Forgive me, Internet Conscience, for I have sinned. I have examined my conscience and I can find no deliberate ill-intent, but I have done some huge wrongs. Here is my first topic of confession: I once cyber-cheated.
When I think about it—and I do, when I have time to reflect—I still wonder what in the hell happened. I didn’t intend for it to happen, didn’t set out to do so, but when it happened, it happened fast. I was naïve before it happened, and in the aftermath learned some cruel lessons. It had just as swift an end as it did a beginning. It lasted barely three weeks, and the whole thing still haunts me nearly two years later.
I was on an online game, part of a constant good sized group. Always leery of the internet, not many knew my name, let alone where or who I really was. I had made several friends in the game, and one of them was someone I’ll call “Joe” (of course, not his real name). Joe and I were usually in the same group for the same events, and therefore we spent several hours an evening talking and texting. He became one of the people I actually trusted.
Let me say right here that I was, and am, happily married. I make it absolutely clear to any guy in the intartubes who even gets an idea in that direction that they’re not going anywhere. Since this disastrous event, I am certainly more strident than I used to be. However, in the midst of normal and innocuous conversation before I learned said harsh lessons, naïve little me got tripped up by the dreams and wishes and the beautiful fantasy world of Joe.
Joe is a bit older than me, twice divorced with a kid. He’s got a decent job and a decent house, but he had, as I eventually learned, some serious baggage. He converted to a particular religion not because he believed in its tenets, but because his best friend pushed him into it. He abandoned his then-current wife and child when he was overseas for a woman several years ago. He is content to sit and play games for hours on end, pretend the real world doesn’t exist, and never leave the house. Of course, I learned all of these things in the course of that intensely colored period of three weeks, and there’s even more to his story that makes me scratch my head all this time later. Posting it, though, would take days.
But the big thing was that he essentially locked himself away from life for over ten years over someone he could never have, and that woman in an impossible position… well, for the record, she’s the wife of his best friend, who she had no intention of leaving. Joe said that he realized somewhere in there that he knew she was using him, but at that point he didn’t care–they were filling each others’ emotional voids. But when it finally dawned on him that what he wanted couldn’t, could never happen, he shunned his friends and he shunned the normality of life, encasing himself in this thick shell where nobody was allowed to come in. He goes to work, comes home, plays his games and goes to bed; nothing else.
For some reason, after all those years, I cracked his shell. I didn’t set out to do so, it just kind of happened.
He bathed me in a golden light, pursued me sweetly, and turned my head because I’d never been pursued before. However, I never lied to him: I told him from the very first day that there was nothing wrong with my marriage, and that I would never leave him, which cooled Joeoff, so I thought I was safe.
WRONG.
For a while I thought it was amusing, him pouring out his heart, telling me things and confiding to me the things he’d never told anyone else, stroking my ego, making the sun shine. I kept reminding him that I couldn’t do this, think that, or say these things he wanted me to say. Despite all this, I was weak and I got sucked in, big time. It was a beautiful and peaceful fantasy world for two. In fact, if we hadn’t have been across the country from one another, things might have gone from the virtual to the real. I’m so glad it didn’t.
Let me interrupt here and say that if I were a different person–a callous, predatory bitch who uses people, etc.–I could have cleaned him out, he was that vulnerable. There was a period in those few weeks that if I had snapped my fingers, he would have flown out here, he would have sent me money, you name it. He is SO FUCKING LUCKY that I am not that kind of a person. I think about that sometimes, and my mind is blown every time. He would have literally done anything and everything for me, he was that far gone. Now, back to the story at hand…
At one point, he had marveled over what had happened between us and his extremely intense feelings for me. He asked about my husband, and I told him that what was happening didn’t have anything to do with him. One of the lessons with this madness was I had learned was how one could cheat on another and tell the person being cheated on that it had nothing to do with him. It didn’t—I love him and feel the same way about my husband as I have for ten years, do now, and always will. The whole episode with Joe was its own world with its own rules and ways. Don’t talk smack about me saying this until you’ve been there—it *is* possible.
From the very first day, I kept inserting warnings, including telling Joe that since I couldn’t give him even his simplest wish (I had never told him I loved him, that simple thing), my feeling was that I had no rights where he was concerned—I couldn’t demand, I couldn’t ask, couldn’t exact promises from him. He hated that stance and denied it; I insisted. He said that the harsh reality was “already creeping in around the sides.” So yes, he knew. I forced that knowledge on him.
It was when Joe started going down certain roads that the nape of my neck started to creep in warning—how would I furnish his house? What would I plant in the yard? Would I like for him to take me to Europe? Etc. The dead end road he started going down started with the question, How would I like to go to _______ to meet his parents?
That stopped me cold. It finally came to me that he was totally disconnected from everything I kept warning him about all that time, that he hadn’t listened to me, not once. I went from careless and amused and playing cutesy to serious and dark and brooding. That one question forced me to put things in their place in reality.
I remember that late summer morning where I was doing yardwork, getting sunburned, and I mentally cracked over the whole thing. It wasn’t fair to me, or to my husband, who was entirely innocent. And I remember oh so clearly when I trudged up the stairs when I was done with the yard to my computer, dead inside, knowing what I had to do. I had to throw reality on this fantasy world.
He was on the voice program; I was typing in the game because I was terribly shaken up and in tears, and I knew I couldn’t actually talk coherently. One of the things I said was that I couldn’t do that to my husband anymore—he didn’t know a thing (poor baby), but I did, and it was eating me up inside—and that I had to protect him, as he was entirely innocent. I just couldn’t pretend anymore, and couldn’t live within the double life that I had tripped into.
I made a grown man cry that day. Hell, I wasn’t doing too well myself.
A short time after that, Joe and I were still exchanging emails, and somehow got back on the topic of my husband. And what I did was send a two-part email about the man I married and the life we’d built, so that Joe could truly understand why I had continued to cut him off down various roads and close off emotions. I kept those two emails for the longest time, because they were so poignant, and because it was the truth that even I had been skirting. He however, couldn’t handle it.
Instead of being an adult about it, he shut down and walked away. Literally. No middle ground, no warning, just… gone. Ten days later, in game, I habitually called him a foreign-language nickname in the midst of the cat and mouse game we were playingwith one another (where I was trying to get back through the shell that had reappeared). With all seriousness, he said, “What does that mean?” He was deathly serious.
I’d heard of people being able to do so, but I’d never actually met someone who could amputate someone like that. I now understand the normal devastation that occurs when this happens. What did he mean by that? We had an entire email thread on the discussion of that term and others. I couldn’t believe it.
Even worse, as far as he was concerned after a certain point in the aftermath, nothing had ever happened; and, in the course of time, I as a person would no longer exist.
The smart thing would have been to quit the game then and there. I did go on sabbatical, staying away from the game itself and the voice program the group used. Emails I sent went into some void with no response. I chose not to use the phone. I just went away.
I did come back, however, for a certain game event, and as a result I laid myself open to incredible hurt. On some days, I didn’t exist. On others, he would be non-committal and distant. Sometimes he would be ‘hi, how are you?’ and it would turn back into a game of cat and mouse.
On still others, he would taunt me. One example was when he said out of the blue something to the effect that he could touch his tongue to his nose. I replied so, so can I, so what? Then it degenerated into things of the sexual sort (that I’d rather not post). I then shut down and stopped communicating. It was just not worth it.
One particular day, I’d seen him with a particular person in another channel—a person I have no respect for—and I knew right then that he was leaving the game (I later asked him point blank whether he left because of me; he denied it, but to this day I don’t believe him). So he disappeared, and I relaxed. But the game, which I had nearly left prior to my involvement with Joe, got boring again, the same ol same ol. Besides, I had gone back to school, and my time was at a premium—I no longer had the time or energy to sit for five hours as we went into an instance. So I left, and it was a good thing, because then I didn’t have to deal with the ghosts and the possibility of being teased or taunted—even ignored—again.
(To Be Continued)
