500 years ago, you were fucking with God. You were poking your nose into the pre-ordained realm that he had so harmoniously set into motion. You were foregoing the natural order that was perfected in the union of man and wife. And you were burned at the stake for it. Or beheaded.

150 years ago, you were fucking with civilised society. You were throwing a nasty little wrench into the works of etiquette and propriety. And you were named and shamed as a cuckolder and probably banged up in a mental ward for being ‘inconstant’ or ‘hysterical’.

50 years ago, you were fucking with the family-unit. You were undermining everything that was right and just and good in the Western world. You were ruining a man. And you were forced to pack up and leave town in the sure knowledge that your name would live on in infamy after you left.

Today, you are only fucking with him. We know too much about the dynamics of relationships, the insurmountable pull of pheromones and chemistry, the impermanence of devotion.

As the moments and days and weeks and years move forward, your love also moves, in sluggish, undulating waves. And you are compelled to peer harder down the forking paths that face you every single day, every sublime moment. You strain to see the future, wondering if you have the power to persuade it, pushing imperceptibly on the options, scraping up against the alternatives to see if they scald, stretching them out into delicious choices.

And he is there, by your side but apart from you, and the question isn’t really whether or not you have betrayed him. The question now is whether you can credit him with knowing - or at least guessing – that you only exist as a series of unwinding impulses, a tiny little world shattered by infinite striations and branching potentialities.

Does he know that the things you desire, the things that he is not, are completely outside his realm? Does he know that they belong to you? That you love them with a passion that does not want to be bridled with guilt? That the more space you have to love them, the more you will wind yourself around him, creating the myth that is you, which, in turn, compels him to love you? That the love you have for each other will expand and encompass everything that lies between you, whether it is shared or not?

Does he understand that you need these things to be a woman?