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Poly-Infidelity | Aug 10 2000

Professional polygraph examiner Martin Schermerhorn offers polygraph tests for a fee at truthorlie.com. He charges $300 for a standard test and $400 for a test involving issues of fidelity. (Could it be (I rather doubt this) that infidelity is more difficult to detect than other lies?) To the surprise of no one, Schermerhorn thinks that polygraphs are great and claims that no liar can beat them, assuming that said liar knows he or she lying. That is, unless the liar is one of those rare individuals, all of whom are sociopaths according to Schermerhorn, who can tell a lie and honestly believe it. This part interests me. Are there really people who can tell a lie and honestly believe it? If so, can such people even be said to be lying? The dictionary indicates not, defining the verb “lie” thusly: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” A lie is intentional. Can one intentionally attempt to deceive someone while honestly believing the truth of what one is saying? Such double-think seems impossible, does it not? At the same time, I seem to remember lying as a kid – lord knows about what – and feeling totally convinced that what I was saying was true (although I knew damn well it wasn’t) because some larger thing was true. I would switch the larger true thing with the smaller false thing, and in this way convince myself of my truthfulness. Maybe convince isn’t the right word. I don’t know what the right word is. Is it distract? I think it’s distract. I would distract myself with my own puffed up righteousness. Ah, but would my righteousness have beaten Schermerhorn’s lie detector? Certainly Schermerhorn thinks not; unless of course I’m one of his lie-believing sociopaths, which for all I know, I may be. (Do such people know who they are? Something tells me not. Which roundaboutly points to another use of Schermerhorn’s handy-dandy polygraph: the detection of lie-believing sociopaths. You ask people to lie; if the test doesn’t indicate that they’re lying, they must lie-believing sociopaths.)

Speaking of infidelity, I once had a date with a woman who told me that her previous boyfriend had managed to cheat on her for four years straight, despite that fact she knew his whereabouts nearly 24 hours a day, in part because her best friend worked at his office.

How did the cad pull it off? Bike rides. During lunch he would go on bike rides and return all sweaty.

I don’t know about you, but I find it weird that she knew where he was all the time. Do you keep track of your significant other (assuming you have one) to this degree? I thought not. So she had to have some reason to keep him under such intense surveillance. Well, either this or she was simply the super-suspicious type. Personally, I suspect a combination of the two, because later in the date she mentioned that she was making a radio documentary about polyfidelity and was considering having a “secondary” relationship with one of the guys she was interviewing. “What is a secondary relationship?” you ask. Well, it is a relationship that is both less significant and less permanent than a primary relationship. Within this certain polyfidelity community (apparently there are many such communities, with varying practices and lingos), a member could and often did have several concurrent secondary relationships, but only one primary relationship. At a time. My date believed that this primary/secondary deal pretty much did away with cheating and jealousy, which was why she wanted to try it: she’d had enough of cheating and jealousy from her relationship with the lunchtime cyclist. I may have chuckled when she explained all this to me, I don’t remember. I certainly hope I didn’t chuckle. The more I think about it, the less I think I chuckled; I’m not the type to chuckle at my dates. Moreover, as I recall, I was quite attracted to this woman, in large part because she reminded of another woman I was also quite attracted to but who as it turns out she was nothing like. This being utterly irrelevant to the subject at hand.

I just checked my journal to see if I noted when she brought up the fact that her father had repeatedly cheated on her mother. Unfortunately I did not. However I did write about something I’d since forgotten. My date’s friend, the one who worked in the office of the lunchtime cyclist, sat a mere five feet from the guy, in the next cubicle, and therefore could hear him when he talked on the phone. This is key. The friend was monitoring the guy’s calls. Why was the friend monitoring the guy’s calls? I’m going to make a guess, in lieu of additional information, that the guy had a history of infidelity, either in his relationship with my date or before, and so my date had enlisted her friend to monitor his calls. He eluded her, however, by using a beeper. His lunchtime lover would beep him, and he would take a quick break and call her on the pay phone in the basement of a nearby pizzeria. (Details, details, love those details.)

I confess that this business with the beeper and the bike makes the whole thing rather thrilling to me: I imagine the lunchtime cyclist racing to the apartment of his lover, his head filled with images of their frantic, sweat-inducing couplings. Which is to say that my date’s over-the-top surveillance – which one assumes the guy knew about; why else bother with the beeper? – upped the payoff for successful cheating. This is natural. I see it as a little dance, cheater and cheated, liar and lied to, each requiring the other to make it work. Which is why the relationship lasted so long: deep down they needed each other.

Which brings us to the key question in all this, a question I unfortunately have no way of knowing the answer to, since I neglected to ask it at the time and as it turned out only saw my date one other time, that being at an awkward party thrown by the guy she was already seeing when we had our date, though she never breathed a word of him to me at the time (no, not the polyfidelity dude; another guy): how was the lunchtime cyclist finally caught?

May I guess? I would like to guess. His lover turned him in. Why? Because he cheated on her as well.

(Oh, former date of mine whose shoulders I adored though I never dared say so: in the unlikely event that word of these scrawlings ever reach you, please email me and tell me if I have guessed correctly.)