Tag Archives: heartbreak

Things I Learned From Working With a Black Metal Band

I have toured twice now with a certain black metal band, and they are my favorite band to work for.  I think I’ll start with my favorite thing I learned while with them:

1.  Nothing can both create and destroy as much as hope.

We had a day off in Oregon back in January, and spent it going on a hike which almost killed me because my Floridian body cannot take altitude.  After being worried for a few hours that some of the guys did actually die (they ventured off trail), we made a celebratory bonfire upon their return.  Well, if I’m being honest, it was just a fire outside to keep us warm and give us something to do.  But in my mind, I was celebrating the fact that no one died. Everyone was quiet, exhausted, watching the flames consume, and I had a sudden thought which I shared out loud, “Fire is the only thing that can both create and destroy so much.”

“No, hope.”  One of the guys immediately countered with.  As dismal as that sounds, he was right.  Hope is the ultimate creator and destroyer.  It has made me begin actively trying to let go of all my hopes.  Having zero expectations of anyone or anything sounds blissfully peaceful.

2.  “Peer pressure is where all of the good stuff happens.”

Something the lead singer said.  He tends to be the wise one.  We always associate peer pressure with negative influences, but it can be equally as positive.  Peer pressure can occur when you’re getting your heartbroken and the people surrounding you convince you that it’s a better idea to climb a mountain with them rather than sit alone moping and drinking beer.  That happened to me on this last tour.  Sure, sometimes peer pressure does not lead you on a good path, but I think part of the point he was making is, even if it’s not the “right” path, maybe something interesting will happen.  Maybe you’ve learned something about yourself or someone else, and maybe you’re better for it.  As I write, I’m realizing that peer pressure is another concept that can also create and/or destroy.  Whether it’s a negative influence or a positive one, I find how powerful it is to be very fascinating.  The lesson is, don’t hang out with assholes, and then you will almost always have a positive peer pressure experience.  Real friends won’t hurt you.

3.  “Things” create an invisible barrier between us all.

I’ve understood this for a while, but I see it with even more clarity now.  These guys don’t need much and they are unconcerned with luxuries.  I think part of the reason why it is so easy to begin to feel like part of the family with them, is because there is no superficial concerns in the way.  We don’t much care how we look or smell around each other, or what we do or say around each other either because everyone is so non-judgmental.  It’s a kind of bond that you can only find with people who don’t give a fuck.  And these guys truly don’t give a fuck.

Especially as a girl, I am often way too in my head and concerned with my appearance.  When I’m out on the road, and especially with this band, some of those voices go away.  I wake up and don’t usually even wash my eye crust away until the afternoon, once load-in is complete.  I don’t normally put on make-up, I wear the same shirt three days in a row and I look in the mirror once a day.  And that’s how they know me, with no falsities filtering us.  It’s fucking beautiful when your mind is clear of all that everyday nonsense.  Your brain has more capacity to notice and experience things and each other when it’s not distracted by hair products, cell phones and how your Levi’s fit.

It also makes me think about a lesson that the boy with the white hair once told me.  He was explaining to me why he tends to wear black on black everyday.  He has enough to think about, so what he is going to wear, is one less decision he needs to make, hopefully making room for decisions that do matter.  So I guess what the black metal band and the boy with the white hair taught me is that the road to peace of mind can only be found when it has paved away superficial mental clutter.

4.  Being a vegetarian is a luxury.

If you’re really hungry, fuck vegetarianism.  I was a vegetarian for several years, then a pseudo vegetarian, and now all I can claim is that I try to avoid meat.  I don’t dispute the probable health benefits of not eating meat, and I don’t support the inhumane treatment of animals that are no better or worse than us.  As I’m sure you’ve already come to understand, these guys are very low-maintenance.  They don’t ask for much on the tour rider, so we often have minimal food available.  I like that about them, but it also means that I know what it is like to be really hungry when there are no food options other than a package of sliced ham that was left-over from one of last weeks venues.  When you’ve been on the road for a while, working your ass off, and there is no food around and you haven’t gotten a good meal in for a few days… trust me, you will welcome that processed pig.

I think of being a vegetarian as a kind of luxury because before mass production and before GMO’s, the only way one could be a vegetarian is if one happened to live in one of the few places on Earth that happen to have plentiful and varying vegetation.  You think that there are many vegetarians in Russia?  Doubtful.  But I don’t live in Russia, so I can easily avoid meat when I’m home, if I want to.  So now I proclaim myself a “non-asshole-vegetarian.”  Meaning, I try to stay away from it, but I’m not high maintenance about it.  If someone makes something for me that has meat in it, I’m not going to be an asshole and tell them that I can’t eat it.  Or if I’m in Eastern Europe (which I was recently) I’m going to enjoy and adjust to their culture, which I am here to tell you… is a lot of meat, cheese and bread.

5.  Moderation can be overrated.

I have always said that everything in moderation is healthy.  Embracing your vices in moderation is healthy.  These mother fuckers though, take their vices head on, like a bull.  And just like a raging bull, they have battle wounds and sometimes they look rough, but fuck, they make decay look beautiful.  They know themselves better than most and I think that a lot of that is because they have taken their minds and bodies to the limits.  I think we all learn a lot about ourselves when we let substances kick our ass sometimes.  They haven’t crossed the line completely, they just dance with the devil on the line between moderation and insanity.  Sure, we have lost some brain cells, but I think we gain so much more.  We gain camaraderie, travels, experiences, wisdom and hard work.  I understand that you can gain all of those qualities while practicing moderation, but the point is, it seems like you can get there by practicing extremism sometimes as well.

6.  Black metal bands have the most competent fans.

As we all know because of my Merch Girl Rants, the people who I typically deal with at metal shows are abhorrently stupid.  It’s honestly incredible.  However, with the black metal band, I only get a couple of dumb questions a night.  Usually, I only get a couple of NOT dumb questions a night.  So it’s safe to conclude that there is something about the Satanist crowd that makes them more intellectually competent.  Those five hours I spend selling t-shirts and patches is a lot less painful when I’m selling for the black metal band because I actually feel like I’m dealing with other humans, rather than a subordinate alien race.

7.  Calling someone a mongoloid is a very fun insult.

Try it soon!  “You fucking mongoloid!”  It’s wonderfully satisfying when someone is acting like an ape.

8.  All pain does is hurt.

I like this lesson because it can apply to physical and emotional pain.  Some of the guys are slightly sadistic, and I’m slightly masochistic, so we end up doing shit like shooting each other with BB guns, burning ourselves due to a bet and whipping each other when someone fucks up a guitar riff.  I used to hate anticipating pain, but I’ve seen their scars and I’ve seen them take it, and now I try to shrug it off and I think to myself, don’t be scared of pain, all it does is hurt.

I got my heartbroken on this last tour, and I applied the same lesson.  All of the pain I was/am feeling, I just breathed it out and tried to remember that this is all it does.  It just hurts, that’s it.  So there’s my final gift to you babe, you can blame it all on me because I’m not scared and I’ll take the pain.





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Love, Drugs and Infidelity – Chapter 3 of 3

…to be continued…

I honestly don’t remember how or why the dealing got so out of hand. Had I known the extent of what was going on, I probably would have spoken up.  I sometimes wonder if things would have turned out differently had I said something to him.  Of course I know that the tragedy to follow, was not my fault, but I just wonder… would he had stopped dealing if I had asked nicely?  If I had genuinely intervened, and request that he stop, I think there is a small chance that he would have.  I never wanted to be a nagging girlfriend though, so for the most part I just kept my mouth shut and turned a blind eye.  I also felt it wasn’t my place, because I was the one declaring that I wasn’t a “girlfriend.”  And so it goes.  I kept my head turned and he kept dealing, but he never got me involved in the least.

I’m not sure if I appreciated this at the time, but in hindsight, he must have gone through at least some lengths to keep me out of that whole mess.  A lot of people got arrested on that one awful morning.  A lot of their girlfriends got arrested too, because maybe one time she drove them to a dealer’s house, or one time she passed over a bag to someone because her boyfriend was at El Cheapo buying a case of Red Bull for exams week.  I vaguely remember there being times when I easily could have done something simple like that.

My blind eye was also due to naivety (or maybe the other way around), so I know that there were times when I had no idea that going over to Bob’s house to hang out, drink Heineken and watch bad television, also meant doing a drug deal.  Or letting a friend borrow my cell phone, actually meant them making a call to arrange buying five “paintbrushes” (they had codes).  I would have never knowingly done anything criminal, but I never did unknowingly either because Chewonki never allowed this.  Despite how convenient my involvement would have been for him, it was just a non-option in his mind, which brings true romance to our unconventional love story.  It was almost as if his gift to me was maintaining my ignorance.

If I remember correctly, just before he was arrested, things were pretty shitty between us for a while and it slightly effected our friend circle because we couldn’t be in the same room together without making everyone else feel vastly uncomfortable.  So I think this is the point where Marie really stepped in and did that she thing does.  Marie is my great friend who always acted as a mediator/counselor to my fucked up personal life in college.  She was doing her part in trying to get us to become amiable again and  I guess it worked.  Civility led to friendliness which led to talking and laughing together again, which led to falling for him, all over again.

I had decided that I wasn’t going to act on this, however.  It would not have been fair to him.  He always knew what he wanted, I was the one who changed my mind every fourteen seconds, so I wanted to at least spare him of another episode of Penny Hell.  I wanted to save him from me.

It was now February of 2008.  On some normal night, we were doing some normal thing, and he was just being so damn cute.  I couldn’t stand it anymore.  He probably called me, “his little quarter minus twenty-four cents” again.  Like I said, I went by Penny then, so Chewonki would sometimes call me that, and I was such a sucker for it.  It was so ridiculous, but it made me laugh every time.  Anyway, after keeping it platonic for a while, I had to kiss him.  And I did.  And thank fucking God I did.  It was beautiful.  We spent that evening together, and I remember talking to myself, telling myself, you’re so happy right now.  You can do this with him.  Just stay in this.  And that was the last time I’d be with him.  Hours later, just as the sun was rising, the cops would bang on the door of his house.

There was an eight month investigation that had apparently been going on, and Chewonki (and others) got narced on.  There was a total of 25 SCAD students that got arrested.  Granted, a couple of the people arrested were relatively high up in the chain, but most of them were like Chewonki.  Not that I’m condoning his behavior, but he was just some pion.  And the worst drug dealer ever I might add, because they never had any money!

The saddest part may be that after their arrest, I found out that they were planning on quitting; getting out of the dealing.  From what I understand, they were in the process of doing this, which is why during the search of Chewonki’s bedroom, as he sat on his mattress handcuffed and hopeless, the cops found nothing.  No drugs.  Just mirrors and razors I believe.  They thought that they had just busted a huge drug ring.  They were expecting to find friggen bricks of cocaine in closets.  Really they just got some rich college kids who were selling $11 worth of shit blow out of their living rooms that had Grateful Dead posters on the walls and always smelled like Ramen Noodles, so that they could keep putting cocaine down their face without their parents inquiring about spending habits.  There was serious crime going on in all of the government projects in the area, and the Savannah PD just didn’t want to deal with it because shit, I wouldn’t either!  With their embarrassing salary, why go risk your lives in the projects, when you can hassle some artsy college kids?  Excuse the rant.  With that being said however, I don’t pardon what they did and maybe it was a blessing in disguise.  Who knows how out of hand his drug use could have become had he not been arrested.

When it all went down  I was obviously heartbroken.  That was a pretty traumatic time for all of us.  Marie had it the worst, but that’s a whole other tragic tale.  College would never be the same again.  Memories of college post-arrests, have a completely different tone and spirit than all of the ones pre-arrests because our whole group of friends was split up.  A lot were arrested… people had to drop out of school… do jail time, rehab, probation blah blah blah and Chewonki was in the thick of it.  That was the last time I saw him.

A few days after his arrest, while he was still in jail, unable to get bailed out yet, his mom called me to update me, and she said, “He wants me to tell you that he’s sorry and that he loves you.”  I cried my eyes out for weeks.

He was obviously expelled from school, and once he finally got bailed out, he had to move back up to New Jersey, and soon after, was forced to go to rehab in California.  We kept in touch over the phone fairly well during all of this, but then came the day when he had to do real jail time.  I forget how long he was in for.  Six months I think?  After that, it just became harder and harder to keep in touch.  I lived in either Georgia, Florida or California, and he lived in New Jersey and time just moves all things.  I’m sure both of us didn’t try as hard as we could have, but we had to move on.  I had moved on.  Until two weeks ago, I didn’t see Chewonki for six years.

Due to recent work, I have been traveling a lot, so I was able to see him.  We only had a short amount of time together, but it was like choreography.  There we were, Matt and Penny, talking and laughing, just like always.

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Love, Drugs and Infidelity – Chapter 1 of 3

This is a story about a time, a place and a boy.  It’s not a special story, but it’s special to me, and it’s time to tell the tale.

The time was college, eight years ago.  The place was Savannah, Georgia and the boy is Chewonki.  His name is not actually Chewonki, but within the first week of knowing him, he made the mistake of singing his camp song in front of me so the nickname stuck.  The fact that I was attending a college where 99% of the students came from those families that sent their kids away to camp every summer was my first clue that I was displaced.  The fact that his family sent him to a place called fucking Camp Chewonki where they literally sang songs around a campfire (I thought that was just in the movies), it’s no wonder he had emotional problems.  At least his problems could be professionally diagnosed and medicated.  My self diagnosis is simply that I suffer from asshole syndrome, to which the only medication is alcohol; a self-medication used to forget that you’re an asshole.

The first time I met Chewonki I did not like him.  I can’t remember why exactly, and I just called him this second to ask him if he remembers, and this was the conversation:


“Hey, are you busy?”  I asked.

“No.  I just got out of some stupid meeting.”

“Sorry that I’m chewing really loud.”

“It’s okay.  Whatever it is, it sounds delicious.”

“It is.  It’s beef jerky, so you know… it requires work to eat it.”

He laughed, “I did notice that your jaw looked strong the last time I saw you.”

“Thanks!  Anyway, do you remember why I didn’t like you when we first met?”

“You judged the cover, asshole.”

“No, I feel like it was because you acted like a Republican,”

“Penny, (this is my nickname, and what most of my college friends call me) I am the most liberal person you know.”  EVERYONE at art school is liberal so he got me there…

“Then maybe it was because you had terrible taste in music.”  Silence.  “So yeah… I guess you’re right.  I did judge the cover.”

“You looked at me and saw a Jersey douche.  But then we went to that party and bonded and you liked me after that.”

“Yeah, I do remember that I liked you at least a little bit at some point in my life.”

Laughing, “I don’t remember that part, but hopefully you still do at least a little.”

“All right, that’s all.  Bye!”

“Bye.  Love you.”

Back to 2006, rewinding over the arrests, drug deals and first time I love you’s that will come later in the story.  At this party (which he referred to in the above), I somehow found myself deep in conversation with Chewonki, the only guy there who I was not attracted to.  Three arguments and maybe two hours later and we were kissing.  Three hang out sessions and maybe two days after that, and we were infatuated with one another.  Him and I in deep conversation at a social gathering was something that I remember to be a pretty consistent occurrence.  It was college, so there were a lot of parties.  It was art school, so there were a lot of interesting people.  Chewonki and I would frequent these events, and though I have the memory of a fucking gold fish, I vaguely remember us more often than not,  ignoring all the new exciting people, and just ending up on the couch together, talking.

The beginning of us took place at a time when I thought I was hardcore because I drank Jack Daniels.  I was nineteen, so I was probably drinking a half of an ounce of Jack for every twelve ounces of coke, but regardless, I became abhorrently drunk one night after Chewonki and I had just started seeing one another.  I was sick in the bathroom, and Marie, my good college friend and roommate called Chewonki.  Now that we’re older of course, if a friend becomes sick due to intoxication, we stay seated and just point to the direction of the bathroom and maybe check in a half hour later to make sure she didn’t drown in the toilet.  But at nineteen, when a friend was puking, there was a whole goddamn rescue squad and procedures that took place.  I was not thrilled on the idea of Chewonki seeing me this way, but I was too drunk to object.  I was on the floor of a friend’s dorm bathroom, that had a random chair in it that read in chalk, “To whom that may concern, I would like to inform you that I just took the biggest dump of my life, and there is no toilet paper.”  After a minute of Chewonki sitting on the floor of this bathroom that should have been condemned, I think I did manage to ask him to give me a minute so that I could vomit in privacy.

To kill the time, he must have picked up a magazine or something, because when he came back in, the first thing he said was not, “are you ok?” or “you doin’ all right?” or any of those conventional phrases.  He said, “So I just learned that Clearwater is the Scientology headquarter of the world.”  Clearwater is where I’m from.  In some small way, I think that might have been the moment that I fell in love with him, though I didn’t recognize it for that at the time.  But what more could I ask for?  A guy who holds your hair back while you’re puking, and manages to have a good sense of humor while doing it.

We went on to have some great times and some hard times too, of course.  I take responsibility for most of the hard, but with that being said, he is a little bit out of his mind.  To be serious, it was sometimes difficult because he had emotional problems that I didn’t understand.  Unstable would be an appropriate word.  Chewonki was unstable.  So we had our fights, and our fair share of “down” times during our rollercoaster of a relationship, but he was always so kind to me despite his insanity and my bitchiness.

Our up times were great.  They were nothing elaborate or lavish, just two college kids laughing and talking.  For example, Chewonki is 6’5″ and I’m 5’3″.  This didn’t really bother me, (though kissing occasionally presented itself to be problematic) but it bothered him.  While walking together, he’d push me away and say, “don’t walk next to me, it’s embarrassing.”  Of course I took full advantage of him being uncomfortable with the height difference, and would get super close to him and purposely call attention us.  He called me a midget, and Flinestone feet.   He was such a character.  He used to wear friggen sweat-bands around his head with his hair sticking a good four inches straight up in all directions, and walk around like that all day.  And he’d also take his shirt off and spray himself with tanning oil if we were going to be outside for more than three and a half minutes.  Granted, he did these things to make me laugh, but he was also at least 55% serious about them.  That’s what I liked about Chewonki; he was goofy, but he knew when to be serious and we could laugh, as well as have meaningful conversations.  And the way he looked at me… I remember that it sometimes quite literally took my breath away.  I could feel that he cared about me.  With others, I could hear it, I could hear them say it, but with Chewonki, I could feel it.

I get antsy if I’m cooped up inside for more than a couple of hours.  I am perfectly comfortable with admitting that I can absolutely be annoying when I’m antsy.  Chewonki would never act annoyed though, so this is another fond memory I have of him.  He would always humor me, stop whatever important task he was in the middle of, and go with me outside (though I’m sure he didn’t want to) and shoot hoops for fifteen minutes or however long it took for me to get the antsiness out of my system, before returning to his homework or whatever it is that he was doing pre Penny neediness.  So nice.  And he defended me.  In my opinion, that’s the most powerful way to express love.  You know you love someone when you can wholeheartedly defend them to anyone.  I was not there, but some night that he was at a party, this girl, who he was good friends with, called me some stupid name, and Chewonki slapped her drink out of her hand and yelled at her, which apparently led to this girl crying.  I got wind of it the next day and asked him about it.  I remember I said thank you to him as I was leaving and then he pulled me back, grabbed my face, looked me dead in the eye and said, “No, you don’t ever have to thank me.  I will always defend you, okay?  Always,” then he kissed me.  That is probably at the top of the most romantic moments of my life.

Here is where my syndrome starts to become relevant, so stay tuned for the next chapter of this story…

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Aristotle and a Story of Love

I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone as much as I loved Nicholas Weston Golden.  I’ve always been a sucker for hot names, it may be the screenwriter in me, and Nicholas Weston Golden takes first place at SATNA (Sexy Author-Type Name Awards).  I met Nick when I was eighteen years old, working as a host at Outback Steakhouse.  He was a busser and I’ve loved him in some way ever since.

Nick has this ability to make you feel protected just by looking at you.  Girls have always been drawn to him because of this, and because he is just good.  While this may sound cheesy and rash, Nick is everything that is right in the world.   I was lucky because while everybody loved him, he loved me.  Of course, being who I was then, I always had a few boys, at the same time, that I was involved with in one way or another, declaring that I was anti-relationships.  We were young, so all of them put up with me, which is something I am eternally grateful for, but will never forgive myself for.  Those sad tales however, are for a different day.

Nick joined the Army, which was something I desperately did not want him to do, but I think he felt like he had no choice.  In a story about heartbreak, that could be the most heartbreaking of it all, because I know he could have done anything.  In late 2006, I believe, he was deployed to Iraq, and during those tormenting months of him being gone, I’ve never loved anyone more than I loved him.  The rest is history.  Life happens, people get away, we give too much or give too little, but we try.  Nick is now engaged to be married.

I’m not bitter about this, which surprised me, and is what brought on this random musing which will come to a point, I promise.  I am of course not thrilled at the idea of him getting married and I don’t pretend to be, not even to him, but I am truly happy if he is happy.  We hear that expression all of the time, but in most cases, we’re full of shit.  This is the first time that I’ve said it and been one hundred percent genuine, and the feeling did take me by surprise.  I suppose I still love and respect Nick far too much to have any real bitterness toward him.

I’ve been in many relationships, said I love you and meant it, in some way or another, to many people, but I wonder why… what it was that made me love Nicholas Weston Golden unlike anyone before or since.  Maybe it was because he was gone and I missed him so much to the point of it being crippling.  Or maybe it was because of all of the handwritten letters, there is something romantic about the mail.  Or maybe it was because he needed me.  He still, to this day, credits me for getting him through Iraq alive, which could be the most important thing I’ll ever do in my entire lifetime.  I think it was all of those reasons, but I also think it was because he was so near death, which brings me to my point.

Aristotle said that unrequited love is the most powerful form of love.  Therefore, the love of the dead (since loving a dead person would be the ultimate unrequited love) is the most powerful of all human emotions.  Of course he said this much more eloquently and in many more words… I’m just paraphrasing.  Thinking about Nick reminded me of Aristotle’s philosophy, and I think good ole’ Stotle was right.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I loved Nick the most because he was so close to death.  Of course, my love for him was reciprocated, but during that year of his deployment, I was constantly scared of him dying which in theory, could correlate to why I loved him so differently.  The question is, does this cheapen our love, or does it make it more beautiful and powerful?  I’m going with the latter.

For a second I was worried that loving him more because he was at war, somehow cheapened things. I was wrong and I think it actually allowed us to have a certain connection that many people will never know, and let us experience something so profound, that we should be honored to have felt that together.  Had Nick not gone to war, I still would have loved him very very much, and I know he would have loved me, but I also know now, that it would not have been the same love.  That however, makes it all the more special.  Realizing this allowed me to more easily come to terms with his marriage.  Nick and I were perfect for each other during that time and place, and had it been anyone else, it would not have worked.  In a way, I think, we kind of saved each other.

The notion that it takes death to experience the most profound of human emotions is heartbreaking in my mind, but somehow romantic as well.  After the love of the dead, in second place must be the thought and dread, of someone’s possible impending death.  So thanks to Aristotle, I now know that loving Nicholas Weston Golden may have been the most romantic and true thing that I’ll ever experience.

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Confessions of a Heedless Sinner – Vol. 3

I am the Queen of emotional cheating.  I’ve participated in such sins while I was the one in the relationship, and I’ve done it with people who were/are in a relationship.  I will use my friend Kyle as an example.  Him and I met our freshman year of college, and about two hours after being introduced, he asked me to marry him.  Of course, he was kidding, it was part of some lighthearted flirting.  I mentioned that I like hockey and some band, and he responded with, “Can we get married?”

The point is, we had an immediate connection.  At the time, I didn’t realize how precious that was.  When we’re young, and constantly meeting so many people, I think most of us believe that there will be many people with whom to share that connection with.  The older I get the more I believe it only truly happens a few times.  I digress.  Kyle had a girlfriend and they were doing the whole long distance relationship disaster thing.  We were in Savannah, Georgia where we went to art school, and she was in Connecticut.  Lighthearted flirting between Kyle and I led to serious flirting, which led to physical flirting, which led to… this situation fucking blows.

We were very open about our feelings for one another, and discussed our predicament frequently.  To make matters worse, we could not keep our hands off of each other.  While he never “technically” cheated on her because we did not kiss, we laid on the same bed together, he would occasionally spend the night, we watched movies together, we kissed each other’s foreheads, we played with each other’s hands, which I like to call “hand sex,” and we friggen talked about how badly we wanted one another.  This brings me to the question of, is emotional cheating worse than actual cheating, and where is the line drawn?

I believe that cheating is defined by anything that one would not do with a platonic friend.  I would not have hand sex and cuddle with a platonic friend, so in my mind, Kyle cheated on his girlfriend.  I don’t care if we didn’t kiss.  If I saw my boyfriend doing those same acts with another girl, I would absolutely accuse him of cheating.  I suppose Kyle does deserve credit for holding back and not jumping on me.  I was for sure not the one trying to stop it.  I would have slept with him in a heartbeat, and he knew it.  So in all fairness, that does say something about his character.

For hypothetical purposes, lets take-away all of the physical elements from the equation.  This leaves us with two people who are falling in love with each other while one of them is in a relationship.  This is emotional cheating, and I believe that in most cases, it is worse than physical cheating.  To be perfectly honest, if I were in a relationship with someone who was falling for someone else, even if they never touched, I would be much more heartbroken over that, than if my significant other got drunk one night and hooked up with a random person.

Three relationships and five years later, Kyle and I are still doing the same bullshit.  Since that first girlfriend, he has been in two other long-term relationships, including the one he is in presently.  There was a small, sliver of time when we were both single and both in the same city, so we were able to finally release some of that built-up sexual tension, which I will say, was one of the hottest nights of my life, but it was only one night and I won’t get into why it couldn’t last.  I live in Los Angeles now, and he lives in Connecticut, so there is no more physical cheating happening, but the emotional cheating is still running rampant.  We’ve had “down times” in the past five years, but this is not one of those times.  No matter how hard we try to keep the conversation appropriate, it almost always ends with confessions of how much we miss/want one another.  I know, I’m going to hell.

What do you consider cheating, and which is worse, emotional cheating or physical?

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Never Date a Writer








Also see, Never Date a Musician.

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