It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After (19 page)

There I was, a twenty-seven-year-old woman looking for a husband, I had narrowed it down to two men, and I was not a virgin. So when the option presented itself to bed these two men, of course I went for it. After ending up with my now ex-fiancé, I sort of forgot that I’d even had sex with anyone else. It was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation, and though I knew there was a possibility that the topic would arise, like a guilty teen I figured there was an equal chance it wouldn’t. Why stir the pot? Maybe it’s more that I just hoped it would never come up, and so I never brought it up. What a mistake that was.

About a month into our engagement, which had been going great, I was in Florida with my mom taking care of my grandmother, who was having surgery. Sitting beside my mother in the cold hospital waiting room, I received a text from my then fiancé.

26:
Did u sleep with anyone else on the show? . . .

Three dots. He was still typing.

26:
Because if you did, this is over. No way I can handle that.

Fuuuuuuuck. How could I think this day would never come? Paralyzed, I sat feeling like I had just been tased, not with a stun gun but with an ultimatum.

I looked up to see my mom reading a magazine.
Shit shit shit!
I wasn’t surprised that the topic was rearing its ugly head, since the fantasy suite episodes were coming up the next week. But I
was
surprised by the ultimatum. What the hell was I going to do?

Option A: Tell the truth.
That would require admitting that I slept with someone else, which, if he meant what he said, would mean we were over.

Option B: Deny, deny, deny.
This clearly is going to get me into major trouble, but maybe he would never find out. If I don’t deny, it’s over anyway, so does it really make a difference at this point?

Option C:
Stall. Completely change the subject and deal with it at another time. If I tell the truth, it’s over. If I lie, I live with regret, and when he finds out, it’s over. Maybe I can buy some time.

Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Not only did I have no options, but I was being faced with an ultimatum, which angered me. I mean, who the fuck gives an ultimatum over something that’s already happened?

I had no options. Basically, it’s over no matter how I slice it. In that moment I desperately wished I had a time machine so I could go back and tell him from the very beginning, but I don’t, so Option C it was. I swallowed hard before typing my response.

ME:
Nah.

26:
Cool, just checkin. How is Florida?

And just like that, I had told my first lie as an engaged woman. I knew that at some point I’d have to tell him—when the time was right, or I guess when the time was more appropriate, because let’s be honest, the time will never be right to tell your fiancé that you had sex with your other potential “fiancé” ten days before him
and
lied about it. But this was clearly not the right time to tell him. The selective optimist within me hoped I would get super lucky and he would forget about the entire thing and we’d continue to live in engagement bliss. A girl can dream, right?

Yeah, right. Two weeks later, the topic came up again, only this time I wasn’t in a hospital waiting room. I was alone in Los Angeles, in a car on my way to film the reunion show where I would have to face all the sour grapes—aka eliminated guys other than Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six—who had banded together and were ready to pounce. Each of them was armed with the same mission: either redeeming himself or getting his last precious moments of airtime by spouting whatever overrehearsed one-liners he’d been practicing.

Up until this point, our relationship had sailed rather smoothly through the airing of the show, which we pompously referred to as “our love story” (behind closed doors, of course). Since returning to Atlanta, we’d chosen not to watch the show together, which gave me a good excuse to indulge in a plethora of wine every Monday night with my girlfriends. We were an open and honest couple . . . except for this secret I had been keeping, which was now taunting me yet again. With only two episodes left, including the overnight dates and the finale, the promos were airing left and right, hinting at the scandalous details that would be revealed. Of course this had sparked his curiosity as to what really went down when no one was watching. Now he was on the other end of the phone asking the question again, and I knew if ever there was a “right time” to tell him the truth, this was it. Our relationship depended on it.

Ahhhhh . . . why did I not just tell him the first time?
Was it the ultimatum that threw me off? Was it the feminist in me that made me feel justified and self-righteous about my right to have sex without apologizing for it? Or was I just a scared little pussy? Whatever, the secret had been weighing on me, so this time his question came as a welcome relief.

Though only Number Twenty-Five and I knew what had happened, and I knew I could probably get away with denying it all the way to my grave, my commitment and love for my fiancé made me realize he deserved to know the truth. He deserved to know my past and thus be spared any potential humiliation he would feel if, God forbid, he were to find out from someone other than me.

As I came clean during the call, a piercing pain shot through my stomach. I had to roll down the window in case vomit uncontrollably began spewing from my guilty mouth. He was devastated, angry, and hurt, badly. I apologized profusely for lying to him, and I didn’t even include a “but.” My mother had always told me, “Never use the word but in an apology because it means everything you just said is bullshit.” Her advice played like a record in my head as I avoided the bullshit indicator.

He seemed to struggle over whether he was more upset by the fact that I had lied or that I’d had sex with another man. Several more apologies later, it became clear the issue was about the sex. Once I realized this, I found myself struggling as well; on one side, I was the sympathetic fiancée who felt terrible that I had hurt the man I loved, but on the other side, the independent feminist in me felt enraged that my choice was being called into question. I then started using the word “but” several times and went into full-blown lawyer mode as I defended my case for spreading my legs.

There were so many reasons I had done what I did, based upon emotions that ranged from uncertainty to confusion to fear. I could apologize for lying, but I just couldn’t seem to genuinely apologize for doing something I didn’t feel was wrong. Did I feel guilty? Yes. Did I regret it? Kind of. Did I feel slightly skanky for having sex with two men in a ten-day span? Yes. If I had the chance to do it all over again the exact same way, would I?

Yes.

Though I didn’t outright say that to him (as my father taught me, you don’t get to go through life saying whatever you want like an asshole), I did defend my romp. I wasn’t defending it only to him, but to myself as well.

REASON 1:
My head versus my heart

As hard as it is to remember my feelings about Number Twenty-Five during that time, now that I was so smitten with my fiancé, I can’t deny that they ever existed. They had. I liked him, very much, actually, and it wasn’t just because of the passionate kisses we shared. I liked him because he offered such a different future from that of Number Twenty-Six. A future filled with profound conversations, endless heated debates, and a cosmopolitan life. He offered me a future that excited me. It was as if my head was voting for Number Twenty-Five—but my heart belonged to Number Twenty-Six. So what was I supposed to do? Would he have been as mad if I’d had meaningless sex with Number Twenty-Four instead?

REASON 2:
Hindsight is 20/20

It’s easy to sit here and say, “Well, I shouldn’t have done it because I found love” and blah blah blah. That may well be true, but it’s also complete bullshit. I was absolutely terrified of being left brokenhearted by Number Twenty-Six. After our fight in Italy, where I had seen his ability to bring me to tears in an instant, I had my guard up. I wondered if he was really a raging lunatic behind closed doors, or if he was playing me like a fiddle this whole time and was going to leave after he got laid. There was no guarantee from his end, and I felt I had to protect myself by keeping my options open.

Plus, if I had picked someone else, it’s possible I’d be in the same situation regardless. Whoever I ended up with would be mad that I slept with whoever I didn’t end up with. So again, what was I supposed to do? Come on the show a virgin and leave a virgin? Umm . . . too late.

REASON 3:
Drive before you buy

Thinking about a life with Mr. Would You Rather touches on another point: test-driving the car before you buy it. There’s a reason everyone does this. It’s a significant purchase and you’d like to make sure everything’s in good shape and you aren’t getting stuck with a lemon. And before you even get behind the wheel, you research it. You get your Carfax report, look at the odometer, find out the gas mileage, inspect for dings and dents, and then if all checks out, you take it for a spin. It’s all about doing your due diligence before investing your valuable currency—whether cash or your heart. Metaphorically, a man is no different from a car. Your research is all the dates you go on, the dings and scratches are the foreplay, and taking it for a spin, well, that’s the sex!

And I’m damn glad I did just that. Can you imagine if things didn’t work out the way they did? I’d have ended up with Mr. Would You Rather for the rest of my life because, well, I had no clue that he was in fact Mr. Would You Rather, because I didn’t bother popping the hood, let alone take it and him for a ride.

REASON 4:
Screw the double standard (literally)

Call me self-righteous or a feminist or even a cold-hearted bitch, but I am so sick of the double standard when it comes to men and women and sex. It’s the new millennium. I am a twenty-seven-year-old WOMAN, I shave my legs, I get a monthly Brazilian wax (where I get abused by an unsympathetic Russian with a heavy accent while in the “froggy” position), it takes me an hour to do my hair, and I cry for absolutely no reason three to five days of every month. Thus, I am a bona fide woman with a vagina, and I should be able to have sex when and with whom I want to, just as a man does.

I guarantee you that all guys in that situation are having sex, and not just with one or two girls, but all three! But nobody says anything to them, they just get a pat on the back and get called a stud. But when a woman does it, she is reduced to being a slut. A slut whose fiancé is mad at her.

REASON 5:
You know what you signed up for

My last reason, I swear. Come the fuck on, dude! Eight weeks surrounded by hot men, them surrounded by one woman, and the first night alone with no cameras, guess what? You’re in all likelihood having sex. Gasp! The lead knows this and so does every one of the contestants. It’s the epitome of the statement I often roll my eyes at: “You know what you signed up for.” Yes, we may all be plucked from obscurity and filled with naïveté that leads us to say and do things we later realize were all contrived, so we use the excuse that we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into, which is often true. But not when it comes to this, because no matter where we’re from or how naïve we are to the ins and outs of reality television, we all come in with either a vagina or a penis. And unless you’re the lone virgin of the season, if you last long enough, you’re going to be using it. Every season it’s the same format: You date, you kiss, you visit the hometowns, you meet the family, and then you have sex in the fantasy suite. It’s all part of the weird “sister-wife” or “brother-husband” scenario you find yourself in. So he can’t be that surprised that I had sex with more than just him, right?

With my case laid out, the conversation remained touch-and-go for hours. I didn’t know the fate of our relationship, but at least it was all out there, finally. After we hung up the phone, I regretted not being more sympathetic. The truth is I had hurt someone I loved, and instead of swallowing my pride, I turned to my ultimate defense mechanism of justification. I thought about how awful and betrayed he must have felt, and even if what I did wasn’t technically wrong, my reasoning couldn’t take his hurt away. No amount of self-righteousness could mitigate his feelings of pain. To this day, only the pain he felt makes me wish I hadn’t done what I did.

It took a lot for us to move on from the argument that by every indication could ruin our relationship. At the time, I was pleasantly surprised by his ability to accept my apology and agree to disagree on the merits of the situation. It was our first fight over something substantial. He had every right, though I would have thought it was immature, to walk away from the relationship right then and there. But he didn’t. He handled the conversation and the issue like an adult, like a man. He handled it like a future husband.

And with the slate wiped clean, our love was going to be stronger than ever. The entire situation would just be a part of history that we agreed would stay in the past, where it belonged. Right?

Haha, yeah, right. Despite my belief that we had moved past it all, we hadn’t. Or at least, he hadn’t. I didn’t know it, but in a matter of weeks, the subject of my sexcapade with Number Twenty-Five wasn’t only going to reemerge, it was going to serve as a catalyst for a multitude of fights. Fights that would continue for months, all the way until our breakup. That one sexual escapade would become a power play used by my fiancé to justify his distrust of me. It would be an excuse to call me a “whore.” And it would eventually lead to the demise of our engagement. I just didn’t know it then.