I came very close to cheating on my wife once. It was about four or five years ago.

In my defense, we don't have sex very often, about three times a year. She loves me and cares for me and I love and care for her, but sex just isn't something she really enjoys, let alone wants. More often than not, I'm fine about it. I have porn and we have cuddles and that's enough for me and us to get by.

There was a short period of time though, where things got very difficult, very quickly because a lot of things just snowballed. We hadn't had sex for about a year at this point. I had a particularly difficult time recovering from a hernia surgery and she was in fear of losing her job. To make matters worse, for some reason my depression was raging out of control. The amount of stress this created both of us caused so much friction, not only were we not connecting on a physical level, but for the first time ever we weren't connecting on an emotional level either.

That's when my best friend from college moved back into town. As a bit of back history, I had always been madly in love with this woman and I know that she reciprocated, but nothing ever happened. Whenever I was single, she was with someone and whenever she was single, I was with someone. Eventually our lives pulled us in two different directions and we drifted apart over the years. She was recently divorced and just wanted to come back to where she used to live to try and start over in an environment she was somewhat familiar with.

We started hanging out a lot, to the knowledge and trust of my wife (who I suspect loved the distraction because it got me out of the house and out of her hair). For the first time ever, my friend was alone and I, while not alone, felt very lonely. I enjoyed our time together immensely. We talked about everything we could and when we ran out of stuff to talk about, we talked about stuff we already talked about. When we ate dinner together, we shared food off of eachothers plates. When we walked together, it was so close our shoulders would touch. I'd look her in the eye and she'd look me right back. It was heaven.

Meanwhile, at home, things were getting worse. I found out that bills were starting to pile up, not because we couldn't afford to pay them, but simply because my wife would procrastinate to the point where she'd just plain forget to pay them. We both stopped doing our chores in a passive aggressive, procrastination one upmanship. To say it was getting to get out of hand would be an understatement.

One night, I got real drunk and passed out on the couch. I woke up to a text message from my friend at about 2 in the morning. "I'm cold" it said. "Come keep me warm." I knew in my head, right then and there, that this was THE tipping point. The choice I made would probably be the permanent one. I immediately got rock hard at the idea of going over there. I thought about a lot of carnal thoughts in the span of a few seconds. My hands were shaking I had a hard time texting her back one single word. "No."

The instant I hit the send button, I walked over to the bedroom, took the two cats off the bed and tossed them out of the room, and crawled right into bed. Without getting too graphic, my wife had a pretty nice night that night. Twice. It was heaven.

I wish I could end it there, saying that one night and one decision fixed everything. It didn't though. What followed was a good year of effort on both our parts to try and get things straigthened out between us. A year of arguing, snapping, dating, laughing, blaming, cuddling, crying, and just plain being married.

We're good now. So are me and my friend, who I'm glad to say has never tried anything again. But when I think about that, and all we went through, I can understand why some people might cheat.