcast. He has a new book coming out on cruelty.
I’m looking forward to that. There does seem to be a sadism epidemic right now.
Reading this made think of a number of things that are all somewhat interconnected.
Firstly, that the” traditional values” of the 40, 50s and 60s that many might advocate a return to do not bear anything like close scrutiny; a lot of the sh*t that “flew” then (or was at least successfully swept under the rug) would rightly not be tolerated now. Secondly, that separating the art from the artist is problematic; I personally think that the two are inseparable, but that’s just me.
And lastly, John Updike was clearly something of a d*ck.
LFTT
I remember all of the accolades about Updike. My mother was a librarian at the time, and she checked out one of his books for me. I didn’t finish it.
There are others who were horrid people behind the scenes who nonetheless came up with solid work. Einstein and Rembrandt come to mind. Oh, well.
But no Updike here. Just ick through-and-through.
I somehow never read Updike, but Vonnegut was essential. Read him in high school as a science fiction writer, but came to realize how he represented the consecutive traumas of the Great Depression and WWII. Post DD and divorce I read his biography and was so put off by his adulterous abuse of his long suffering wife. He surely suffered with undiagnosed PTSD from WWII and family trauma growing up. This was the germ of his brilliance in literature, but I cannot use it to excuse his serial cheating on his devoted wife.
His son Mark Vonnegut wrote 2 very good non-fiction books, one that details his father’s shittiness a bit, but also explores substance abuse and mental illness in a way that isn’t backward and shaming. He I like more than his father.
My ex-husband, who I married in 1972 and divorced 14 years later, loved Rabbit, Run. I had not read it (not have I read it to this day). Now that I’ve read the plot summary of the book in Wikipedia and Chumplady’s comments here, his love of Rabbit, Run would have served as a big, red flag. However, I would have likely ignored that red flag because I was in love and I was young and stupid.
Like creepy JohnU..Both my Exs detested woman but could not function without them. However I must say, they used us/them and abused us/them, if they stayed like I did..WAY TOO LONG !!!!!hoping I could cure them and they grovel in it !! When I hung on they started collecting side chick’s like gathering Easter Eggs. Looking at history and my favorite, Henry the 8th how he kept legal wife locked 🔒 up and kept using woman as incubators for a male heir. There seemed to be no shortage of pick me dancers for him even though they read the news and knew the ending possibility. I checked up on Chump Queen Katherine who had plenty of famous kin and she could have left England in a heart beat and gained a life..BUT BUT she wanted her daughter to still be in the line up for the throne Queen otherwise, nothing …so Katherine stayed for her daughter Mary, whom she never saw again from the moment she was put away. Mary got to the throne but had a horrible end. I’d say leave a cheater even it means a crown is dropped 👑Why sew then into a sleeping bag. Just GO!!!!
Yes, reading about histories of royalty, I often wonder why people would ever want that.
Contemporary novelist Stephen King ? Apparently, Nicholas Sparks cheated but never remarried.
King has been married to Tabitha forever. No cheating scandals as far as I could find. However, he has been accused of plagiarism numerous times. Not sure how much merit the cases had though. It doesn’t sound like they were based on anything that solid.
I’m currently struggling with the prospect of King Charles and Queen Camilla travelling to the Vatican to pray with the Pope this week. God forgives all, I guess, but I’m made of smaller, more petty stuff.
I know! My mind just boggles at this!
English PhD here. I loathe John Updike, and always have, because like Tracy I know a misogynist when I read his work.
My campus office for 28 years was next to that of an Updike scholar. (He was also a Hemingway scholar.) He was a misogynist, too.
i think chumps are tired of pull-it-zers, but maybe i’m speaking for myself!
Great pun!
I had the exact same reaction to Rabbit, Run. The misogyny was equal parts enraging and horrifying. Another thing that struck me was how pathetically puerile it was. We were supposed to identify with characters who were basically toddlers with erections? How to fail at being a worthless, scum-sucking manwhore was supposed to be an important, universal theme millions could relate to? Oh please. Updike was a shit writer in addition to being a narcissist and if I had given him the slightest thought in the last forty odd years I would have expected him to be a serial cheater, a wife beater and a sexual predator. That’s what I think of John fucking Updike and the kind of slobbering pseuds who consider him a “great man” because he wrote “honestly” about being a walking phallus are crashing bores. Updike is the literary equivalent of Penthouse letters.
Updike’s quote about creepiness should just be taken as proof that most women thought he was a creep and he was butthurt about it, so he wrote a bunch of vile claptrap to get petty revenge. IOW, he had the rage of an incel even after he was famous enough to actually get laid, which is what happens with incels who are successful.
I’ve honestly never heard of this mansplot until now. The name is vaguely familiar. But in the same way facebook’s “people you may know” shows me the profile of the ex of a friend from high school.
The world loves excusing assholes if they spit out a “great” bit of media somehow. It actually being great is debatable. I recently had a conversation with a 20 year old coworker who was the typical podcast gym bro and he was going on about his favorite host. Obviously I’m skeptical. “He’s not a misogynist! He’s got like…great stuff about fitness and self-improvement!” (Me: define “self-improvement”)
I google this dude’s name and the very top result is an article about how he got caught cheating with five different women who didn’t know about each other.
My coworker said “Well…you can’t judge.” Both me and the secretary said at the same time “Yes we can.”
“Well…we’re all human.”
I said “I’m a human who manages to not cheat on my fiancé. Especially not with five people.”
“But I mean…it’s hard.”
The secretary said “It’s pretty easy to not cheat with five people.”
“…but he does have good fitness stuff.”
Mr. Not-A-Misogynist-Can’t-Judge-Life-Is-Hard has FITNESS STUFF guys. So look away from the multiple levels of cheating.
My sister lives in Ipswich, MA, and is good friends with Miranda Updike, the youngest child of John Updike’s first marriage. His poor kids suffered tremendously with him as their father. Such is the crapshoot of life: Unfortunately, we cannot pick our parents.
So. Many. Famous Men.
I had, for instance, no idea about Paul Newman. Not dad-joke, charity-creating Paul Newman.
Remember the avuncular Charles Kurwalt? When he died, his wife discovered his 30+ years affair.
I’ve never read any of Updike’s books, and after reading this, I never will. Thanks, Chump Lady!
So my current H whose dad cheated on his mom for sport and who my h hates, said the man he felt was more like a dad to him was a wonderful father to his kids and a wonderful husband to his wife that he loved so much and took great care of yet-/ he had a wee bit of a problem in that he could not stop hooking up with other women. Again like sport. Yet my h thinks he was a wonderful man/- he just had a bit of an issue. And apparently this man was giving my h advice about picking up women. No thought to how his wife and family saw this.
It makes no sense my h hates his dad for cheating in his mom yet this other man it was ok when he did it?