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"  Adults know to group things in threes: Three wise men. Three strikes. Past, present, future. We tell our stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It helps make sense of the world. But it&amp;#039;s a cheat, a learned habit, and children under a certain age have not internalized it. Last summer, my older son, then six, had not. I&amp;#039;d just picked him and his brother up at their mother&amp;#039;s place for a weekend at mine, and his commentary, while he was strapped into the back of my car, seemed to roll on forever. &amp;quot;Daddy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, handsome?&amp;quot; A pause here from the chatterbox. Ominous. It was a tricky time. &amp;quot;Ingrid&amp;#039;s going to leave.&amp;quot; A statement, flat certain. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s going to leave. Then you&amp;#039;re going to find another girl and she&amp;#039;s going to leave. Then you&amp;#039;re going to find another girl and she&amp;#039;s going to leave. Then you&amp;#039;re going to find another girl and she&amp;#039;s going to leave. And then you&amp;#039;re going to die.&amp;quot; Amazement trumped the shock, but not the pain. I smiled one of those God-I-love-this-brilliant-kid-of-mine smiles\u2014the same one I&amp;#039;d shown when he first figured out how to add negative numbers. The kid had done the math, and I couldn&amp;#039;t fault his calculations. Behind my smile, the smile that I hoped would also tell him that I wasn&amp;#039;t leaving any more than I already had, I flashed through my life\u2014the decisions and nondecisions that had gotten me from my own boyhood to a nascent, broken manhood in that car at the end of a street I could no longer call home\u2014and I knew he might very well be right. We were at a red light at the bottom of a hillside block in Brooklyn, the block to which their mother and I had moved with so much hope seven years before, buying an apartment to make room for this boy and his life, and ours with him. I looked over my shoulder: two little boys, two big car seats, one sad car. My girlfriend and I were breaking up. We&amp;#039;d been together for just over two years and lived together for one. Extending a family visit, she&amp;#039;d been in Europe for a month. The boys missed her and had seen me missing her. The relationship was terminal\u2014it was killing her and, I saw much later, me. She had said she was going away to get herself together, pull herself together, get some perspective\u2014I can&amp;#039;t remember the exact euphemism\u2014but it was clear to me she&amp;#039;d be moving out when she returned.  There&amp;#039;s no arguing with the optics. When a 35-year-old once-nice Jewish boy, gray where he&amp;#039;s not bald, and not particularly fit, walks out on his supportive but demanding wife and his beautiful but demanding babies so he can find possibility and (one hopes, eventually) &amp;quot;himself&amp;quot; with his snarky, 22-year-old shiksa research assistant with a nose ring and big tits (however brilliant beyond her years Ingrid was, however thoroughly beloved); when they break up and, brokenhearted, he embarks on the spree he had reasoned in his twenties he could go a lifetime without; when that womanizing in turn triggers its own cascade of trial-and-error joy and loneliness\u2014the guy at the local pizza place who sees the morning parade now calls me &amp;quot;Danger Man&amp;quot;\u2014it&amp;#039;s time to own it. A brief romantic history. The summer after my freshman year of high school, my 18-year-old French exchange student deflowered me in a hotel outside of Lyon. I think she was the third girl I&amp;#039;d kissed. Two years later, I returned the favor with a Catholic-school innocent in plaid skirts and braces. It was a crime of opportunity; I was a shy kid and mostly chaste. The closest thing I had to a relationship in high school was secretly hanging out with a friend&amp;#039;s girlfriend for a few weeks after she jumped me one night in a cabana while we were pool hopping. I had no confidence, I was immobilized by fear and guilt (for years after that first encounter, I imagined for myself a punitive case of syphilis), but, by a certain measure of young male success, I was doing okay.  On to college. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and within weeks I was going out with the girl across the hall in my dorm whose name ended with an i. She was full of life, lit from within, and, as so often follows, liberal with her affections. She cheated on me and I was wrecked. I fell into the arms and the bed of, and then in love with, a close friend, a nice girl. We went out all through college, moved in together, traveled all over, enjoyed each other as others enjoyed us: the stable couple in our group, responsible, on the right course, ahead of the game.  We got married, both of us 25, days after I finished grad school. We settled (in her mind and, by all appearances, mine) on the kind of leafy Park Slope, Brooklyn, side street where families are made and kept. We had our two kids.  The balance of a decade passed, during which I took advantage of my wife&amp;#039;s full-time employment to risk a career as a freelance writer. Just as that career began to take off, with a contract for a book on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, I fell in love with a much younger girl, Ingrid, and, after a protracted period of demon wrestling and Jimmy Carter sinning, and an eruption of long-suppressed honesty, I left my wife. I&amp;#039;m That Guy. It took a lot of hard work to get here. For nearly 10 years, I&amp;#039;d been in secret, high-functioning misery, but I didn&amp;#039;t know why. Then I did know why, and I convinced myself I didn&amp;#039;t. Then I really did, and I just hid it. I&amp;#039;d be standing at a swing set in Prospect Park, pushing a kid through the motions of a happy childhood, dreaming of escape to Manhattan streets and galleries; new, witty cliques; distant utopias where the choices of youth could be undone without hurting. Up all night cursing myself for getting into this situation, getting deeper with each season, terrified my soul was crushed beyond recovery, I never slept. I made every excuse\u2014mandatory professional parties, friends in chance crises\u2014just to be out. If I had to move the car late at night to make way for morning street cleaning, I&amp;#039;d prowl through the city for hours. Coney Island, 10 miles away, wasn&amp;#039;t too far to drift.  I loved my wife. On paper she was perfect. Ambitious, beautiful. Even after I moved out, I treasured a photo of her I took sophomore year on the shore of one of the Madison lakes, the sun setting on a lithe girl with chestnut hair. Her eyelashes were so long people would stop her on the street. We agreed on the big-picture priorities\u2014settle in the city, raise bookish kids\u2014and we only fought about the stupid things people fight about when they live together in small, dark apartments in New York City. Now I realize it was all proxy warfare, every battle a new sortie over the same bloody ground. Our ideas about how life should be pursued, our personal philosophies, once we were old enough to have them, were in stubborn opposition and equally fixed. She thought me insufficiently responsible, and I thought her insufficiently curious. She thought the world was a scary place. I thought, if I could muster the courage, it was there to be explored.  I was also bored. Just bored. For years, I later realized, I had been adjusting my diction with my wife, self-censoring, editing out of conversation the allusions I didn&amp;#039;t think she would get. I see it now with my kids: When their little brains aren&amp;#039;t engaged, they act out. When I needed help with research, a friend sent Ingrid my way. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re going to thank me,&amp;quot; he wrote. He thought I would thank him for her body and her youth; she was only 20 then, suffering from what she called her &amp;quot;newfound hotness.&amp;quot; I thanked him for her mind. From the first e-mail, our verbal sparring was intense and playful, erotic even when it wasn&amp;#039;t obscene. We had each other&amp;#039;s number. It was uncanny. My sister met her and said, &amp;quot;Gross; she&amp;#039;s a girl you.&amp;quot; I loved that she wrote, and the way she wrote: spare but twisted, a crackhead Hemingway. It was worse that I was in love with her brain first; I couldn&amp;#039;t get out of this pickle just by getting in her pants.  When I finished my book, in summer 2004, I congratulated myself by buying a high-performance sea kayak. I&amp;#039;d grown up sailing, and it had started to seem ridiculous that I lived on an island and didn&amp;#039;t have a way to be out on the water. That&amp;#039;s what I told people. When I called my father, a psychiatrist as well as a sailor, he pointed out the obvious: The boat had only one hole. Where were my wife and kids going to sit? Out on Jamaica Bay, I took risks I would never have taken if I were happy. Then I would land on one of its rotting, littered islands and call Ingrid for the tenth time that day. She had a boyfriend; she hadn&amp;#039;t yet admitted she was in love with me.  The postpartum book depression hit that fall. I lost my ability to compartmentalize between new love and old, family guy and man-about-town, pain and pain&amp;#039;s mask. The night of my thirty-fifth birthday, in October, my wife and I went to dinner at some restaurant we&amp;#039;d been meaning to try. Everything about it offended me\u2014menu, lighting, decor. I couldn&amp;#039;t even lift my head to look at the woman I&amp;#039;d been with since I was 19. I had one thought, and couldn&amp;#039;t shake it: This isn&amp;#039;t the life I was meant for. My silence forced her to push me: &amp;#039;What&amp;#039;s going on with you?&amp;quot; We left before our food came, segueing to a running fight through the streets back home. I inched toward candor. She accused me of only wanting to hang out with my friends, drinking, and &amp;quot;talking about being famous.&amp;quot; It sounded like paradise. That night, for the first time, she told me I should just move out. I wasn&amp;#039;t ready. The door opened and shut. The son of a shrink and a psychiatric social worker, I&amp;#039;d never considered therapy. I got hooked on astrology instead. It was hard to even admit to my parents I was depressed, after I&amp;#039;d at last admitted it to myself. One night, out walking, moving fast to shake my demons, I thought, This is what people talk about when they talk about pain. That winter, while I was shoveling out a car with my father, he suggested drugs. I told him that mine was a &amp;quot;situational depression,&amp;quot; that if I changed my situation\u2014I wasn&amp;#039;t brave enough to use a more specific term\u2014it would go away. I didn&amp;#039;t, and it didn&amp;#039;t. My wife begged me to &amp;quot;talk to someone.&amp;quot; I told her she didn&amp;#039;t want me to; I knew I&amp;#039;d unravel. I didn&amp;#039;t want to hurt her.  By the new year, I&amp;#039;d spent months trying to explain to my wife, in and out of couples therapy, why I needed to leave. We had met too young, I couldn&amp;#039;t grow up in that relationship, and I finally did want to grow up. It really was me, not her. My unacted-upon love for someone else really was more catalyst than cause. My feelings for that little bombshell\u2014the one my wife had taken to calling &amp;quot;a fat, dumb, ugly whore&amp;quot;\u2014really were rooted in a profound intellectual compatibility. All true. Really. And it was all impossible to explain without recourse to well-trodden male-midlife memes of the kind that get you glared out of coffee shop meetings with your trusted girlfriends and laughed out of bar-side confessions with your boys. Writers know cliches are born from truths so inescapably true they get repeated into meaninglessness. But try explaining that to someone you love whose life you are ruining. Or a friend who, projecting your life onto her lover&amp;#039;s, fears nothing more than that same form of ruin. Try making it seem fresh to your married friends who, like you, were husbands before they were men.  By March 2005, I was spending most nights on the couch and some out of the house, sleeping at a day office for freelance writers in Brooklyn. My book had just come out, and I had to go to Chicago to do a reading. To stretch the trip, to feel free for a time, I drove. I joked with a friend that it would be &amp;quot;a voyage into the heartland, and the heart.&amp;quot; Hallmark absurdity made it easier to tell him the truth. I got a speeding ticket in Pennsylvania, crawled through an ice storm in Ohio, nearly lost a wheel in Gary, Indiana. Between those distractions I toggled between open-road elation and the fear that this was all a long dead end. What if no other girl would have me? What if I really couldn&amp;#039;t live alone? I checked into a dour boutique hotel. I don&amp;#039;t remember the rest of that day; Chicago is a great city for sleepwalking. An hour before the reading, my wife called. &amp;quot;I just have one question,&amp;quot; she said, skipping hello. &amp;quot;Are you in love with Ingrid?&amp;quot; I remember thinking, The truth will set you free. I said yes. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re getting divorced.&amp;quot;  Terror and relief\u2014the first attack of a dissonant chord that would ring in my head for years. I needed someone to talk to other than Ingrid, who I&amp;#039;d called immediately. My parents were out. They&amp;#039;d gotten married in the &amp;#039;60s and were still happy together in their sixties. They were having trouble catching up with my choices; this would be only the second divorce in all the known history of my family.  In the sort of too-perfect-for-fiction move that made so much sense midpanic, I kept driving west, out to Madison, scene of the death of my childhood if not the birth of my adulthood, and home still to my old, wise mentorial professor, a Cuban emigre with aristocratic airs. He&amp;#039;d been married all his life, but I imputed to him an enlightened, European morality. Once he had scolded me for having a bad relationship with time. I was hopeful. We met for lunch in a cliffside, art deco hotel dining room looking out over the plane of frozen Lake Mendota. Three Manhattans in\u2014&amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s troubling you, son?&amp;quot;\u2014I told him everything. &amp;quot;Young man,&amp;quot; he said, free of doubt, &amp;quot;go back to your wife. You don&amp;#039;t want to wake up when you&amp;#039;re 50 with a whore in your bed.&amp;quot; The most grandiose man I know had said, essentially, don&amp;#039;t be so grandiose. I fought back lamely: &amp;quot;But...but...love...life.&amp;quot; That night, stoned in the best suite in town, I wrote one line in the journal I had been carrying around but neglecting: &amp;quot;We are witnessing a birth.&amp;quot; I drove back east and moved out.  Cue homelessness\u2014I was radioactive to my mostly married friends; only one dared take me in for a few nights\u2014then near-homelessness. For the first three months of my new life, until Ingrid left her boyfriend and we were finally, improbably together, I slept most nights in a bare artists studio I&amp;#039;d rented in an under-construction warehouse on the Gowanus Canal. Cue divorce, Judge Jeffrey S. Sunshine presiding, a grinding $50,000 New York State special hinging on the notion of &amp;quot;emotional adultery.&amp;quot; Cue lavish, self-destructive Lower East Side nights, occasional bliss, and everyday despair. I started writing a very angry blog. I couldn&amp;#039;t do any other work. I missed my kids but couldn&amp;#039;t afford a place of my own where they could sleep over. My lawyer had all my money. The bathroom at my squat was down the hall. I was showering at a gym. To give my children a bath or put them to bed, I had to drive four hours to my parents&amp;#039; house. It was the happiest and saddest year: relief\u2014I couldn&amp;#039;t believe I had pulled it off\u2014and terror: What now?  The gavel fell at last and I got a little ground under my feet, financially at least. I rented a house a stone&amp;#039;s throw from the harbor in Brooklyn, big enough for me, my kids, and my kayak. The cross-street was, absurdly, Visitation Place. When my newly exed wife dropped off the boys for the first time, I pointed to the sign. I hadn&amp;#039;t seen her smile in years. Glibly calling herself &amp;quot;the home-wrecking hussy,&amp;quot; Ingrid moved in with me. She got to know my kids, and they fell for her as completely as I did. We suspended disbelief, the happiest couple, perfect lovers reveling in our modernity, buying furniture and art, playing music and chess with the boys, throwing dinner parties with good cheese and too much bourbon: the germs of a life 2.0.  One day we raided Crate and Barrel, replacing all the domestic equipment I had lost. I felt the weight of every fork. After my hard-won freedom, it was too soon to be playing house again. Ingrid was chafing too. Fall passed, winter came. She began planning big nights when she knew I had to be home with the boys. One night she got home later and drunker than usual and announced that I wouldn&amp;#039;t be the last person she slept with. It sounded retroactive. Shades of unprocessed dorm-room betrayals: I was terrified. I wanted to preempt this one. She went to Texas for work. I fucked up and fooled around with her best friend. I fucked up again and didn&amp;#039;t tell her. I fucked up a third time with a threesome (her idea) that became a botched wrong-girl twosome. She evened the score. With the intervention of Manhattan counselors and Brooklyn Quaker meetings, we endured six more months. There was a lot of love there. But soon enough all expectations were met\u2014a final, spectacular crash\u2014and I found myself single for the first time in 20 years.  My eldest chimed in again here, on another car ride, on another, even darker day last summer.  &amp;quot;Daddy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You want to be buried next to Ingrid, don&amp;#039;t you?&amp;quot; It was true then\u2014the kid went two for two\u2014and it would be convenient for the narrative if it were still. But this is a mess in progress, churning freely. And I&amp;#039;ve grown up a little. The first girl I picked up last summer\u2014the first girl I&amp;#039;d ever picked up\u2014was from a subculture of twentysomething hip-hop intellectuals, devout readers of Missbehave magazine. She introduced me to the concept of the DILF. It was a revelation: My children don&amp;#039;t disqualify me; I may yet get another chance at this. Still, I flee my house each night at dusk, searching for that third salvation, haunted by the equation of singleness with loneliness, disaster, death of the soul.  No one wants to hear it. I&amp;#039;ve learned that otherwise intelligent, urbane, and morally imaginative women\u2014the bulk of my friends\u2014often cannot bring themselves, even when they invite the conversation, to sit through my stories, to deviate from a high-contrast model of human behavior, to see how gray it can be in practice, to see the devil in their friend. It&amp;#039;s a formidable blind spot\u2014too close to home, a last taboo. I had lunch with an old friend, a married mother of two in her late forties. She listened stonily as I told her what I&amp;#039;d learned from this fling and that, how, by being free to bounce through different situations each night, I had matured more in a few months than I had during years of self-abnegating stasis. &amp;quot;l&amp;#039;m not sure you&amp;#039;re suffering enough,&amp;quot; she said.  I&amp;#039;ve suffered plenty. I still suffer. But our reigning cultural norms demand that, like Hank Moody in Californication, I suffer more. Possibly forever. Unless I go back to my wife. Why? At each point the choices I&amp;#039;ve made have been my own, I thought: original; considered to a standstill if not always wise; not intended to harm even when panicked, irresponsible, or simply stupid; and not at all easy. I didn&amp;#039;t plan to be a poster boy for male recklessness and marital disaster, wicked, dismissable, a cliche. But the more I wriggle\u2014I&amp;#039;m a good person! I&amp;#039;m a good father! It&amp;#039;s complicated!\u2014the more I settle into that grip. I should have seen it coming, the hesitation from my friends (and former friends), the derision in the eyes of and occasional open attacks from friends&amp;#039; wives (it&amp;#039;s not contagious). But apparently, with the burden of being a lightning rod for the fears of women and the resentments of burdened men (three drinks in, they all admit they&amp;#039;re jealous), with the responsibility of being a foil for everyone&amp;#039;s overtaxed moral systems, a dose of daftness is a part of my new persona. I should have known from the frowns on the Park Slope playground that I couldn&amp;#039;t take this course, feel and show no regret, then reintegrate without friction into bastions where happy marriages are flaunted. I should have known it three years ago when a single, 42-year-old very good friend of mine went out of her way to make breakfast plans on my birthday, then didn&amp;#039;t appear. I called her. No answer. I tried her for weeks. I pictured her dead in her Upper West Side one-bedroom, prized dachshund licking at her corpse. I finally called a mutual friend and asked what was going on. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s fine,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;She just doesn&amp;#039;t like that you&amp;#039;re swanning around town with that little blond girl.  &amp;quot;My father always said, &amp;quot;Your mother and I were dumb and lucky.&amp;quot; I wanted to be lucky, in the only way I knew such luck to be defined: Find someone young and build a life together that minimizes pain. But I hadn&amp;#039;t been. I was just dumb. I chose badly, not in women, but in time. It wasn&amp;#039;t only that I didn&amp;#039;t give myself the years I needed to grow up. I didn&amp;#039;t give myself the years I needed to know what it would mean to grow up. And that haste, prolonged by fear, free of malice, had a devastating effect on five lives, one of them probably too young to be a player in her own devastation, and two of them certainly so.  We&amp;#039;re out of the car this time, me and the same son that same summer, standing on a pier on Fire Island, watching the waves.  &amp;quot;Daddy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, my love?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Maybe your next girlfriend will already know how to live by herself.&amp;quot; After we broke up, I ran into Ingrid nearly every week, all over town, more than I&amp;#039;d ever run into anyone at random in 20 years in New York City. One day, walking with the boys, I had such a strong premonition we would see her that I mentioned it to them. I didn&amp;#039;t want them to be surprised. Two blocks on, around a corner, there she was. A few weeks later, I bumped into her as she was walking home at nine in the morning. It was the first time I&amp;#039;d seen her alone since she&amp;#039;d moved out. And without the distractions of others, or maybe because I had grown up a little, or maybe it was just a trick of the light, I saw her for the first time as a little girl\u2014is that what everyone had been trying to tell me?\u2014too much a stranger to herself to settle down. As I was. Twice. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a9100/danger-man-18902/>