Every Married Woman Needs A Battery Boy

Last fall, Lauren* had what some might call a wet dream about her toddler’s preschool teacher. This is a man who, in her conscious life, she had never had an untoward thought about. Yet that night, while she slept, he led her into a warm, steamy bathroom, slowly took off her clothes, and washed her body “in the sweetest, loveliest way,” she says, “like you would wash a little baby.”

It was as if Lauren’s subconscious had created a human embodiment of her deepest, most unmet longings. The intimacy of it felt weird, sure, but mostly innocent — more emotional than physical. So she felt safe joking about it with her husband and friends. Yet as the dreams continue to recur, the feelings they bring up don’t necessarily vanish when she wakes. Now, the 43-year-old rhapsodizes about the teacher’s “dreamy” eyes and his “big giant bear body,” so soft and comforting, like “the Frette pillow” of man-bods. Lauren has no intention of acting on these urges — of course not! But when she sees him, her sweaty pits and inability to hold eye contact are quite real, in a distinctly middle school way. It makes the daily drudgery of school drop-off a whole lot more interesting.

Elise, 47, a suburban mother of three, gets a related fix from two different friends’ husbands. One of the husbands is witty and handsome, in a preppy Paul Rudd way — “he knows he’s got it,” she says. The other isn’t all that good-looking — more of a John C. Reilly type — but is kind and full of compliments. The specific jolt Elise gets from them is one that she and her girlfriends coined a name for, back in their single, swinging 20s. “We call it a ‘boy battery,’” she says. Back then, a “boy battery” wasn’t the guy you dated, but rather the one you hung around with till last call, fueled by the shared electric current of flirtation. Now, her boy batteries — both of whom appear to be, like Elise herself, quite happily married — light her up at occasional dinners or birthday parties. She spends a little more time primping on those nights, and when she gets there, “I’m a little more fun and easy and flirtatious and, like, aren’t I such a delight? I’m presenting the best version of myself. I find that really powerful.”

“If I’m in a better mood, then I can bring that home.”

In an era of open marriages and throuples, of Babygirl and All Fours, the imaginings of long-partnered women can sound downright quaint: After all, nobody’s lapping up saucers of milk with the office intern over here. The pulse may be spurred; the brain chemistry shooting sparks — but all the action is happening in their own heads. These women are seeking a little extra battery power, sure. But they’re keeping it in their pants, so to speak.

That said, sometimes these crushes do veer uncomfortably close to real life. Colleagues tease Elizabeth, a 49-year-old publicist, about the goofy, self-deprecating comedian she met through work. Every time he calls, “my voice goes up about three octaves,” she says. But their sexiest — and riskiest — interaction occurred when he invited her backstage at his show, which she’d attended with her husband. “I had to pretend I couldn’t find him backstage,” she says.

“Remember that guy I f*cking lost my mind over?” says my friend Taylor, 43, from Los Angeles. How could I forget? Taylor’s marriage is among the most enviably stable and mutually affectionate of any I know; nevertheless, she has been known to fall deep under the spell of a powerful crush. The guy in question would, on paper, fit the bill for an Elin Hilderbrand novel: He was hot (if a little short for her taste), Euro, multilingual, and well-dressed, with a big job at an international company. Around him, Taylor acted like an overheated schoolgirl. “I would wait to open emails from him, just to savor them,” she says. “I would find my way to sit next to him at lunch or, like, brush shoulders.” Once, when she knew she would see him, she wore a new pair of high-heeled, open-toed sandals — in the depths of winter. If her husband had suggested she slog through the slush in those shoes, she’d have laughed.

For several months, Taylor relished this illicit little secret. It was fun, energizing; it made her heart race. And to her mind, it was unlikely to cause any actual pain — again, she had no intention of making it real. Friends advised her to bottle up the energy she felt with her boy battery and bring it back to her marriage, and in a way, she did: “If I’m in a better mood, then I can bring that home.” But part of what made it so hot in the first place was that she didn’t have to bring it home. It was her own private thrill, distinct from the sometimes oppressive mind meld of coupledom.

“A large percentage of things that actually do turn into affairs start off as things where someone tells themselves I would never.”

Elise, the boy battery neologist, says she assumes — hopes, even — that her husband gets his batteries recharged by the occasional flirtation, too. She doesn’t want to know the details, but to her, these benign crushes “make the whole bargain seem more fun.” After evenings with one or both batteries, she comes home feeling like “it’s fun to be married and live in the suburbs, and I married a really great person, and we have a great friend group,” she says. “It kind of just feeds the larger gambit, right?”

It came as no surprise that when I put out the call for crushes among my own community, those fastest to respond were, like me, 40-something, long married, kids. That’s partially a reflection of the self-selecting nature of my sample population, but it’s also because these are women in a stage of life that almost inevitably requires either actively battling or capitulating to a nagging sense that — not to put too fine a point on it — one has become a cold, dead shell of the woman one used to be. (My words, not theirs.) Cliche as it may be, the “invisibility” of middle age can feel like a very low-wattage, sparkle-free existence. And the twin forces of motherhood and monogamy notoriously make one’s erotic self, so close to the surface in our youth, feel nearly impossible to access.

If a crush gives us a wormhole to that lighter, brighter side — a reason to dig out our most impractical footwear; to laugh a little too hard at someone’s joke; to get the sexual wheels turning, if only mentally — without upsetting the apple cart at home… well, what’s so bad about that? Plenty, says Naomi Bernstein, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist specializing in couples therapy. You knew the bucket of ice water was coming sometime, didn’t you?

Bernstein sees “innocent” crushes all the time in her line of work — usually after they’ve tipped over into real-life infidelity. “A large percentage of things that actually do turn into affairs start off as things where someone tells themselves I would never,” she says. She outlines a scenario that’s almost too easy to imagine: One morning, after you and your partner have an argument, you bump into your crush in the parking lot at work. “You’re activated, your nervous system is triggered, you’re not thinking fully straight,” she says, and before you know it, you’re unloading about the fight, or some other frustration, to a person who may have been harboring similar feelings about you. “Boom, all of a sudden, what felt very safe is now a real thing.”

“I would wait to open emails from him, just to savor them.”

Even a seemingly innocent crush, she says, can give you a basis of comparison that starts to infect the way you view your partner. Taylor admits that her imaginary work paramour appealed because he was so different from her own funny, all-American husband. Likewise Lauren, the mom dreaming of her kid’s teacher, says he embodies pure “comfort and time and space and slowness … the opposite of what I have in my house, with two little kids and, like, a pretty anxious husband.” This game of comparison can make us hyperfocused on whatever it is we don’t love about our partners — and there’s always something, isn’t there? — and on the “nuggets of goodness,” as Bernstein put it, that we are getting from the crush (like, say, that time he actually noticed the highlights you spent three hours and $250 on).

Bernstein’s recommendation — you knew this was coming, too — is to find some way to get that “boy battery” energy out of the person you married. It’s true that “in your 40s, you’re likely not going to feel that feeling [you got when] you walked into a room in your mid-20s, like I’m the one to look at in this room right now.” Which is why that feeling can be so addictive when we discover it elsewhere. Parents, in particular, face the challenge of activating two diametrically opposed parts of the brain — the maternal caretaker versus the sexual being. To do so takes real effort; for starters, getting away from your kids and the “purity zone” of the home, “where you have to be the perfect mom, wife, role model.”

If you are going to skip her advice and toy with a new crush, Bernstein recommends taking time to really “feel your feelings around it.” Pay attention to that little inner flicker, the internal combustion that happens in the moment you’re engaging with that person, and then check in with yourself an hour later and a day after that. “If you pay attention to the after effects and it all continues to feel great,” without risking damage, “then…” She pauses, clearly reluctant to give any permission here. “Then… great.”

Sometimes, the search for external “battery power” can be habit-forming in itself. Corinne, a 43-year-old academic, is crystal clear on the fact that crushes she’s mentally indulged in recent years — interactive and not; on men and women alike; colleagues, researchers, TikTok DMers, a stranger on a train, and a 20-something in her dance class, “so young, so tall, so hot,” she says, “like a young, tall John Travolta” — were “directly related to not feeling satisfied in the bedroom with my partner.”

Over the last year, her mate finally heeded her long-running complaints and made some rather miraculous changes in that department. Their sex life and their marriage improved immeasurably, and right on cue, her intense thinking about, fantasizing about, and flirting with people outside of its bounds has all but ceased. Still, sometimes Corinne can’t help longing for the charge of a new battery. “I almost wish I did have a crush again?” she says. “It’s a fun energy to have sweeping through.”

*Some names and identifying details have been changed for the purposes of anonymity.