You want
to believe
he’d never
betray you.He charmed
her – and his
sidepieces....TO SEX
love & lust
“I was looking in a
dresser drawer for a shirt for
my boyfriend, Joe*, when I
found an old mobile phone.
I started looking through
the text messages and my
mouth just dropped. It was
filled with women’s numbers
and heaps of outgoing texts
like: ‘Hi, this is Blank from
Tinder’; ‘I’m just down the
block. I’ll be there in about
five minutes’; and ‘Let’s f*ck
in the garage’.
My heart was beating
out of my chest, but when I
asked Joe about it he had the
straightest face. He said he’d
found the phone in the street.
I wanted proof so I turned
our apartment upside down
looking for chargers, or just
for anything to find out if it
was his mobile. I eventually
found a credit card statement
from a few months earlier
with a mobile purchase on it.
I dropped down to the floor,
feeling sick to my stomach.
I couldn’t wait another
second to confront him so I
got in my car and drove to
his train stop to meet him
as he came home from work.
When he saw me holding
the credit card statement he
knew that he’d been caught.
At that point we were both
crying hysterically.
I told him to give me
back his key and get out of
my apartment. He said, ‘It’s
just one person.’ That was
actually the worst thing he
said to me. Cheating on me
with one person is enough
for me to want him out of my
life. A week later, in an email,
he changed that number totwo. I said, ‘You need serious
f*cking help.’ He replied,
‘I do need help. I love you so
much. You’re my everything.
I want to go to therapy.’FOUR years earlier, Joe
had spotted me at a club. He
was tall, dark and handsome,
and there was never a lull in
the conversation. Everyone
just loved him. From day one
we would go out to bars and
restaurants and have a blast.
We were both hardworking
and ambitious, and shared a
dream of buying the perfect
house. Two years after we
started dating, he moved in
to my apartment. Soon after
that, we started hunting for
houses. All our friends said
we would be the first in our
group to get married.
Then, three years into
our relationship, Joe turned
into a homebody. He claimed
he wanted to save money for
the house, but even when I
suggested doing something
free, like a walk in the park,
he made excuses. At around
the same time, he lost his job
and I caught him looking at
porn on his computer. That
wasn’t really a red flag. He
was unemployed and bored.
I was more upset about our‘real’ sex life. When we first
started seeing each other, we
were doing it three times a
day. Then it went down to
twice a week... then once a
week. He was always ‘tired’.
I started to ask myself, ‘Am
I settling?’ But I loved him
so much, and we got along
so well. I decided that I still
wanted to be with him, even
if we had problems. I found
out after we broke up that he
had been shopping for an
engagement ring.AFTER I kicked Joe out,
he knocked on my door and
begged me to take him back.
He said he definitely needed
help. He wouldn’t call himself
a sex addict but I believe he
is. I couldn’t sleep in the old
apartment we’d shared, so I
moved in with two friends.
I would drive myself to work
and just cry. I lost a drastic
amount of weight.
Everybody said, ‘You’re
so lucky you found out now.’
If I had never accidentally
found that mobile phone in
the dresser, we could have
ended up getting married
and having kids, and he still
would have kept on cheating
on me. But four years is a big
part of your life to give to
someone, regardless.
Looking back, when I
thought, ‘Am I just settling?’
that was my intuition trying
to tell me that something
was wrong. I was settling,
but I never will again.”
MELISSA, 30 >*NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED. HADLEY HUDSON/THE LICENSING PROJECT; JENNIFER ROBBINS/THE LICENSING PROJECT
COSMOPOLITAN June 2015 145