I joined the 21st Century a few weeks ago and signed up for Facebook.  While the Facebook software loaded up the names of friends it found in my AOL inbox, one in particular surprised me: my wife's. Hers was an invitation only page so I sent her a friends request.  Days passed without a reply until I confronted her about it one day while she checked her e-mail.

"So I'm good enough to marry but not good enough to be your Facebook friend?"

"I never check my Facebook page."

I playfully took the mouse and clicked through several pages of spam until I spotted my Facebook request.

"Well, you can do it now. It'll only take a second."

 She gave me that "don't tell me what to do" look only a wife can deliver then promised to get around to it later.

I waited a few more days and still nothing. At first, I didn't think much of it. She will go days without putting her laundry up until I get seeing a freshly laundered basket of clothes on the kitchen table and put her unmentionables away myself. Procrastinating in regards to my friends request seemed perfectly predictable.

But last week I decided to have a little fun at her expense.  I typed "cute guy" into Google Images and created a fake Facebook profile for my chosen hunk. While my wife hogged the desktop, I sent her a friend request via my laptop. Guess what? Within minutes, she accepted my request!

While I snooped around her Facebook page, a few peculiarities caught my eye. First, no wedding pictures nor mention of her marital status. And secondly, all her Facebook friends were cute guys!

When I foolishly asked her why all of her friends had Y chromosomes, I naturally got my ass handed to me for sticking my nose in places it did not belong. She left in a huff this Sunday night, allegedly to buy fish food. Three hours later she came home empty-handed, which was not unexpected since all our pet stores close at 6 on the Sabbath.

I have yet to broach this topic again and am debating my next move.  Personally I don't mind if she wants a little action on the side; it's the being lied to that I find unacceptable. She was still a virgin when we met so I imagine a little sexual curiosity about other guys is perfectly natural.

And if we're being frank, I feel at times like I retired from the dating game too early in life. Like Roger Clemens did numerous times, I've got that itch to play again. You see, dating is a lot like baseball. Each sport is cyclical: dead ball eras are soon followed by home run eras and back again. Unfortunately I began my own dating career during what we playboys refer to as the "blue ball" era.  Guys remember the time well: both Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton found themselves embroiled in sexual harassment suits while the Miller Brewing Company fired Jerold J. Mackenzie from his $95,000-per-year job for discussing a Seinfeld episode with a female co-worker.

While the frustrated baseball players of the early '90s began using performance enhancing drugs like Steroids and HGH to up their power numbers, we single men adopted our own dating enhancing drugs such as alcohol and roofies to up our own numbers.

While those around me indulged in the date rape era, I can proudly say every notch I carved unto my bedpost I came about honestly. I have never knowingly used dating enhancing drugs. Admittedly, I did take Paxil during the 1998 dating season--a drug that is now known to cause four hour erections in those who use it--but at the time a doctor had prescribed it for social anxiety disorder so I consider myself clean.

Now that I am married, our society has seemingly entered a sexual Shangrai-Lai. There is no longer a need to get a woman drunk or slip some Flunitrazepam into her drink if you want to get lucky. As Good Morning America puts it, "oral sex is the new good night kiss".

The language of infidelity is quickly fading into the past.  A decade ago we used words like cheating, adultery and swinging to describe sex outside marriage, words that connote lies, hellfire and really bad aftershave respectively. But today? The broken marriage has been replaced by the open marriage. Every day more and more people are realizing monogamy is a medieval institution that breeds jealousy and possessiveness propped up by Republicans who don't even practice it as a campaign wedge issue to win themselves the votes of the Religious Right.  Monogamy has outlived its usefulness in a modern society where the pill, abortion and DNA testing are all readily available.

Is polyamory--which dictionary.com defines as  "participation in multiple and simultaneous loving or sexual relationships"--the wave of the future?  For the good of mankind, I hope it is. Both my wife and myself had really let ourselves go during our first year of marriage. She put on some weight while I stopped working out, lost my muscle tone and began to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shaggy of Scooby Doo fame. Since my wife put up her Facebook page, she has started working out every day and watching what she eats. Meanwhile, I've actually shaved, cut my hair and joined my hometown gym. We both look and feel better already!

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My wife and I did come to an understanding of sorts last night. She belatedly apologized for snapping at me while I told her it was alright, that she no longer had to hide anything from me and that love and understanding had replaced shame and guilt as the zeitgeist of our time. 

Now if only I could get her to call it something other than fish food . . .