Why Strip Clubs Are Good For Marriage

During a recent business trip, I found myself shoe-horned into the back of a taxi with colleagues in various stages of inebriation, hurtling through chancy neighborhoods of Baltimore. I was on my Blackberry with my wife, going through the litany of "kids/mail/bills/when are you coming home/this single mother crap is getting old" when the cabbie abruptly stopped at our destination.

"Gotta go, hon," I said. "We just pulled up to the strip club." My colleagues turned their heads my way, mouths open.

"You told her you were going here tonight?" one colleague asked.

"My wife would throw my junk on the lawn faster than you could say divorce lawyer," slurred the client we'd been wining and dining earlier that evening.

The panicked look on my co-workers' faces said it all: most men are terrified to admit to what really transpires on the road—and what inspires them in the bedroom when they come home.

Let's be clear: if your man plies his trade taking client abuse or has ever attended a conference that finds him in a hotel banquet hall for 12 hours of Powerpoint torture, you can assume your honey has blown off steam, at least once, by contributing to some gal's plastic surgery fund, one crumpled bill at a time.

I am the garden-variety business-traveling strip club patron, for whom a lap dance with a client is like a harmless game of golf. You tuck a dollar bill or five or 20 inside a G-string, sit back for an innocent bump n' grind, have a few laughs with associates over the thundering drums of a Motley Crue song, wonder where your money went as you comb the sticky carpet looking for stray bills around your seat, and leave the joint lighter of both heart and wallet.

My wife knows she has absolutely nothing to worry about, and neither do most women. She knows I would not blow her trust by paying a scantily clad woman $500 to take my pasty, fat married a** into some back room for an hour. No good can come of that. Plus I'm too lazy to bulldoze my tracks and too cheap to burn a good Brooks Brothers shirt when perfume and glitter won't come out of the fabric.

Now, that's not a wholesale guarantee of good male behavior, and I don't pretend to represent mankind as a whole. My wife and I have been married for 16 years; the drama quotient is remarkably low, the passion remarkably hot and we've never needed any chemical or psychological intermediaries to keep it that way.

"You can take care of yourself to your heart's content in a hotel room, but you best not bring that filth into my bedroom," declared one of my wife's friends when I intentionally brought up the subject of shaker bars at our holiday party. Interestingly, she said this to no one in particular at maximum volume, avoiding the repentant gaze of her husband. From my vantage point, it looked like the mini-qiuiche he was swallowing suddenly turned to broken glass.