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Diamonds are Forever. So is Herpes…

20 November 2008 748 views No Comment

Are They Cheating? Get Tested.

I’ve had two men cheat on me in my life. Both times it was devastating. When it happened with the first one, I was 21 years old, and I had just defied my parent’s wishes and moved in with a guy for the first time. I had broken up with my first love, my boyfriend of 4 years only a few months prior. Matt was a rebound relationship, my boss, and 6 years older than me. In retrospect, I can see why my parents were so upset. But I was wearing rose colored glasses and was positive that we would live happily ever after, and I was having fun playing house.

Six months after we moved in together, I started to feel uneasy about Matt. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I didn’t believe him about certain things. For one thing, he told me he was taking a computer class so he could get a new position at Microsoft, and was gone every night from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., but I never saw a book or saw him do any homework. I had not met any of his friends, or his family. I found this odd as well. When I asked him about meeting his friends and family, he told me he wanted to wait, because they had all really liked his ex-girlfriend, and he wanted to give them time to get over it first.

I was feeling more and more uneasy about this every day. One evening, while Matt was at class, I decided to go through his drawer of bills and things. I was looking for his credit card bill. Anyone who has ever watched a chick flick knows that the credit card statement is always where you go to find out if somebody has been cheating on you. I felt very Meryl Streep a’la Heartburn while I looked through his drawers. I almost expected soft Carly Simon music to start playing in the background as I rifled through stacks of envelopes and papers. I was terrified he would catch me. But I found it.

There it was in black and white. Matt had not been taking a computer class. Matt had been spending his evenings in Woodinville, which was nowhere near his supposed “class” in Edmonds. Dinners, lots of dinners on his credit card statement. Dinners for two, unless he was eating fifty dollars worth of food on his own each night. At places like The Olive Garden, Tony Roma’s, and Alfie’s Pizza. Now that’s classy. At least he was taking her out in style. Movies—lots of charges from Regal Cinemas, and grocery stores in Woodinville. He had supposedly gone out of town a few weeks earlier for a football game in Pullman with his friends. I noticed on those dates that he had spent 3 nights at the Silver Cloud Inn in Woodinville. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

Matt had led me to believe that he had broken up with his ex girlfriend Amy because he came home to the apartment they shared and found her in bed with someone else. As a 27 year old, I now know how utterly ridiculous that sounds. When I was 20, I believed it. Suddenly, I started wondering if this story was true. I got on my computer and googled Amy’s name. Up came her name, address, and phone number. In Woodinville.

I called Matt’s cell phone. It was turned off. It was always turned off while he was in “class.” So I called Amy’s number. I got her voicemail. I left her a message, telling her I was Matt’s live-in girlfriend and asked her to please give me a call back. Within 5 minutes I had a call from Matt. “You’ve been cheating on me with Amy.” I said. He denied it and said he had just gotten out of class. I didn’t buy it. “Come home right now.” I told him.

In all my life, I had never been so angry. I paced around our 600 square foot apartment, alternately bawling my eyes out and storming around in a rage. 2 hours later, Matt walked in the door. We had a fight, me yelling and crying, and him looking me straight in the eye and denying all charges against him. I was crazy he said. He loved me he said. I was imagining things, he said. I stared at him in disbelief. Did he really take me for a total idiot? Did he really think I would just take his word for it when I had the proof, right in front of me in black and white? In my gut, I knew he was lying.

He stood across from me in the living room, denying the allegations. Calling me crazy. I started to feel a little crazy. It was almost Christmas. I picked up a cookie tin full of those little shortbread cookies and threw it at his head. I didn’t care if I took his head off. I would hide his body in an Eastern Washington wooded area and nobody would ever find it. This was my well thought out plan.

I missed Matt’s head by about 3 inches and the cookie tin exploded all over the wall. Cookie crumbs everywhere. In hindsight, I’m lucky it missed his head, but at the moment, I was really pissed off about it. I didn’t even care about the mess I had just made. Matt left. Probably on his way back to Amy’s. “Good!” I said to myself. I started gathering up his clothing. I was going to throw it off the balcony, just as I’d been taught by Rosie Perez in It Could Happen to You.

It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t know who else he had been cheating on me with. It could be any number of people. I could have Chlamydia. Or something worse, something permanent. Sexually transmitted diseases are everywhere. I recently read that one in 4 sexually active adults had herpes. How was I going to get a new boyfriend if I had herpes? I’d have to go onto one of those online dating sites specifically for people with herpes. And I’d only slept with two people in my life. I began to weep. I abandoned my plan to throw his clothes off the balcony and went to sleep.

The next morning, Amy called me. She confirmed that she and Matt had been sleeping together and dating again, but that she had not known about me. “I guess he was playing us both.” She said. I believed her. Turns out that the way Matt had broken up with Amy had been pretty horrible, but that’s another story for another time. I thanked her for her call.

My self esteem was extremely low. I suppose that it had something to do with the way my last relationship had ended. My ex-boyfriend had not cheated on me, but he had broken up with me so that he could date somebody else, a friend of his. This was heartbreaking, and not good for my self image. Then, here was Matt, overweight, unattractive, a liar, and he didn’t want me either. If Matt didn’t want me, who would? I felt low. That’s probably why, when Matt came home a couple of days later, begging for forgiveness, I forgave. This was a mistake. I can honestly say that the year I wasted staying with Matt after this incident was the loneliest, saddest, most emotionally scarring time of my life.

Matt cheated on me for the next year before I finally got fed up and left him. I got an STD test (clean, thank God), packed up Toad, my cat, and all of my belongings, and went straight to my best friend Emma’s house. She made me a cup of tea, gave me a spare bedroom, and I got over it. Her husband gave me the best advice I received during that time, and now I am going to share it with you. When you are in a bad relationship, when there is cheating or abuse going on, it is, inevitably going to end. No matter what, you are going to have to feel that pain. That agonizing feeling that enters your heart when a relationship ends, that actual physical pain, is going to have to come eventually. So you can either deal with it now or later, but you’re going to have to deal eventually, so why not get it over with. I realized I had stayed in a relationship for far too long, just so that I could avoid that feeling. It wasn’t worth it.

Matt taught me my golden rule. Once a cheater, always a cheater. I used to think this was something that only bitter old cat ladies said, but now I say it too. Later in my life, when another man cheated on me, I left him right away. I had learned my lesson. If anything, do it for your health. Remember, when you sleep with somebody, you are sleeping with everyone they have ever slept with. And if they’re cheating on you, that STD test you took before you threw out your condoms in favor of birth control is pointless. After all, diamonds are forever, but so is herpes.