On Tuesday, the Washington Post dug up a tasty little detail about Vice President Mike Pence’s devout relationship with his wife, Mother (his wife-mother): he will not dine alone with a woman who is not her, and he won’t attend events serving alcohol without her either. It seems like an ultra-safe way to conduct a relationship that presupposes that all women want is Mike Pence’s milky bod (or to see Karen Pence suffer!!!), and that his text message records are either deeply boring, or very much the opposite (“take off ur cardigan... take off ur second cardigan”).
The reaction to this detail (mockery) has prompted some husbands to come to their Vice President’s defense. Conservative blogger Matt Walsh expressed that he was unable to think of a reason for a person to hang out with someone of the opposite sex unless they were family (I don’t think gay and trans people exist for Walsh, et al):
Another conservative media incident Erick Erickson concurred, noting the only two occasions in which it is acceptable for him, or presumably his partner, to dine with a potential lover:
I have two minor quibbles: First, if your spouse is dead, you should definitely start having dates and participating in sex again, and pretty soon. Second, if, let’s say, Erickson’s spouse was meeting with various men to plan Erickson’s funeral even though Erickson is still alive, doesn’t that seem extra inappropriate? And wouldn’t he rather they just eat hamburgers together as friends, rather than being forced by Erickson’s own moral code to plan for his murder?
Pence, Walsh, and Erickson’s code suggest their women dinner partners are both so sexually irresistible (maybe instead of eyes, they have boobs, or washed their vaginas with holy water and sent the men videos of it) that the men will be weakened in the face of sin, or that the men are so sexually irresistible (maybe Pence’s religious undergarments are made all of lace) that the women will have no choice but to perform a hand job at the dinner table and the men, not wanting to be rude, will have to accept it.
Once I dined with a man who had a wife (was it Mike Pence? I’d never say). When the waiter came, I ordered a fettucine alfredo and a glass of milk (this was a work lunch, after all), which set the man off into such a frenzy of sexual excitement that he came directly onto the table and had to excuse himself to the bathroom to clean up. When he was finally dressed again (though his shirt was sopping wet), he returned and paid me $1,000 to never ever tell anyone about how he had humiliated himself. And I never did.
So: Have you ever dined with a member of the gender you are romantically interested in who was not your spouse? If so, did you fuck them?
Better to be safe than sorry, should you end up like my lunch date, or like lick memes: