While my mate was working late and away on business trips, I'd get my rocks off by imagining a mysterious naked couple acting out semi-violent fetishes. Once the aggressive male I was envisioning turned into the British film star Clive Own (around the time of Closer, where he stole every scene by playing an angry manipulative scoundrel). The disobedient French maid he was disciplining became the tennis player Anna Kournikova, whose cheesecake bikini pictures I'd seen in the National Inquirer. I'd also paged through Penthouse and surf porn sites on the web. When Aaron got home, I offered to enact any lascivious scenario that might appeal to him: a private wet T-shirt contest with me as the only contestant and him as the judge? Hand job with scented motion lotion? Trying it doggy style? Titty f**king? I even asked if he was interested in giving me a "pearl necklace." So he didn't think I wanted him to buy me jewelry, I explained I'd read online that the phrase was a euphemism for a man ejaculating onto a woman's neck. "Great, now I'm married to a porn addict," he said, going into his den to check email.

Mild, metrosexual men have never done it for me. Maybe it was because my father grew up a Lower East Side street kid who, my mother used to brag, would have been a gangster had she not put him through medical school in the Midwest. Her favorite photograph of him is when he was 16, wearing a black leather jacket, smoking an unfiltered cigarette and looking handsome and menacing. I wondered if she'd cursed me to a life of cads. Then there were my three big, tough brothers, known for yelling "switch to tackle" before landing on top of me in the middle of a touch football game on our lawn. Not surprisingly, I turned into a loudmouth tomboy unafraid to compete with the guys and stick up for myself. When I introduced my junior high best friend, Claire, to a sweet fellow student who'd asked me out, she whispered, "Are you kidding? You have more testosterone than he does."

At 15, I met David, a wife-beater-wearing, Marlboro-smoking, self-styled James Dean. He was obnoxious and aggressive—even anti-romantic—calling me an "old sea hag," with "violent eyes" and "breeder's hips." When we made out, he rubbed his hands all over me and said his father owned a meat-packing plant where he worked in the summertime, so he was used to slinging sides of beef. Bored by polite West Bloomfield boys who'd ask permission before kissing me, I was a goner. The fact that we were at a B'nai Brith camp convention where I was president of my chapter, and he was a straight A pre-med student from a well-off Ontario family, was incidental. He correctly surmised that since I was such a powerful type-A personality used to being in charge, I needed an arena where I could loosen up and let someone else call the shots. Six turbulent years later it ended in (predictable) disaster after he slept with not one but two of my close girlfriends.