HOT MESS – I am definitely a single girl in Bangkok but, somehow, over the last 14 months or so I’ve also been an ‘other woman’ of sorts, which is awful and something I never imagined I’d be. Nobody wants to share their man or be second favourite and nobody wants to think too hard about the person whose relationship you’re interfering with.
I don’t know how it happened, but a little bit of a morality slip has meant I see this boy, knowing full well he lives with his long term girlfriend. I’m not sure if it’s a defence or an excuse, but when we first met he played down the seriousness of his relationship (not mentioning the fact they live together and that she moved to Thailand to be with him), and then I fell for him quite hard.
He’s an arty hipster type, very funny and very cute. He’s self-conscious and shy and not at all what you’d think of as a playboy.
But, he is.
Even his very best friends know and don’t let his girlfriend in on the secret, which is really horrifying.
With any kind of relationship like that, if you’re going to stay in it, you have two choices of how to act. You can either pretend like it’s all fine and you don’t even care about him that much anyway (my way of dealing with it) or, you can demand to be treated with respect, which I definitely should do, but I don’t want to, because these guys never pick the other woman.
So, for the moment, I just tell myself I have a part-time boy until a better situation presents itself.
Being the other woman definitely has some really demeaning parts to it; like having to pretend he’s just my friend if I bump into them when I’m out (I’ve never been introduced to her, thankfully) or seeing photos of them looking happy together on holiday.
But in most ways, a part-time boy works for me because I am pretty independent, in that I like to spend most of my time in the gym, with my best friend and alone at home. I don’t really want to make time for a relationship. The thought of having someone else with me a lot of the time makes me feel claustrophobic. But, occasionally I like to have someone I care about to cuddle and to Whatsapp in-jokes and news to.
It’s not ideal, but I think it’s more ideal for me that a full-time, serious boyfriend. I’ve thought about what it would be like to be his girlfriend, and concluded it would be awful, because I couldn’t trust him (and he sleeps really late, which irritates me, but that’s by-the-by).
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