“How do I know that you’re single?”
In a time before Facebook, and even before MySpace, it was impossible to ‘stalk’ your new lover.
When you began talking to someone, flirting with them, or even sleeping with them, you didn’t have an unassuming way of checking who was in your bed. You had no choice but to believe what they said about themselves.
When a man or woman said he was single, you believed them.
I supposed that made 2005 a gullible year to be young, single and open-hearted. You could say I was primed for duping.
I didn’t ask to be the other woman. But before I knew it, I was.
I met Matt on schoolies
The rite of passage in Melbourne school culture is schoolies. It’s the two weeks you spend celebrating your high school graduation with your friends.
If you didn’t go, the masses assumed there was something wrong with you.
I went to Gordon Cove, a little coastal town two hours from Melbourne’s south-east. There were ten girls staying in a three-bedroom split-level house. There were blow-up mattresses scattered over every floor, and by the end of the schoolies week, three of them had split.
Inside my duffle, I stashed three bottles of champagne, a bottle of Midori and a half-drunk bottle of vodka. I brought more alcohol than clothes.
After only two hours after arriving, one of the champagne bottles was empty. Julie, the lead organiser of our nights out, had lined up a ‘nightcap’. Down the road. And with boys.
Not men. Boys. I was seventeen, and I didn’t know I should have ignored the boys who would play with my heart. I wanted a man. But it was only once I became the other woman I learned that.
Three boys waited for us at the bottom of our street. The small entourage accompanied the ten of us to their home on the other side of town. And there he was, the swarthy boy dressed all in black.
Matt, short for Matteo, stood in the middle of them. Not that his name mattered. But it would later, it would be the name that haunted me for years. I approached him, ignoring the chaos of introductions, and extended my hand to his.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said, kissing me on both cheeks. “I watched you walking down the hill and knew I had to meet you.” He took my hand. “Can I walk you back to our place?”
Would it be wrong if I said that the guy I was waiting for was standing right in front of me? Would it be too corny? Would it be too untrue?
As he took my hand, immediately entwining his fingers with mine, I melted. Maybe it was the drink, or perhaps it was the feeling of desire, but he made me feel like a woman. I didn’t think it was possible to have such an instant attraction with someone like this.
“Yes, that would be nice.”
We had passion.
As Matt opened the door for us, there was the rest of the boys playing drinking games around an expansive dining table. Ten, the same amount as us. A girl for every boy.
Matt lead me through the chaos, bee-lining for one boy dressed in a blue shirt and tailored green corduroys. “This is Weston. He and I are pretty close, and we share a room together.” Sleep with each other, I thought? They looked at each other, so dreamily, I felt like I was interrupting a moment between them.
But I was reading their knowing exchange wrong.
I stared at the sea of boys and girls, the way we all collided unexpectedly. The frenzy of hormones and alcohol fusing together at once. It was manic and exciting and perfect, all at the same time.
I forgot the other names Matt prattled off during his introductions. Yet, I didn’t forget how he pulled me onto the couch, in the middle of the open living room, and kissed me hard.
My legs over his lap, his hand across my face, we kissed for what felt like hours. After a tap on the shoulder from one of the boys, we moved into a bedroom, which turned out wasn’t his.
Despite this, he barricaded the door, threw me to the bed and locked legs with mine. “I don’t want to let you go,” he said.
“Then don’t,” I replied, holding him tight to my chest.
Then came the finger. Middle that is.
We spent a week at the Cove and not a night went past when Matt and I weren’t together. As relationships go, this one was progressing naturally. I didn’t think we were exclusive, nor that we were ‘official’.
Yet, I didn’t know it was over the day we packed up and left for home.
What I didn’t know was the rules about schoolies. It was the same for holiday romances. They don’t exist.
What happened on holiday would live for that moment and that moment only. Never to be spoken of again. If you fell for someone on holiday or established a connection worth penning poetry about it, you were an idiot. I didn’t get the memo on that rule. I didn’t know I needed to forget Matt ever existed the moment we left.
If only they put that on a pamphlet or something. I wished this relationship came with a warning.
The day after I returned home and my liver had the chance to recover after my week-long affair with champagne, I received my warning. Only it was too late. But it was a warning all the same.
A message from my friend Edith appeared on my phone. I opened it, assuming the communication would be harmless as all texts from her were.
“Matt has a girlfriend. You’re screwed.”
“How do you know?” read my reply.
“His girlfriend. It turns out we work together, but I didn’t know until today. All the boys knew, but no one said anything.”
Yep, screwed. Even though I was clueless and I wasn’t the cheater, I was the other woman. It was almost worse than being the one with everything to lose. I didn’t have the joy of having something worth missing.
So when Edith said ‘screwed’, what she was really saying was:
- Everyone now thinks you’re a home-wrecker
- Everyone who knows about the affair has found out from. So they only have his side of the story
- No one was going to listen to my side of the story
- No one was going to believe my side of the story (because I was the other woman)
- Everyone would talk about it until someone else screwed up worse
- Everyone would assume I knew he was in a committed relationship
- Everyone would forget I was utterly humiliated because I didn’t know
- Everyone would ignore the fact that I was heartbroken when I found out and discovered that our relationship was a farce
- Everyone would ignore the fact I wouldn’t have kissed him had I known
So now I had a stigma.
And what I hadn’t realized from the ‘you’re screwed’ message was that even the people who knew the truth would believe me to be a home wrecker. The people who watched me get duped. They knew I had no intentions of breaking up a happy couple.
Craig, who was one of the many names I met that first night, didn’t speak to me for two years after schoolies. He believed if I came too close to him, he would catch infidelity like the common cold.
Ben, another name, assumed I had drugged Matt that first night, and every night after that. He wanted to get the police involved, but thankfully someone with rationality and intelligence talked him out of that.
It was impossible to shake the stigma that I was out to ruin every happy relationship in front of me.
There is a romance about affairs. But not about duping.
I can’t deny the Hollywood allure of an affair. The secret rendezvous. The secrets whispered into the ear. The touching of legs that no one else notices.
But this wasn’t an affair. An affair would imply I was complicit with the cheating, that I was aware it was an affair.
And for years afterwards, I felt so unresolved about what Matt thought me. Did he care for me? Was the connection real? Did this moment really mean anything?
Matt has since turned into a man, a very successful journalist for a well known Australian newspaper. I wonder what he thinks of my writing.
But more so, I wonder if he knows how much he broke my heart when he made the other woman.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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