When pondering whether or not to stay with your actual spouse until you’re dead (as you promised you would a long-ass time ago, remember?) the first thing you need to consider is cash flow. How many rock-hard, throbbing rolls of currency can you squeeze into your greedy fists as you hit escape velocity? If the answer includes some complicated discussion of revolving credit, current HELOC rates, and the tax hit you’d take if you withdrew a large chunk of your 401k, you’ll probably need to get your brand new lover out of your car and back into your dreams in a nice clean act of Billy Ocean reverse-osmosis. 

You’re also going to want to run through some of the codependent task assignations you’ve made as a couple over the past decade or so. Because most high-functioning egalitarian marriages turn both parties into finely tuned specialists who cannot survive on their own. One spouse can bake an elaborate lasagna but doesn’t have the subtle wrist action to shove an antibiotic down the older dog’s throat. The other spouse knows how to order and install the filters on all of the HVAC vents but can’t hold more than three grocery items in his feeble brain at one time. One can spackle and paint an entire room with the dexterity and finesse of a professional contractor but doesn’t like to put on pants or leave the house more than a few times a month. The other strikes up jovial conversation with the man from the gas company but is not sure how to pay an actual gas bill -- or how much the habitat around him costs, for that matter. (“How much can cable possibly cost?” he’ll ask you in mixed company, and everyone will titter like he’s just doing his best Lucile Bluth imitation and didn’t lose his monetary management privileges a solid decade ago.) Ask yourself: Can you two mutants manage to stay alive without each other for more than a few hours?

This is about the time that you’ll start to notice the deep, deep (dick-deep!) differences between wealthy urban liberal professionals and their less-wealthy suburban moderate counterparts. Hip, rich city types like to pretend at total loyalty and duty to their spouses in public. How else would they get away with all those cool cocktail parties and steamy hot mixers cleverly disguised as children’s parties with tumblers of bourbon where the piñatas and jumpy castles should go? These people will treat you like some varietal of dirty harlot if you dare to, say, make direct eye contact with one of their spouses. Meanwhile, their lives are so heavily staffed and serviced that the faintest whiff of dissatisfaction sends them into an existential spiral, one that seems easily remedied by a single late-night call to the version of Merry Maids that comes with a blow job. (That’s offensive because the life of a cishet married human is inherently offensive at some deep, deep [deep-dickingly deep!] level. You can’t get the filth out. Trust me, I’ve tried.)

You’ve probably also observed by now that these rich urban motherfuckers actually have the cold, hard cash to fly off to Bali with their lovers, or to ditch their spouses for the burlesque dancer they met on a recent business trip to Morocco. You (a mere non-loaded mortal) drag out one pathetically unprovocative story about making out with a girl once, and all of these supposedly sophisticated elites react like you’re there to dig your toes into somebody’s ball sack under the table until he leaves his wife and his secret Merry Maid mistress for you. (That’s offensive because these things actually happen, ask Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Meanwhile, all of these soft-pawed twats are about to start swapping spouses -- splitting up households and creating new blended versions and then splitting those up and starting all over again until every single progressively-educated 5-language-speaking uber-child in the next room has 6 stepparents and 14 half-siblings and 23 maids named Harriet like some exponentially expanding sci-fi-horror parody of “The Brady Bunch.” They should all just buy a big midcentury modern compound together so they can fuck each other at random each night as wine-and-crudité hour draws to a close.

But out in the suburbs, people are legit swinging – or at least giving it a solid try. If you have a husband as hot as mine you know these things, because hot wives are everywhere but hot husbands are as rare as pink diamonds. Suburban types know they don’t have the cash or the staff support to actually leave their spouses, plus they don’t watch movies like “Marriage Story” (I haven’t seen it, just a guess) and they don’t read books about how conventional marriage is just another tool that the high-capitalist fascist overlords use to manipulate you into handing over all of your data and cash while they fuck your life in the face for free.

“Wow. I want to have sex with all of your wives.” This is what a relatively dweeby, non-douche-bro suburban husband was overheard exclaiming to a kitchen full of husbands at a holiday party in the suburbs recently. Instead of marveling over what a dick the guy was, the wives used their rich imaginations to collaboratively form a vivid mind-image of what fucking the guy as a herd might look like. 

In the suburbs, many of the women stay home and vacuum while their husbands go to work in the big city as IT guys. Some of these suburban husbands even have manly jobs, like they’re homicide detectives (ungh, yeah) or they’re restaurant-equipment salesmen who do a lot of macho glad-handing and also machinery repair (using their gigantic manly hands!) in their three-state service region. Something about this hardy population of early-bloomer males with good enough frames to play football in their youths seems to inspire the wife population to do things like amass huge volumes of cheap but increasingly daring lingerie and chat openly about searching for pole-dancing classes that still offer a solid ab workout. These women say things like “Holy shit, your ass looks amazing in those jeans! Dave! Check out Molly’s ass right now!” I’m sure that sounds completely fucking rancid to you city folk but dude, my ass does look amazing and at some point, you stop fighting the tide and you just NOM NOM NOM eat that shit up like you like it. Because you do like it, motherfucker.

Sure, when I first landed in the suburbs, I used to cringe at the pole dancing discussions. I used to roll my eyes at the lady who wore a thong and yoga pants to school pick-up, so that everywhere you looked all you saw were two perfectly articulated ass cheeks in your face. But now? I am that lady. When you work out as much as I do, why wouldn’t you want people to see your naked body everywhere you go? No one has less fucks left to give in this world than a second-rate suburban Karen like myself. There just isn’t a hell of a lot to do up here, outside of shopping for cheap dish soap at the local Big Lots. You have to amuse yourself inside the wretched confines of your filthy dirty depraved disgusting mind. 

But do these suburban humans actually divorce each other frequently? Seemingly not. Seemingly they go to strip clubs and swinger bars and come home empty-handed, armed with stories of nasty innuendo and very little actual fucking. Seemingly they remain a solid team of two while admiring various juicy ass offerings in their midsts. Seemingly they flirt rabidly and openly yet continue to fuck each other with gusto behind the scenes.

Personally, my tastes run somewhere in between the city and the suburbs. I like the idea of aggressively flirting while remaining loyal to my perfectly serviceable husband forever and ever, but I also very much relish the notion of ditching my dumb boring smelly old husband for my personal trainer and absconding to some delightful Mediterranean country with half of our cash, all of our children, and zero of our badly trained pets. My husband is an extremely handsome white man with an advanced degree whose dick still works. He will do just fine without me. Hell, he’ll be way better off without a vainglorious whore like myself dragging along behind him like some cross between a blow-up sex doll and a Speak-n-Spell that never shuts the fuck up no matter what you say or do. I’m not worried about him one bit. He probably has his next five wives lined up inside his imagination already. He’s probably been fucking them inside the rich corridors of his mind like Jimmy Carter for years now.

More power to him. Everyone laughed openly at Jimmy when he said that shit about cheating inside his head years ago, but he stuck it out with Rosalyn and you just know he’s still giving her the good Southern loving she deserves with clock-like regularity. (Hot tip: If you can imagine it, that means it’s actually happening.)

But we all have to be like Jimmy now. We all have to retreat into our imaginations as the world turns darker and every movement and sound we make is captured and digitized and stored by the exact same high-capitalist fascist overlords that are fucking our lives in the face as we speak. Forget sexting and dirty trysts — no one gets to screw around on the DL anymore. There is no DL. You can barely write an email with the faintest insinuation of impurity to an innocent non-colleague friendy (cute platonic-ish friend-ish) these days without landing yourself in some Easily Blackmail-able and Revenge-Porned database somewhere. You can fuck your life in the face by ditching your spouse entirely on a random whim or fuck your life in the face by staying with your spouse until his ass falls out, there are no other options. 

You knew this tale of sexy fun had to turn dark eventually, didn’t you? That’s how Molly does it, bitches. Settle in and get used to it, because it might just last forever. 

It must be Sex Week, because Polly just unpacked some adorably romantic adjectives about picking up some hot slices of ass to go. And yes, I agree, this is the best newsletter in the known universe, tell all of your boring friends about it already. They could use a little wild and dipshitty fun in their lives — trust me, I’ve read Polly’s letters, I know.