Men and their secretaries - essay

Where do men go who run off with their secretaries? First memories are a strange bit. People I know recount first memories like "I peed in my pants" and "I was walking down the street holding my mother's hand," and "I got carsick and they had to stop while I threw up," and things like that. It may seem odd but my first memory, or at least one of them, was standing around a group of adults talking. The conversation, as I can remember it, went something like "...glubba glubba, snarfle, dingle mumble mumble...ran off with his secretary...sniggle snicker." At the time, obviously being very young, I didn't know what to make of this, although even then I could recognize scandal and disapproval when I heard it. I have heard this same conversation several times in my life. I still don't know what to make of it. But I do wonder, "whatever happens to men who run off with their secretaries?" I mean, you never hear of them again. At least I never do. Is there some special place where such people congregate? A whole city of men who ran off with their secretaries? But how could you have a city with nothing but secretaries and the men who ran off with them? How could they live? Who would do the work?
While I don't condone such behavior I can understand it. After all, men with secretaries spend almost a third of their time with them. Its only natural that they should be a little friendly, so to speak. But running off? That's a very different thing. Maybe they just go to another city and change their names? Perhaps, if they can afford it, they skip the country and go to Mexico or Portugal or some such place where they can retire in quaint little fishing villages and live off the land happily ever after. Nothing against secretaries, or even the men who run off with them, but somehow this scenario doesn't seem plausible.
Maybe there's an island somewhere, a secret paradise in the South Pacific known only to executives who want to run away with their secretaries, the knowledge of which is passed on only by word of mouth from one insider to another? They must go somewhere, they certainly don't hang around their home towns or their old friends once they have taken such an unacceptable path or, perhaps, "way out." On the other hand, it happens often enough that maybe it is more acceptable than we think, one of those "culturally patterned ways or misbehaving" or "time outs" that the anthropolgists talk about. If, on the other hand, it's merely a time out, what happens when time is back in? Do these liasons between boss and secretary last? How many of those men come crawling back, spent and broke, begging their wives to understand, to forgive and take them back? Like a lot of important questions you want to know about, I'll bet there are no figures, no statistics, probably no real information of any kind. But whether they go forever or for just a short time they still have to go somewhere. They don't just disappear into thin air although it may seem that way. How many men do you know who are living with or married to their former secretaries? How about your neighbors? The guy in the office next door? No, he'd be the last person to do such a thing. Aha! That's what we always say, just after the guy has left his wife and children and run off with the mindless boopsie with the figure like Marilyn, the one who always had to moisten her lips before she could take dictation, who wore the revealing outfits even in the dead of winter, who always needed the advice about her love life and was willing to stay after regular working hours to "help out." Do you suppose she's now tending the kids, slaving over a hot stove, scrubbing the bathroom floor? Is that why she ran off with the boss, helped to wreck a home? Well, if not, where is she? Is she with him? And where, pray tell is he?