One night, while sipping wine in my apartment, we started adding items to the list of lascivious things we wanted to do together:

A shopping spree at a sex shop.
A threesome with another woman.
Sex clubs.
Light S&M.
Role playing.
Orgasm control.

I didn’t even know what “orgasm control” was. It sounded frightening.

“Anything else?” I asked.

There was one other thing Sophia wanted on our compendium of carnal delights: an open relationship. Sophia, who was openly bisexual, was convinced monogamy wasn’t for her, even though she’d never tried polyamory herself.

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As a college senior with plans to attend dental school, I never imagined my life would end up this way. I figured I'd graduate college, take the summer to prep for the Dental Admission Test, get into schools, then begin my trek toward normal, civilized life. That's what everyone else was doing in the biology department.

But I had no idea of the turmoil that lay in store. I ended up at Victoria's Secret the same way most men end up on daytime talk shows: I got dumped by my girlfriend; I couldn't get a new girlfriend to save my life; and, to top it all off, I began growing breasts. I now believe my boobs were the result of eating too much soy, which has a high amount of estrogen in it, and has been known to cause such reactions in prepubescent girls. But at the time I didn't realize this as I was simply too busy freaking-the-hell-out. It's one thing, as a man, to feel like you don't understand women; it is another to feel like you're becoming one.

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The lyrics echoed in the background as he shouted about STDs and unplanned pregnancy from the pulpit. Cause I am waiting for you, praying for you darling, wait for me too, wait for me as I wait for you. One by one we each placed a ring on our fourth finger and made vows to an apparently bi-curious Jesus who took teenage husbands and wives by the dozen that night.

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I’d proposed to Ellie in 2009 in the town where Sappho was born. At sunset, we climbed a hill overlooking the ocean and in a very ineloquent fashion, I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me. Despite the grand romantic gesture of a proposal, when we got home from Greece, we hardly told a soul about our engagement. Partially it was because we were in a new city and nobody knew us. Partially it was because gay marriage isn’t legal in California, so announcing our engagement felt a little like playing pretend. We wanted legitimacy, and not in the form of Facebook comments. But we couldn’t have it, so we accepted our new life as betrotheds without fuss or fanfare.

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We had our first kiss in a dark corner. Before long, we were flying down the stairs of the club and climbing into the back of a cab. Within 30 minutes we would be back at her house for hours of groping and tussling, but when I asked the cabbie to pop the trunk, she asked, “What is that big, green bag you’re carrying?” I looked at my feet and confessed.

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Me? I may have done the most heroic thing of all. I went on Match.com for a year.

The thing was, I had just done something brave, which was to write a memoir with my son, tour the East Coast together, and appear on stages before hundreds of people at a time. But one dream coming true doesn't mean you give up on other lifelong dreams. You're not dream-greedy to want, say, a cool career and a mate. And having realized this one long-shot dream with my grown child gave me the confidence to try something even harder: to date.

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It all began nearly a year earlier when an essay of mine, adapted from my unpublished memoir, appeared on Salon. The essay starts off with me, my ex-wife and several gay men standing next to a Jacuzzi on Fire Island watching a straight couple we’d been having public sex with have public sex with each other. The story progresses, or degenerates, as my ex and I smoke crystal meth from a glass pipe in the company of two gay porn stars. It’s a story of the high life — fast living with a partner whose motto was “more is more.” Things end with me pulling myself out of an emotional death spiral by leaving everything about that life behind — including my wife.

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We are here because Tova began pacing my apartment, her tongue shooting out of her snout; she worked her jaws and licked the air. The vet tech who answered the phone, the same one who hands Poochie’s owner a leash and collar with a heart-shaped tag, told me to bring her in right away: “It could be gastric torsion.” Gastric torsion: The belly, swollen with gas, crushes the diaphragm, pinches blood from the heart. It could kill my sweet girl—the one who finally wakes me with head-butts and nuzzling after the alarm has gone off; the one who dances when my key turns in the door—within an hour.

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I had come to New York from Los Angeles to collect the engagement ring I’d commissioned for the girl I wasn’t certain I wanted to marry. Five months earlier I had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a job in “the industry,” and I found everything about “the industry” industrially inauthentic. That May, New York represented everything I worried I might never have.

Couples streamed into Central Park, enjoying the late light. Pinstriped professionals knocked off early from work to catch the first evening of the summer, strolling with their elegant wives on the side streets off of Park Avenue. They seemed, all of them, on their way to riches and happiness.

I’d had the ring designed by James de Givenchy, formerly of Christie’s, now an independent designer of jewelry for, I imagined, the rich and happy. James was no doubt slumming it with me and my six-carat pin-cushion sapphire, with its barely perceptible hairline fracture that made it affordable to me, and I was grateful for his attention. He was glamorous in an easy, aristo-French, signet ring way. Unlike the rest of the sloppily preppy Upper East Siders I knew, James was always beautifully turned out; bespoke Charvet shirts and well-cut jackets, jeans always dark and new. I wanted him to be my friend.

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"Our marriage is over,” I told her. “At the very least it's over in the way it used to be – which is a good thing, because I'm not very happy, and I don't think you are either."

The experimentation had gone on for a couple of years. I’d had relations with half a dozen or so guys (always safe). I had quickly discovered the lively, burgeoning world of secretly bisexual married men – most of whom are in their 40s when they get enough courage to step out. My gay father had always told me how many married guys he'd meet at the bars – and now, I was one of them. When I made the decision to sleep with a guy behind my wife's back, I also decided I’d never tell a living soul about it. Ever. Of this I was certain.

But there I was, spilling everything to her. I thought it would be the end of us. Instead, it was a whole new beginning.

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I was 36 years old and I’d never had a lover, a fact I was ashamed to admit and had only divulged to my therapist.

Although I’d wanted to be in a relationship, my attempts to date brought on a total body fight-or-flight response. I played out idealized romantic scenarios in my mind, but when it came to actually being with a man, I felt like somebody’s prey. At the same time, I was terrified of being abandoned.

When I noticed a potential boyfriend looking at me with interest, I was convinced he’d pass me over once he saw through my superficial appearance: with my clothes on, I believed, I was false advertising. I imagined that once he saw me naked he’d view me in a light of lesser worth, because of what had happened to me, because of what I’d been involved in when I was a child.

As a girl, I’d been sexually abused, manipulated into acts that entailed the same body parts and motions as intercourse, but that was rape, my therapist said, that wasn’t the same thing as having sex: I was a virgin.

But I didn’t consider myself to be a virgin. I considered myself to be an anomaly.

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I had just gotten a three-picture deal with Disney. Well, it wasn't really a three-picture deal. They hired me to write a script for one of their moronic ideas (Sinbad in the Army with dogs), and in the contract they locked me up for another two movies for slightly more money each time. But at the bottom of every page was writ in small letters: “We can terminate this contract for any reason at any time for perpetuity and eternity in this and every other conceivable universe and pay you NOTHING.” I asked my agent and she said I could tell everybody I had a three-picture deal with Disney. Even though I didn't really. And that, in a nutshell, is Hollywood, baby.

But the thought of telling the truth about myself made me hot and clammy, sticky and jittery, teeth tearing into cuticles till they bled. I was much more comfortable working on my buddy script about two 12-year-olds who go to Vegas and beat the mob. Or my mobster-becomes-a-vampire script. Or my “Some Like It Hot” cross-dressing baseball script.

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Philip and I met at Princeton — two ambiguously exotic, international business types, headed for New York and doing a very good job of seeming like American yuppies. We dated for four years and married at 24, took prestigious jobs in business, lived in New York and Paris and Amsterdam. I loved Philip deeply. That part was real. But I can admit now that I was pretending about the rest. The whole persona. It felt unnatural, but I clung to it. “I owe it to myself, don’t I?” I said about my job, about the polished man I had chosen. “Ten years ago I was sleeping in a refugee camp. There’s no actual choice here.”

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This is the phrase that sears through me as I stare at the rabbi who’s been hired to preside over my cousin’s small, graveside funeral. Minus the gray hair, he looks exactly the same as he did two decades ago, when he wasn’t a rabbi and we lay together partially clothed one late summer night in a neighborhood playground that I had loved as a child.

“Give me head,” he had said after about 20 minutes of making out in the playground’s sand pit underneath the swings.

“You want me to give you head?” I was a barely 19-year-old, conflicted Orthodox Jewish girl, the type who wore long skirts for synagogue and short ones for drinking at bars that let me get away with my fake ID. I was also a virgin who hadn’t yet solved the problem of branching out sexually while keeping what I would later recognize to be a rather idiosyncratic covenant with God.

He undid his belt, clearly disregarding the question mark at the end of my sentence. “That would be nice.”

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I’m a married psychotherapist now, living in a city of hills and bicyclists. Often my clients bike to my office. They walk in wearing one pants leg rolled up and put their helmets next to them on the sofa/couch. Each time I feel a wave of admiration.

This morning a very bright, sexually adventurous 28-year-old woman came for her weekly consultation with me. She has a strikingly pretty face, no makeup, a shaved head and a mischievous boyishness. Her bike helmet has stickers that declare “Question Gender” and “Geeks Do It Better.” She works in tech. Last week, she moved in with her new partner, whom I’ll call Aaron, a very bright and sexually adventurous 28-year-old man who also works in tech. They spent the last six months falling deeply in love. Their compatibility is obvious to everyone. She came to therapy because she wanted greater emotional intimacy -- and she is in the process of building that -- but she is still afraid that she doesn’t know how, afraid that not knowing how means that she is incapable of greater intimacy, that she isn’t the type of person who has a stable long-term relationship. Perhaps she had been damaged?

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“Shall we go?” I asked Greg. I’d known him since he became my aide during my sophomore year of high school. Being wheelchair-bound due to cerebral palsy, I needed someone to take notes for me, feed me and, yes, even take me to the bathroom. Seven years later, he was the ideal traveling companion.

“Yes, we definitely should,” he said. Years of practice had accustomed him to my barely understandable speech, as well as the perversity of my thoughts.

Alas, it was not to be. Just when it seemed that my endeavors to have sex this one time would finally pay off, God delivered a crushing blow.

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There was a lot of living between the silky Simone and the mangy mutt. It was mostly delicious, beaches and beds, reading out loud, laughter unspooling through the days. Even a shared stint of unemployment we spent traveling through Italy, slowing down in Florence so we could cook from the markets. Fava beans were in season. When we met, on a junket for journalists in the Bahamas, we were magazine editors living a continent apart. Kevin had read a feature I had written quoting one of his favorite Berkeley professors. He thought I was smart. So we began our relationship via email, Los Angeles to Vermont. It was always built on words. It wasn’t until he sent me a poem, the one about eating the plums, that I understood he was at least flirting with flirting.

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I never planned to pledge a sorority. I went to Emerson to be around nerdy artistic kids in an urban setting, but I arrived to find the small liberal arts school lacking in a party atmosphere of any kind. Where we had mocktails and screenings of Charlie Kaufman films, I wanted red plastic cups and basement make-outs. In that first week, I was lonely and tired of sitting by myself in the dining hall. I missed my friends from back home. So when a girl from my dorm asked me to go to a sorority rush event, and I found myself in a roomful of girls who talked about parties and boys and looked so comfortable together, I desperately wanted to belong. I attended more rush week events, hoping to meet a few girls I could call my friends. I never thought I’d meet the girl I’m going to marry.

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Manhattan may boast bloated salaries, Indian food delivered at 4 a.m. and the glorious perfume of Central Park in autumn and of damp and dying leaves commingled with the smoke of Halal carts, but as I aged, I learned these perks came with a huge anthropological flaw: its ratio of men to women. Statistics cite our city’s population of single women as being 210,000 more than its available men. It feels more like one man for every six or seven women. This biological trip-up is easy to ignore in a Neverland of middle-aged Peter Pans and Wendys. As I enjoyed an exciting career at CNN and Bloomberg TV, matched by an invigorating social life, my 20s and early 30s blew past me in a torrent of late nights at the Spotted Pig, front row seats at the Marc Jacobs show and Moet at Rose Bar. Did I mention Michael Stipe once hand-rolled me a “cigarette” at 60 Thompson? I am finally good enough, I thought, as I considered my boozy, status-driven pursuits.

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Well, maybe met is too strong a word. My boyfriend M. and I walked into a crowded party and I caught a glimpse of her across the room, clutching the green neck of a Heineken and laughing at a joke I could not hear. I pivoted on my toes, walked the other way, and spent the rest of the night keeping her in my peripheral vision while avoiding eye contact.

So how did I know it was her? How does anyone these days recognize a person they’ve never met? Facebook, of course.

But I hadn’t just caught a glimpse of this girl in one of M.’s profile pictures, or seen a grainy icon next to a message on someone’s wall. Over the past several weeks, I had scoured every photo on her profile, hundreds of them, desperately hoping to read into them some explanation for what had happened.

Oh, and what happened was this: I had stolen her boyfriend.

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