I suppose this is cheating really
but it works for Portugal so it can work for me

Back in my Uni days I was in one of those long-distance relationship things. All the rage back then. Alright that's bollocks, most of the people I met in my first year who were attempting to remain faithful to partners at the other end of the country could measure the length of their fidelity in beer rather than days or weeks. Not me though. I didn't sleep with a single woman I met in the entire time I was at University. You may be thinking that this makes me a dick. And, with hindsight, you'd be right.

One of the strangest things about long-term fidelity, especially in the sex orgy-esque environment of higher education, is that whilst your mates are calling you a twat for not taking a crack at Sophie the 6'2" Swedish blonde who drunkenly let on she was up for it (yes she was real, and if she's reading this, sorry love, missed yer window. Not really. My place. Now), all your female friends think this is a fantastic quality. To the extent that, in my case at least, a few of them will develop sufficient affection for you as to try and surgically remove this allegedly strong characteristic. With shagging.

So it was that I came to enter into a real double-edged sword of a friendship with a girl called Heather, which presumably would be par for the course in a marriage between professional ninjas (as long as one or both of them was called Heather), but which I found an almighty headfuck. My fiancee was 60 miles away and I saw her at weekends for a ritualistic 48 hours of old-before-our-time contentedness. The other 5 days of the week I was hanging out with Heather as much as I could, and not missing the missus overly much.

At this point one of my gothy friends (rookie mistake) suggested I "write myself a letter" illustrating how I feel about both girls.

In the words of a well-known* Australian cartoonist and animal health enthusiast, "That was really fucking stupid advice".

What was even more stupid was committing to paper my angsty (Emo hadn't been invented yet, we only had angst back then. And coal), over-wrought deliberations on my conflicting emotions and all that bollocks.

With hindsight, jotting down in fuck-off black letters "I'M IN LOVE WITH HEATHER" - just to see how it made me feel (FFS) - was a particular nadir of judgement.

But this QOTW is about "Letters they'll never read", right? So, in order to conform to the structure of the question as all we good B3tans always do, nothing bad could ever have come of it. My (now-)ex and Heather would never suffer the confusion, disappointment, heartbreak or sheer unbridled horror (delete as applicable) implied by my pathetic teenage scribblings.

But that wouldn't be a very good end to the story, would it?

Hence, "Cheating"^



*Not well-known. Fictional.
(Darth Foxtrot A one-man army dedicated to making fetch happen, Fri 5 Mar 2010, 12:20, Reply)