I am sitting on our Barcelona terrace with a cortado, watching the Mediterranean light do that thing it does in February—turning everything golden and honest—and I am thinking about a woman I haven’t seen in twenty years. I am thinking about a fallen log in the Tennessee woods and the hours we spent talking about Dostoevsky, God, and the meaning of our restless lives. I am thinking about the extraordinary conversations we had between bouts of torrid lovemaking. And I am thinking about how, when her husband asked what she missed most about our affair, she answered without hesitation: my friend.

She missed the friend. I did too. I still do.

Here is what the research tells us, and it confirms what my body has always known:

Over half of all extramarital sex—53.5 percent, according to a University of Colorado study analyzing thirteen thousand Americans—happens with someone we know well. A close friend.

The 2022 General Social Survey found that most casual sex is sex with a friend. Sixty percent of college students report having had a “friends with benefits” arrangement, and when asked the main advantage, nearly sixty percent said “no commitment”—but I suspect they meant no performance. With a friend, you can just be.

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá made this case magnificently in Sex at Dawn: we did not evolve for lifelong sexual monogamy with a single partner. Our ancestors shared everything—food, shelter, childcare, and yes, sexual pleasure. The nuclear family as we worship it is an invention roughly as old as agriculture, which is to say it is a blink of evolutionary time. We have been friends sharing bodies for a hundred thousand years. We have been shaming each other for it for maybe five thousand.

My first affair, at forty-eight, after twenty-seven years of monogamous marriage, was with a friend who listened to me—really listened—for the first time in decades. She sat on that mossy log and heard the questions I had been swallowing since seminary. We talked about Rand and Shakespeare and whether a person has complete freedom of choice. For six months, we fed each other’s famishment—body, mind, soul, and spirit. And when the guilt consumed me—because I was still a good Christian then, still tethered to the moral code that kept my brain free but my body imprisoned—I confessed. I went to her husband. I asked his forgiveness.

He gave it in that performative Christian way. Then he forbade me from ever contacting her again.

I once said to her during the affair, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our spouses could just understand how much we care for each other and let us meet once a week for a few hours? She laughed so hard. “Oh Randy,” she said, “there is absolutely no chance in hell that would ever happen.”

She was right. In the America we inhabited, drenched in evangelical purity culture, a married person could not have an intimate friendship with someone else—let alone a sexual one—without detonating their entire world. The cultural taboo was absolute. And so we detonated anyway. The affair ended. The friendship was harshly amputated. My marriage limped on for five more horrific years of shaming and distrust, as only Christians can do.

My second affair, five years later, was also with a close friend. That one ended my marriage. She was already in the process of a divorce. That friend’s name is Gina. And she did not just end my marriage—she began my life. Again, I found myself asking:

Why can’t two people who genuinely care for each other share occasional intimacy without everything exploding?

Fifteen years later, I can tell you that what started as an affair between two famished friends became the most complete relationship I have ever known. Gina is my muse, my model, my inspiration—the woman who champions me as no one else in the world has done. We have had over five thousand in-depth conversations over cocktails and coffee, on terraces in Austin, Nashville, on our farm, in Dunedin, and now in Barcelona. We have mind-blowing sex—the kind that gets better, not worse, with years of trust and exploration. We have sat with each other through the loss of our children, our friends, our country, our God, and she has never once flinched. She is the first person in sixty-seven years who has seen all of me and stayed.

Esther Perel, whose work I devour, argues that we now expect our partners to provide what an entire village once supplied: friendship, intellectual stimulation, emotional security, erotic adventure, spiritual companionship. She is right. But what Gina and I have discovered goes further: even when your partnership does provide abundantly—and ours does—the human soul still longs for communion in its many forms. One magnificent relationship does not cancel the need for others. It makes you brave enough to seek them.

I have no regrets about either affair. Zero. What I regret is the devastation—and every shred of that devastation was manufactured by a cultural taboo that insists friends must never become lovers, that marriage must be a sexual prison, and that the body’s deepest longings are evidence of moral failure.

From this terrace, at sixty-seven, that taboo looks ridiculous.

If sex with friends were simply allowed—openly, honestly, with the kind of communication Perel champions—I believe far fewer marriages would end in the carnage mine did. Far fewer children would lose their fathers. Far fewer women would sit in shame, punished for the sin of wanting to be heard and touched by someone who actually showed up.

I know this is heretical. I have been a heretic for twenty years now, and it suits me. The wisdom of sex with friends is ancient. We are only just remembering it.