This is My Confession

Quantum never, ever lied about being basically married. Not once. We’d been talking for a few days, pretty much constantly, when I came straight out and asked him: “Are you single?”

“No, I’m basically married,” he replied.

Oh. Well, of course he fuckin’ is.

I didn’t really understand it; he’d been talking to me all day and all night. Did he ever actually see her? If he was basically married, how on earth was he managing to fit in constant texts to and from me? Was it a get-out-of-jail-free card in case he realised that he didn’t actually like me?

Plus… he seemed really into me.

Weird.

I slowed down for a few days, but it didn’t take long for us to fall back into the familiar pattern of talking all day and all night and even flirting a little bit. We sent good morning texts, good night texts, moaning-about-our-day texts, and even joking-about-marriage texts. We made plans to meet. Tentative plans, admittedly, but every time we did, he’d go radio silent. I probably deserved that for all the times I blew out plans with Sambuca, but still, it irritated me a little.

One night, Quantum and I went too far. Far, far too far. Pictures were exchanged. The conversation descended into playful filth. We both found our happy endings, so to speak. Him being basically married didn’t even enter the equation. I seemed to… forget about it? About her? Perhaps I just didn’t care? Maybe I thought it would go the same way as (dare I say his name again) Sambuca? The latter was already done with his relationship and looking for an excuse to end it. I wondered if the same applied to the former.

When I woke up, the morning after the phone-sex-fuelled night before, I felt terrible. The worst. I literally hated myself. You know all those names you probably want to call me right now? Yeah, I called myself all of those – and then some! Slut. Whore. Home-wrecking slag. Cheating scumbag. (Him more than me, I guess.) Yes, yes, I know. What a piece of shit I am. What a piece of shit he is, too! We are both ginormous pieces of literal shit.

Once again, I/we pulled away a little, reducing the chit-chat and trying to keep things on a steady, platonic level… and, once again, it didn’t take long for us to fall right back into that shitty little pattern. And yes, we had some more phone sex. Photos were upgraded to videos. This time around, though, during my feeling-like-a-massive-piece-of-shit stage of the morning after the night before, I decided to just ask some questions.

Mostly:

“What the fuck are you doing, Quantum?”

You see, he might’ve been honest about his basically married relationship status from the start, but he had actively instigated almost all of our misbehaviour. He actively chased me. Not once did he ever turn around to me and say, “We should chill the fuck out.” Not once.

Me? I said that a lot. Many times. The words were basically worthless when I kept running back to that basically married man, but at least I said it! At least I fuckin’ tried.

“I’m not happy,” he said. “I’m not happy with her.”

Mate, I’m almost forty years of age. Do you know how many dalliances I’ve had with married/basically married men over the course of my slutty little dating life? (Yes, I know, I’m a cunt.) Do you know how many lines I’ve heard from married/basically married men?

“I’m not happy,” is a classic.

Over the next few weeks and months, things stayed pretty much the same: we’d get close, then one or the other of us would pull away again.

Can you guess what he said during my next round of questioning?

“I’m not happy with her, sexually.”

I think I’ve heard that line from basically (or otherwise) married men approximately fifty times in twenty-plus years of dating. Maybe even one hundred times at this point.

Why do men marry women that they’re not sexually compatible with? Can you people not talk about these things, or something? Are you not capable of saying, “Yo, can we try this thing?” Probably not, because then you’d need to accommodate her wants and needs in return, and we know how much y’all hate that.

Even if I wanted to believe his bullshit, which I didn’t, any shred of benefit-of-the-doubt disappeared when I went social media stalking. That basically married couple sure didn’t look unhappy. In fact, they looked like a perfectly normal – and happy – basically married couple.

I wanted to throw myself out of a window as soon as I saw her, too. She could almost have been me, ten years ago. That poor woman. How could I do that to her? How could I phone-fuck her man behind her back? Why would I want to do that to another woman, any woman, let alone a younger one? Don’t I know better? Haven’t I been on the other side enough to know just how shitty that feels? How fucking soul-destroying that feels?

“Have you done this before?” I asked Quantum.

“Yes, kinda,” he admitted.

How could I have been so fucking stupid? Who the fuck am I? Because I’m not this person. I’m not the other woman. I don’t want to be. And I certainly don’t want to be the kind of person who breaks a poor woman’s heart over a guy who, quite frankly, is a bigger piece of shit than me.

The more I learned – not just about the situation but also about him – the more annoyed I got. How dare he treat me like something he could just pick up when he fancied, then put down when someone hotter/better/nerdier/funnier came along? Worse than that: how could I be the hotter/better/nerdier/funnier person that did come along?!

A big part of me wanted to message her and let her just what her fella has been up to behind her back, but could I really do that? Do I really want to go back to that pettier-than-petty bitch who wrecks lives just because she can?

I decided against it.

You’ll be happy to know that I also decided against doing him again, digitally or otherwise. It turns out, being a lying, cheating scumbag isn’t an outfit I enjoy wearing. It’s also a massive turn-off. I don’t know whether it was his behaviour or my guilt, but something sure broke the Quantum spell. I no longer wanted him – and thank fuck for that… because a few months later, he came back and informed me that he was no longer basically married.

Well done for finally doing the right thing, I guess?

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: Garlic Bread.