'I had an emotional affair'
The spare room in my and my husband’s two-bedroom flat contains a multitude of lives. It’s where I sit and work and get dressed in the morning. It is also the place I started writing to a man I’ve never met. A stranger who could have changed everything.
There was something about months of lockdown that made me revisit former desires and parts of myself that had been dormant. I joined FetLife, which isn’t a dating site as such, but a place to connect with like-minded people who are into fetish. I was seeking the kind of connection you can only have with a stranger. It’s easier to tell your darkest desires to someone unencumbered by the framework of cohabitation, someone you don’t know, who you don’t need to ask what they want for dinner.
My profile picture is just my body, all distinguishing features carefully hidden. No one can know that I’m here – desperate for someone who’s not my husband to look at me. As I set my profile live, messages poured in instantaneously. But there was something about the intensity of one man’s messages that had me hooked. He was older than me by more than a decade. A heavily tattooed security guard with broad shoulders and thick thighs. As I clicked through his pictures, I felt that heady rush. My body was tight and tingly as I looked at him wearing a sharp black suit; then a selfie, his bearded face up close to the lens. It felt like he was looking inside me.
His name was Noah*. ‘There’s something about you, I can feel it,’ he’d typed. I revelled in being adored, wanted in the most primal sense. His messages became hungry and persistent, from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. Thoughts about him crept into every moment of my day. He wove his way into that room. I closed the door to keep him in there with me.
He’d write me poetry and tell me how to touch myself. ‘Imagine this is me,’ he’d type. ‘Run your hands over your face, down your front, over your breasts.’ I did as he said. ‘Now pull your nipples.’ I thought about his beard scraping the soft skin of my chin.
Knowing there’s a man – thinking, breathing, feeling – on the other side of those messages is different from watching porn or masturbating alone between the sheets of my and my husband’s bed. Noah writes that I’m making him hard – that knowledge makes me hot and sweaty, the back and forth of messages a potent kind of foreplay. When I fingered myself, I came almost instantly.
‘I’m falling in love with you.’ I stared back at the words on my screen. He wanted me to leave my husband, be with him. But I’d never met him and he’d never even seen my face. ‘I can’t,’ I told him. This was a fantasy. I didn’t want it to leave this room, it couldn’t exist outside of my mind. I told Noah I was leaving the site, not my husband. He gave me his phone number. I didn’t give him mine. I told him if he really loved me, somehow he’d know it was me if he ever came across me in real life.
I’ve always liked having a secret. Something just for me. My friends call me a secret-keeper, squirrelling away moments that I may reveal years later, an anecdote slipping out over dinner or drinks. I still have Noah’s number saved in my phone. Sometimes I seek him out on WhatsApp, hover over his profile picture, looking for seeds of what it may tell me of his life. It gives me a small thrill I wrap around myself.
We haven’t been in contact for years, because I’m sure the idea of him is more of a turn-on than the reality. Occasionally, I fantasise about the smell of his skin or the sound of his voice. I don’t think what happened between Noah and I is an affair, not really. I never felt him touch my breasts or his lips on mine. There is this grey area, where nuance exists. It’s possible to love my husband, adore the quotidian of our togetherness and still think: what if? Maybe there’s another version of me living this entirely different life and part of me just wanted to try it on. Just for a bit. To see what it could feel like...
*Name has been changed for privacy reasons
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