Cheatie Sweetie

I had the weirdest dream last night (the one thing late nights are good for are the weird, trippy dreams they produce). I dreamt that I invented a new holiday called “Cheaters Day”, in which people celebrated by having sex with someone other than their spouse or romantic partner. It was celebrated, of course, on May 31st, my birthday, and the whole idea was that you and your partner both celebrated Cheaters Day at the same time, with each other’s full approval and blessing. It was envisioned as a sort of complement to Valentine’s Day a few months before – a day to celebrate not dedicated monogamous love, but rather the fact that there were so many other sexy motherfuckers out there in the world besides the person you had chosen to spend your life with.

There was this whole formal procedure to Cheaters Day, much like a formal dance… For weeks beforehand you would carefully check out the people in and out of your life, neighbours and co-workers and classmates and even the clerk at the cafe where you get your coffee every morning. At a certain point you would then ask the person to be your “cheatie sweetie” for May 31st, at which point they could either politely accept or decline. Hallmark, seizing an opportunity, had even started a line of “Will you be my cheatie sweetie?” cards, which in my dream had turned into their third most popular type of cards after Christmas and birthday ones. It was customary to rent a hotel room for Cheaters Day as well, which meant that the hotels were fully behind the holiday, most of them running Cheaters Day specials in order to drum up business on this totally random day of the year.

In my dream, Cheaters Day had become really popular, really fast, mostly because of the nature of the holiday itself, it was actually seen by most as a romantic gesture, an opportunity to let your spouse have this incredibly hot sex once a year with someone besides yourself, without having to worry that it was a prelude to your spouse leaving you. In fact, most couples reported that their own monogamous sex lives took a dramatic upswing in the weeks following Cheaters Day, simply from the thrill of celebrating the holiday in the first place. I, of course, being the inventor of Cheaters Day, received dozens of invitations every year to be people’s cheatie sweeties, and while I was trying to figure out how I was going to maintain an erection for 24 hours as I met up with four or five different people over the course of the holiday, I woke up.

Damnit!