I know it’s easy to make a monster out of someone who slept with someone else’s boyfriend. I think that’s why we rarely see articles from “the other women.” I never thought I would be that girl. I hated that girl. I have been cheated on, but once upon a drunken night he asked to spend the night and I didn’t say no.
I am not defending myself, I did this to myself, but I am offering my perspective. As easy as it is to call me a whore, I am also a human being who has a heart and I am extremely ashamed to have played a role in a situation like this. I’m writing this because I am not proud of my actions, but it’s impossible for me to take them back, so I might as well own them. I have decided to own them.
I was told in a fit of justifiable anger that I should title my next article, “10 things that happen when you sleep with someone else’s boyfriend.” This was obviously meant to hurt me, but here I am at 3:26 am writing this article because I am not going to hide from this ugly side of my life.
1. You will wake up feeling sick to your stomach and not because of the hangover, you don’t get hangovers. This pain you’re feeling is from the guilt you feel about the decision you made before you fell asleep.
2. He will befriend you, claiming to be “a nice guy.” In your state of guilt, you feel like you are unworthy of friends and since you’re both in this situation anyway, that you must embrace this as if dysfunction is a solid foundation to build a friendship.
3. He will hook you with his deepest secrets, vent to you, then disappear and reappear at his convenience. You want to understand and for some reason feel obligated to be there for him.
4. After becoming your friend he will decide he needs to change his lifestyle. He will claim that, “he can’t do this anymore” because he doesn’t trust himself around you; leaving you alone with his secrets--as if you’re poison that he can label “temptation” when he's feeling guilty.
5. You stop feeling anything-- feeling less like a person and more like an object because you are carrying enough baggage to fill the back of a truck.
6. You begin questioning your entire existence, wondering if you were just put on this earth to be someone’s temporary plaything. Eventually you’ll rationalize it because you weren’t the first, or the last girl he cheated with and that somehow helps you sleep at night.
7. You realize you need to keep your distance yourself from the entire situation, hoping that if you detach yourself now that somehow the entire mistake will be erased and you’ll have a clean page-- A chance to make this all go away, but you know it's all wishful thinking.
8. At some point she will learn about you. You won’t be able to respond to her messages because nothing you say will be able to take away the resentment she feels. You feel relieved that she knows, but you also want to cry because you can’t do anything to fix your actions.
9. He will cut all ties with you as soon as she knows. It will click that he was a coward all along. He used you to take some of the heat off of himself and you will feel like you were punched in the chest as you try to hold back tears at work.
10. You will no longer feel the need to carry around his suitcases of secrets. And it’s not until this weight is removed from your shoulders that you realize just how much you were carrying for so long.
