I am having an affair.

A very sensuous affair with a woman named Tina.

Tina smells good.

Carla, my wife, is fine with it because this way I don't bother her so much. You see, Tina wears this wonderful perfume named Opium - a perfume my wife hates and no amount of begging will get her to wear.

But Tina, she just spritzes it on, and whenever I am near her at work, she doesn't mind that I sit nearby and, well, just inhale. That is all I do in this torrid affair.

You might ask, "Is that it?" Yep.

It's strictly an olfactory one. The whole olfactory experience is a world unto itself. Purely sensual, but at the same time involving no disloyalty to the only woman I love.

I heard somewhere that the cinnamon scent is a tiny molecule that binds to the same receptors in a man's nose that female pheromones bind to. Have you ever gone by a Cinnabon bakery in an airport in the morning. Business men who haven't seen their wives in days line up to the strange pied-piper-like calling of the cinnamon scent.

I once danced with a girl who wore Oscar de la Renta perfume - the same perfume my mom wore. I liked the girl and she was pretty, but I never really wanted to kiss her. I knew another woman who was drop-dead gorgeous, interesting, funny, easy on the eyes, and who liked me. But whenever I got close, I just couldn't stand the smell. It wasn't bad or disgusting, but for some indescribable reason, it was a complete turnoff and no matter how much I tried, I didn't want to be close. She was the last girlfriend I had before I met Carla.

Theoretically, if two people of opposite sex were to have offspring with a bad genetic makeup, then those two people would find the scent of each other unattractive. There was a British study in 1995, nicknamed the "Sweaty T-shirt Study," in which women were asked to identify which of seven different sweaty shirts from seven different men were attractive to them. Each woman chose a shirt of the man who was the most genetically different from her - avoiding a sort of genetic incest. A genetically diverse mate would presumably result in healthier offspring.

I'm guessing this has something to do with why dogs sniff each other when they meet. I'm certainly not endorsing doing what my dog does to the next person you meet - you're liable to get arrested if you do. But I will say, all kidding about affairs aside, my wife's natural scent is light and pretty and extremely attractive to me and that I'm glad I married her instead of the smelly other woman I could have wound up with.