I have no tolerance for infidelity. None.
A relationship like the one Crystal and I share requires a level of trust and commitment that goes well above and beyond a “normal” marriage. There is no room for infidelity in this relationship, this lifestyle or any polyamorous relationship. Honesty and trust are more essential than ever. Thus, I have never cheated on Crystal and I never will.
However, I am not without sin in this area. I have cheated before, but only once and under situations that were, in a word, unusual. I’m not proud of what I did, but I am big enough to admit my youthful errors and learn from them.
In fact, I think those mistakes may very well have saved my relationship with Crystal.
Long Distance Lust
In the spring of 1999 I was eighteen years old and was a Freshman in college. I was also completely clueless about women. Though I had lost my virginity at age sixteen, I was completely oblivious to when women liked me. A horrible nerd and outcast in high school, I assumed no one would take an interest in me. Even as I grew up and grew into myself, I assumed the world thought me ugly and, as a result, I blew two perfectly good opportunities to get laid my Freshman year.
What I was good at was writing. I ran, and in some capacity still do run, a very successful poetry and short story site of my work. One of the women who visited there, named “NM”, wrote me and we began an email correspondence a month or so before summer. It started off innocently enough, but quickly evolved to a flirtatious exchange and then a sexual one.
NM was, to be fair, an older woman, twenty-six years old to be exact. Her red hair, which came straight from a box, complimented her green eyes. She had a slender build but had great curves, including a very nice round ass, a trait I still admire in women today.
It was, for a time, a typical horny teenage Internet love affair. Lots of cybersex over AIM, Webcam chats over whatever was available (before she got a Webcam, she used a scanner to take an image of her breasts and pussy), swapping dirty audio recordings and more. Though I shared my dorm room, our schedules were polar opposites leaving me plenty of time for the exchanges.
It was over that summer we met for the first time. My family took a vacation to DisneyWorld and NM, being from central Florida, arranged to stay at the same hotel we were at. It looked like a chance meeting, my family probably thought it was, but we met there on the third night of the vacation after my parents went to hit the clubs and bars (I was still too young to get in).
We met and nearly broke up immediately there after. Signals got crossed, we jumped into bed too soon and we both cried thinking that the relationship was just about sex. We both felt cheap and used. Yet, after separating and calming down, we talked things out. We even trudged out the next day to the Magic Kingdom where we enjoyed a beautiful day in the sun riding rides and generally acting like children.
For the next few months, NM made regular trips to South Carolina to see me. By then I had my own apartment and her visits, usually for the weekend, turned into wild sex romps that seemed to never end. We seemed destined to be together forever. We professed our love on my site, I even made her an administrator of the forum.
Things seemed perfect.
The Slippery Slope to “AA”
About six months after that first meeting, things started to go south. The visits became less regular and eventually stopped. Since my schedule did not permit me to leave early on Friday, I wasn’t able to simply go down there myself.
Worse still, she was spending more and more time around other guys closer to home, borrowing money from me (the broke college student) and had practically stopped talking with me other than on site administration matters. Despite that, she tightened her grip on me, she demanded access to all of my passwords, including to my email accounts, and seemed to watch me like a hawk.
Still, I put up with it for about six months. When the next summer came, it had been two months since I had seen her. We had not interacted in a sexual way in at least that long. The only sexy picture of her I saw was the one she took in her panties to capture her new thigh tattoo, the one I helped pay for. The photo was also sent to about a dozen other men.
Since sex was out of the question and I needed a way to spend my youthful energy, I took to laser tag. I became one of the top competitors at my local arena and played an average of ten games a weekend. It was there that I met “AA” and her boyfriend “Ghost”.
I quickly became friends with both of them. We would stay up all night sipping coffee and chatting at a nearby all-night diner. However, almost immediately, AA began to go places with me by myself, the arena, the coffee shop and shopping. Ghost became, well, a ghost. Then one day, when talking about movies, she mentioned coming over to my place for a movie marathon. It seemed innocent enough, but I really didn’t care. During my time with NM I had cut off most human ties and it felt good to be friends with someone again.
However, a subsequent email exchange with her grew more flirty. It started out innocent but somehow shifted to her agreeing to wear a very sexy pajama set she wanted me to see. Dumbfounded, and still somewhat oblivious, I agreed.
That night came and she was there, wearing a see-through top and a pair of satin pants. I suddenly realized what was going on but felt that it was too late to stop it. We began to cuddle when the phone rang. It was NM. She had read my email and knew about the meet up. She was completely livid.
On the phone she threatened me, she threatened AA. She then went on a tirade about how she was sleeping with her male roommate and a couple of other men. She then told me, after much screaming and a few hang ups, to kick AA out now and make things right with her. I stood there with the phone in my hand and I thought about all she had done to me, what she had just said, all she had made me surrender, how she treated me and what I wanted for my future.
“Sorry,” I said before hanging up the phone, unplugging it from the wall and going into the bedroom, AA right behind me.
Guilt, Bob Segar and Self Loathing
I saw AA one more time after that night, pretty much to the same end. Both times we had sex, I never came, the guilt and emotions were just too high. I couldn’t perform, I couldn’t concentrate. I slowly started talking to NM again and tried to make things right. With no classes to occupy my time, I alternated my hours from curling up on the floor and crying to listening to Bob Segar’s “Turn the Page” over and over again.
I was hollow inside. I didn’t eat. In a mere seven days I, who barely tips the scales at 170 today, lost nearly ten pounds. I was determined to make things work with NM, but in the meantime, I was doomed to torture myself to no end.
I wanted to renew my commitment to her. I scraped together a few hundred dollars and purchased a small promise ring for her. I was going to prove myself to her.
I also scraped up enough cash to purchase a bus ticket to go see her. Though she had made about half a dozen trips to see me, I had only made that initial one to see her. With a month left in summer, I took off on a Greyhound to central Florida to try get things back on track by any means possible.
The trip, did not go well. The combined 16 hours on the bus were the least painful parts of the whole experience. There, almost immediately I was introduced to he friend “JG”. It was obvious from the outset that this was no platonic friendship, they had been together for a long time.
I felt sick the entire time I was there. Once again I could not eat. They, however, took advantage of me and mooched money off of me the entire time I was down there. By the middle of the second day, I was in tears. I left for home early, catching a bus that was a full 12 hours before when I was supposed to live.
She made one more visit to see me, it ended just as badly, with her telling me that she could never trust me again. We tried to have sex once, but it didn’t work. I never even got to show her the promise ring. When she left, it was over. I changed my passwords and started piecing my life back together again, hanging out at coffee shops, meeting old friends I’d lost touch with and doing all of the things I had neglected under NMs watchful eye.
Finally, one afternoon she called me about a girl I had mentioned in my online diary. The girl was just a friend, happily engaged to another friend of mine, but NM asked with a taunting voice if it was my new girlfriend. Angry, I said, “I don’t have a girlfriend,” and hung up the phone.
It was over. We divided up our “assets”, she took the forum since I wouldn’t have time to maintain it by myself and I kept the rest of my site. We made arrangements to exchange the rest of our physical goods, mostly movies and books, but never followed through.
Finally, I was free and I was king of my own domain again. It felt good. I remember, after it was all said and done, walking out of my apartment building, around the block and into my favorite coffee house. I ordered the largest mocha they had and sipped it with a huge smile on my face. Freedom never tasted so good.
Aftermath
Sadly, the story doesn’t end there. When I took back the site, I closed out her email account and, due to a faulty server setup, I started getting some of her mail. One piece I got was from a class reunion site. I decided to take a look at her profile on the site and made a strange discovery. The year of her high school graduation did not make sense. I then looked at her personal details and saw a startling quote.
“I am 33 years old.”
I was only 19 at the time. She had lied about her age by a full six years and had kept it up for a year and a half.
I then saw a new forum post where she celebrate her six month anniversary with JG. The problem was, she and I had just broken up a week prior and the incident with AA was less than two months in the past.
Many months later, I started getting threatening emails from someone calling themselves “Yellow Snowman”. He tried to hide his identity, but writing styles are like fingerprints to me, it was clearly JG. Still, I played dumb and forwarded him the link to NM’s class reunion profile as well as clearing the air on a few other NM lies. The Yellow Snowman changed at that point, NM herself had taken over and she was in a rush to end the dialog. She asked for her stuff back one more time, I asked for mine and the matter was dropped.
Shortly thereafter I received word that NM and JG were no loner together. I don’t know if my conversation played a role, but I like to think it did. After all, JG was only seventeen.
Epilogue
I’m not proud of what I did. I still feel ashamed about it. Yes, I was the lesser of two evils and, yes, I was young and stupid, but those are not excuses. I screwed up. I admit that.
Looking back on it though, I realize that I needed a way out of the relationship and that, at the time, I thought cheating was my exit. I was wrong both in terms of ethics and strategy.
The only regret that I carry with me today is how I treated my friend Ghost. I didn’t see him again after AA and I parted company. He was thrown out of the arena for a violent altercation with another player and the diner we used to frequent closed down. I never had a chance though, given his temperament, that is probably for the best.
It took me a long time to accept the fact that I was not a bad person, that even though I made a mistake, it was just that, a mistake. Many people who did not know the full story never forgave me, I almost didn’t forgive myself.
But the whole story ended well enough, two weeks after the final break up with NM, I got another email in my inbox. This one was from Crystal. Seven years later, we opened up a site of our own. This one.
Still, without the lessons that I learned from NM, I doubt that we would have made it this far, not considering the strains that were placed upon us our first year.
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You sound so much like The Knight. While he was married he and his ex-wife were having problems in many ways. She finally moved back to be with her parents leaving him alone to sort out the financial mess she had made, telling him that she was finished, though he believed they could work it out. A little time passed and he struck up a”friendship” with a woman he worked with. One thing led to another and they slept together. She also ended up pregnant.
When it came right down to it, The Knight didn’t love this other woman. He and his now ex-wife talked back then and agreed to work things out. Then he had to tell her about what he had done. He wasn’t proud of it, nor was he proud of what had happened because of it.
Like you, I have no tolerance for infidelity. If you read my blog post, you already know that. I should have put a disclaimer in there about childish mistakes and such. I didn’t mean to offend or even neglect the fact that we all do things we’re not proud of. We all stumble and fall.
My post was about those who are chronic cheaters. Those who have been married for years and have had many extra-marital affairs with their colleagues, friends, etc. I simply have no tolerance (or sympathy for) those kind of people.
Forgive me if my post did not make that clear.
Love,
The Butterfly Temptress