Years ago, I was dating this guy who had a bisexual best girlfriend.
She had strawberry-blonde hair, a British accent, she was funny and beautiful, and we clicked right away. I loved this because there can sometimes be an initial level of threat or competition when meeting the close girlfriends. You never know if there’s history there.
We hung out every weekend together, going out, getting drunk, ending up back at my boyfriend’s house to continue the night, and the next day, we’d sit on the couch all day, nursing our hangovers and ordering food.
I’m not saying this was good or healthy by any means, but for a little while, it was our lives.
One evening, the girlfriend and I, we’ll call her S., went out for drinks and dinner just the two of us. Neither of us had many female friends at the time, so we were both excited at the opportunity to spend time together.
We got espresso martinis and talked about our careers and our childhood traumas and about exes and we both said how rare it was to be this honest and open with someone.
Later that night, my boyfriend joined us, and as usual, we all went back to their house to continue the party.
At one point, my boyfriend left the room to go get us more drinks. S. and I had been on the couch, laughing at some stupid joke, and suddenly, we found our faces close together, nearly touching, and I put down my drink, pulled her in close, and we kissed.
My boyfriend came back into the room, and rolled his eyes, “Really?” He said. “I’m going to bed.”
The next morning, everyone laughed about the incident. But I woke up feeling so much shame. Did I cheat on my boyfriend while he was there? Why wasn’t he mad?
S. laughed it off too. We were just drunk, she said.
I don’t know whether part of me wanted to make something happen between all of us—a triage. Or whether I had feelings for S., and my inebriated mind told me to make a move on her. But what I do know is that if S. had been a man, the responses would have been different.
How come we can laugh off a kiss between two women as a drunken mistake, but if it was a straight male, my relationship would have been over?
Cheating is cheating. Personally, I don’t think what I did was right, and I do regret it. But my boyfriend never saw it that way. Perhaps, he didn’t want to see it that way.
What that night taught me is that the more we try to push something away, the more likely it is to come to the surface, and with full force. There was a part of me, and my sexuality, that I needed to explore, and maybe I was in denial about it.
It also taught me that alcohol is not a tool to get what you want.
If I did want to have a threesome, that should have been a conversation I had with my boyfriend prior to getting drunk and kissing S. And if I didn’t want to be with my boyfriend, I shouldn’t have used a night of getting drunk and kissing someone else to do it.
We need to learn how to sit with the uncomfortable parts of ourselves to better understand our wants and desires.
What I’ve learned about cheating and affairs is they are often a symptom of something deeper that’s going on—something we are afraid to face.
My boyfriend and I broke up a few months later, and, funnily enough, S. and I are still in touch every now and then. We don’t live in the same country anymore, but sometimes I think about that night and the moments leading up to the kiss.
I’m grateful that this messy period in my life helped me see what I’d been trying to ignore within myself.
And I won’t go on accidental dates with my boyfriend’s girlfriends in the future.
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Previously Published on medium
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