Dear Playful Something or Other,
When we first met in a Yahoo chat room, you were completely honest with me. You told me that you were happily married, and my personal policy has always been to cut off any conversation with married guys. As I told you during that first conversation, I deserve more than another woman's table scraps, but you said you just wanted to talk, and I bent my rules and allowed myself to be sucked in. The question of whether or not cybersex is cheating is a simple one for me; the brain is the biggest sex organ in the body, and cybersex occurs primarily in the imagination, ergo it is cheating just as plainly as if you were in the same room. The fact that no one has caught an STD from cybersex does not relegate it to a lower level of cheating.
Over the past few months, we have had many conversations about your wife, your family, your work, my writing, my studies, my children, and so much more. In spite of your occasional flirts and attempting to get me to break my rules, I came to truly enjoy what I considered the intellectual nature of our chats, the political discourse, and just having someone to be completely honest with. Since I never caught you in a lie, I assumed you spoke the truth when you told me you thought my writing was excellent. I gained from your occasional critiques of things I was working on.
So, it was more than a little upsetting when you suddenly disappeared, more so in light of the fact that I had finally allowed myself to be seduced by you just days before. Your persistence paid off; you caught me in a moment of weakness, and then you made a complete lie out of everything you had said previously by disappearing. I have no claims on you, nor do I want any. I just want you to know the sequence of feelings and thoughts you left in your wake.
Initially, for a few days, I thought you were just busy at work as you had gone MIA before for short periods. Then, I started to wonder if your wife had caught you either online or in real time, which of course made me feel extremely guilty for possibly having damaged your marriage. This possibility was in the back of my mind when I began to wonder if you had been hurt. As we had also discussed earlier, the nature of this medium of communication is that you could be hurt, hospitalized, or worse, and of course no one would let me know since they do not know I exist.
The sex meant nothing to me beyond the fact that I felt guilty about it, but the loss of what I thought was a promising friendship was much worse. I went through alternating periods of anger, feeling used and cast aside like a whore, and worry. Understand that none of these consumed my days; it is not as if we had ever actually met, but you would cross my mind periodically associated with one or a combination of negative emotions.
And then you popped up in my offline messages with a lame note about having been extremely busy,and with that you have confirmed for me my worst suspicions about what has happened. If you did not know that I would wonder what had happened, then you should at least have responded to my last offline message. You cannot tell me that you did not have 10 seconds to let me know that you were okay, or that you wanted to focus on your marriage and making it what it should be. It would have been kinder of you to tell me I bored you to death, or that you thought the cybersex was lousy. I can only assume at this point that your motivation in handling this as you did was to make me feel cheap. Well done.
Sincerely,
Considering Joining a Convent.