From Cosmopolitan

We were sitting close enough together on the edge of his bed that I could feel the heat of his body without actually touching him. A nervous magnetism was keeping us closer together than necessary, and also, just slightly apart. If energy in air were visible, the inches between our respective thighs would've been flashing neon.

The charge came from a tenuous, unspoken sexual attraction that was the entire basis of our "friendship"-one we'd never actually acknowledged because I was, at the time, in a serious relationship. My boyfriend-we'll say his name is Matt*-was a mutual friend. I'd come to Drew's* place that night in early summer under some ridiculous guise I can't even remember now... but it had worked. So there we sat, thighs squishing against the sagging side of his bed, waiting for either something or nothing to happen.

Before you hate me for what comes next, you should know something: I hadn't felt my body heat up like that in months. Matt and I had sex every day (sometimes multiple times a day) for the first two years of our relationship. But by that humid night in early June, we'd stopped-not entirely, but enough so that he could look at me before we fell asleep and tell me the exact number of days it'd been since we'd fucked.

I was 21. So, when I started feeling an aversion to having sex with my boyfriend, I thought: These are my horniest years, something must be wrong with me. I considered seeing a therapist to try and fix myself. It hadn't yet occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to have sex with my boyfriend because of who he was. The way he kept track of the days since we'd last had sex felt more like a threat than a concern.



And, at the time, I didn't yet know the difference between loving someone and just needing to hold onto them. This is not an excuse to lie to someone you've said "I love you" to, but it's what was flashing across the ticker tape of my brain in the moments before what happened next on Drew's bed. Someone touched the other first, and then mouths were on each other, and hands were moving so fast they grabbed at clothes and skin with the same urgency.



We were horizontal-half-dressed and damp from the heat and our nerves-before my phone buzzed us back into reality. That was the first time I ever cheated on a boyfriend.

Photo credit: Hearst Owned More

Cheating is one of the big Nos, a flashing DO NOT PASS sign, one of the few things most people in the world can agree is very bad. It's a capital-S Scandal-something you have to have literally Beyoncé-level strength to forgive. And I would know: I saw one of my parents do it to the other, and now, because of that, they are no longer married.

Still, knowing this, I've cheated on all three of my serious boyfriends. I'm not completely morally bankrupt, and I feel bad for lying... even if the lie only lived for a few days or weeks until I broke up with each guy. But I don't regret each instance of cheating. Not really. Because, though they were all very different, each experience taught me crucial things about myself and my sexuality in my early twenties.

The frenzied grabbing and kissing on Drew's bed that night, for instance, didn't immediately reveal to me how badly I needed to break up with Matt. But, it did show me that my sexuality hadn't dried up, like I was worrying it had. I was still capable of feeling tingly and wild; and the urge to squeeze my body so close to someone else's that the only logical answer is to be inside each other was still there. Over the coming weeks, I noticed how not-there that feeling was with Matt-how it had never really been there at all. It wasn't me that was broken, it was our relationship. And I think it would've taken me so much longer to realise that if I'd just walked out of Drew’s room that night.

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