The gentle art of hotwifery

For the first several months of our acquaintance, I didn’t know that Steve thought I was a hotwife. I also am not sure when I learned what a hotwife is. When Steve met my husband for the first time, they had coffee together at an Aroma Joe’s. When my husband came home, he told me, “He definitely seems into you. He kept bringing up your body though. It was kind of weird.” In retrospect, it makes sense in light of the hotwife miscue. My husband thought he was meeting a man I was dating, and yes, fucking, but whom I was interested in as a whole human person. By the time of their meeting, I was well along in the process of falling in love with Steve. Unbeknownst to me, however, he thought we were enacting a kink.

After my conversation with Steve for this episode, I got to thinking about why he ever assumed I was a hotwife. It just struck me as such a specific thing to think. The brief definition of it, according to Urban Dictionary, appears simple, but contains a snarl of potentially conflicting meanings. The first line of the definition, “A married woman who is allowed and/or encouraged by her husband to pursue sexual relationships with other individuals,” elides and flattens with that ‘and-slash-or’. For the husband, ‘and/or’ could mean everything from grudging, semi-coerced permission, to high arousal at the prospect. There are animal names and categories for everyone involved, depending on their role; the wife is a vixen, and her extramarital partner a bull. The husband gets to be different kinds of animals—he’s a cuckold if he gets off on humiliation, and he’s a stag if he just digs watching someone else fuck his wife. His feelings are central to what this dynamic is. Everyone else’s feelings are mostly irrelevant. It’s not that I don’t believe there are plenty of women who extremely get off on this dynamic, it’s just that if she does or doesn’t is immaterial to the practice of hotwifery.

The second line of Urban Dictionary’s definition reads, “Often, these relationships are in pursuit of fulfilling the husband's/couple's fantasies.” (by all means, also do explore how UD defines ‘husband’ and ‘couple’). “Husband’s/couple’s”: there’s another slash doing a lot of work. Hotwifery, then, may be the husband’s fantasy, or the magically, mutually aligned fantasy of an entity known as “the couple.” Despite the definition mentioning husbands who are simply “allowing” their wives to have sex with other people, that’s not really how this works. If it’s purely the wife’s wish to fuck other people, and her husband is not in any way aroused by it, then she may indeed be extremely hot, and a wife, but she is certainly not a hotwife.

This is when I began to understand why Steve’s assumption actually made sense. In his mind, the only way a married woman would be on a dating app, seeking new connections, up to and including the sexual, was that her husband not only tolerated it, he got off on it. What husband would permit this kind of obvious humiliation, loss, and torment, if they were not eroticized for him?

My husband and I have been together since we were teenagers. I used to ponder why, in my lifetime, I had not suffered the degree of male harassment that so many women have to deal with. Men did not generally hit on me, and though I was glad about that, I wondered why, since most (young) women report being fairly awash in come-ons and worse. Was it my androgyny, or that I tend to read ‘lesbian’ to most people? It can’t be that, because, alas, being a lesbian never saved anyone from male sexual attention. Was it that I’m such a homebody and introvert and teetotaler that I never went to bars or clubs or really anywhere where men might hit on me? Probably partly, but men hit on women everywhere, all the time.

Thinking back over my life, I realize how many instances there have been when boys or men did hit on me. It was always in a wistful, “it can never be” sort of way. Every time, from high school on, these male persons would say, “Listen, I know you have a boyfriend/fiance/husband, so it’s not possible, but I want you to know…” and then they’d profess their attraction/love/forlorn hope. Never in those instances did any of them ask what I wanted. It was all over before it began because I was already someone else’s property. I have not been single since I was fourteen, and this meant I was constantly under a male’s protection, and that is the only forcefield that other men universally respect, so, they left me largely alone.

Steve’s assumption, in light of all that, makes sense to me now. How else, but as an extension of my husband’s libido, could I be out in the world, dating and having sex with other people? There had to be something in it for him. In Steve’s mind, as in our collective, social mind, no husband would put up with it if it were solely his wife’s desire, her agency, her freedom, her happiness driving it.

There is an archaic term, wittol, long fallen out of use, for a man who knows about his wife’s outside sexual relations and does not object. In some definitions, he ‘tolerates’ it, in others, he ‘submits’ to it, in others ‘acquiesces,’ and in others, ‘condones.’ Those words all have different emotional textures, but to flatten them all out, a wittol is, essentially, ok with it. He’s not turned on by it, but neither is he distressed. The language itself has largely lost track of the existence of such husbands, but mine is one. It’s a long story for another time, how we spent a year talking, turning the idea over and over, handing it back and forth between us, before we both felt secure and ready for me to pursue romantic or sexual partners outside our marriage.

There are animal forms all over the kink, fetish, and general sexual realms. Stag, vixen, bull, unicorn. My husband is a rarer beast than any of these, and one that Steve’s imagination could not conceive, in the early months of our relationship: a husband who wanted my happiness, for me to be fully myself, and who would make sacrifices toward those ends. To the question “What’s in it for you?” he gave an unimaginable answer, “Only her joy, her freedom.”

What animal would I be, then, given that I don’t see myself in what I know of the existing sexual menagerie? A seemingly strange avatar, but I think a deep sea anglerfish. Seemingly strange, until you consider how she is lit from within, bearing her own beacon before her. She is herself utterly, haloed, and beloved.