Somewhere between heartbreak, solitude and survival, I stopped confusing male attention with emotional safety.

At 11:43 on a Tuesday night, a married man of 20 years sent me a message from Tinder asking what I was looking for.

The honest answer would have been: peace. But also chemistry. But also loyalty. But also desire. But also somebody emotionally stable enough not to detonate my nervous system for sport.

Which, in 2026, narrows the field considerably.

Twenty years married, and there he was on a dating app sounding less like a man risking his domestic life and more like somebody trying to arrange fibre installation. Calm. Efficient. Almost administrative.

That was the unsettling part.

Not the cheating itself. Humanity has always cheated. We invented adultery approximately six minutes after inventing monogamy and have spent the intervening centuries writing novels, operas and country songs about the fallout. The alarming thing was how frictionless it all seemed now. No guilt. No panic. No tortured moral collapse. Just a middle-aged man casually browsing emotional alternatives between ordinary life obligations.

To be clear, I did not meet him. We spoke briefly on WhatsApp before I lost interest in becoming unpaid support staff in somebody else’s secret life. I have no desire to be hidden, managed, lied about or squeezed into the margins of another woman’s marriage like some kind of emotional Airbnb.

And yet the conversation stayed with me.

Not because I wanted him.

Because once upon a time, I probably........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)