By Ashtyn Britt
abritt@lc.edu

Coming to terms with one’s sexuality is at times a long and exhausting process. It took me many years to completely accept myself, and try to venture into the dating world. Over time, I have ended up collecting stories and lessons learned from my dating life, which I will now be sharing every month for roughly the next year. All names will be changed to protect the privacy of everyone mentioned, as they deserve anonymity and respect — no matter how bad the stories may have ended. Instead of telling these stories in chronological order, I will be telling them by order of importance of their morals.

Readers, usually in these stories I share times when either I or a close friend had been the hero of the story, or the one who suffered from someone else’s wrongdoings. The friend whose story wanted to be shared today does not fall under this category. I ask that you all humbly do your best to not judge Sandy, because believe me when I say that she’s been judging herself enough, and only insisted I tell her tale so that others won’t make the same mistake that she had.

Sandy met Margot about two years ago while out on the town for Sandy’s 21st birthday, where Margot happened to be the bartender at the first establishment Sandy visited. While Sandy and her friends still would go to many different places that night, she had made sure to leave her phone number with Margot before leaving. Margot called her the next day, and the two started dating not long after that. For their first year together, the two had been crazy about each other. Sandy had been fresh off a break up before Margot, with a woman named Iris who she’d been seeing for a month before it hadn’t worked out. Luckily, Iris had grown to be close friends to Margot and Sandy despite their history and would hang out with them multiple times.

Anyway, after a little over a year together, Sandy and Margot started to map out their future together. Specifically, they were beginning to think about moving in together, which meant they were both going to have to save money in order to afford a bigger place to fit them and all of their belongings. Margot seemed to think the solution was easy, and decided to get a second full-time job in order to have more money sooner. Unfortunately, this would prove to be the beginning of what would lead to what Sandy refers to as “That Weekend”.

Because Margot had become so busy working both jobs, she literally never saw Sandy for about two months straight. Sandy might get the occasional text, but no phone calls, and definitely no seeing each other in person. Even when Sandy had tried to visit, Margot would politely ask her to please stay home because she’d be too tired to entertain any guests and since they’d live together soon anyway, it wouldn’t matter. Sandy tried multiple times to call Margot to express how she was beginning to feel neglected, but was never able to reach her. While Sandy loved Margot, she had grown from feeling neglected to feeling resentful.

Things came to a head when Sandy saw Margot on a Snapchat story out to dinner with a friend of hers, leading Sandy to believe that Margot could potentially be cheating on her. In a fit of blind rage, she called and sought friendly comfort in Iris who instantly offered for her to come over to watch some movies and vent their issues. Sandy quickly accepted and then decided to get dressed up, not having had the opportunity to do so in quite some time.

For the most part, the interaction had been innocent enough, Sandy simply was going off about all the ways Margot had been making her mad, and Iris had been comforting her. Things stopped being so innocent after two bottles of Sherry between the two. Iris had started cuddling up to Sandy and let her know that she’d had some regrets recently about having broken her heart a year and a half beforehand, and that had Sandy been her girlfriend she would’ve been calling her every day to let her know how important she is to her. It became apparent very quickly that Iris was more than willing to take a stroll down memory lane with Sandy.

Sandy, having been inebriated and angry with Margot, felt so happy just to have someone notice her that she found herself accepting Iris’s offer and would end up spending the whole weekend walking down memory lane repeatedly. Sandy describes the experience as being like a high, not being able to feel like the rest of the world even existed. Sandy had been blind to the reality of the aftermath that would come, and considering Margot still hadn’t talked to her the entire weekend, it apparently made it easy for Sandy to get caught up in Iris’s embrace.

Then, Monday morning came and Sandy finally understood the gravity of what she’d done and what it would mean for her life. Sandy drove home as fast as she could and would spend the next week feeling so guilty she couldn’t eat or sleep. Finally deciding she had to tell her girlfriend about her infidelity, she rushed over at 2 a.m. knowing Margot would finally be home from her second job.

Margot was about as furious as you’d expect when Sandy told her the truth, calling her every name in the book and demanding she leave and never speak to her again. Margot called Sandy completely ungrateful for all the effort she’d made trying to give them a good life, and had no interest in hearing anything Sandy had to say about how sorry she’d been. When Margot threw her shoe at Sandy, screaming profanities at her, Sandy finally knew there was no way to undo the damage she’d caused and finally returned home.

I’m telling you all this because cheaters ultimately never win, and a few nights for a fling is never worth sabotaging an entire relationship. If you feel unappreciated or undervalued, please communicate with your partner about it instead of stepping out on them. While we will face temptation many times in relationships, it’s our responsibility to ourselves and our partner to not act on those temptations. Sandy is now taking time away from the romantic world to go to therapy in order to better understand what made her act so impulsively so that when she does enter the dating world again, she won’t make the same mistakes. To Margot, if you ever see this, please know that Sandy really is sorry. As for everyone else, I can’t emphasize enough to please not cheat on your partner.