Blog 20 - I try to make amends.

So HS says he really wants to sort things out with his girlfriend and my encouragement is really helping. He says he knows he shouldn’t have had a fling with me or he should have at least told me he had a girlfriend so I could make an informed decision about getting involved with him. No sh*t Sherlock! I should really just cut all contact now but I feel so guilty that I’ve been part of someone being unfaithful that I try to steer him in the right direction.

He says he hasn’t got anyone sensible to talk to that will give him good advice. It’s definitely a common problem as my male friends have all said that to me at one time or another. Guys don’t talk to their friends in the same detail women do. You won’t catch them having a civilised glass of wine trying to thrash out the reasons their relationship is going wrong and what they can do to put it right. If they do talk to their mates the response is usually minimal pearls of wisdom such as ‘…well I dunno, you better just sort it out mate…’ in between football commentary at the pub. HS relays this practically word for word when I ask what his mates have advised.

So it looks like it’s down to me then…and I feel obliged to continue with the free relationship advisory service seeing as I’ve become part of the problem. I’ve told him to look at some relationship advice websites. Sites like that don’t hold all the answers but they help give you ideas and think in different ways when you don’t know what to do. To be fair to him he’s been doing his research and e-mailing me links that suggest different things and asking for my opinion. Over the last week we’ve had a little routine going where he reads up on some stuff when he’s working late and e-mails me his thoughts for the day. I respond when I get in to work the next morning and give my opinion and some things to think about. Good progress was being made, he seemed truly remorseful about what had happened and truly committed to fixing his relationship.

I felt like this chapter was coming to a happy ending and that soon enough he’d be sending me flowers to thank me for my support and telling me he’d proposed to the girlfriend. That would of course absolve me of all the guilt I felt and confirm that there was some kind of divine reason that our paths had crossed in the first place.

Not so. He text me late last night to say his girlfriend had hacked his hotmail account as she’d been suspicious. She’s read everything we'd ever e-mailed to each other. All the details of what happened skiing, me asking to meet up, him ‘fessing up he’d got a girlfriend and then worse….Him telling more intimate and embarrassing details about his relationship than you’d see in a Woody Allen film.

So she’s not just dealing with the horror of finding out her partner had been unfaithful but also the betrayal of all the secrets he’s shared with me. Oh god, how awful. As soon as he told me he had a girlfriend I should have just cut contact there and then. What was I thinking?? She’ll probably hunt me down and I wouldn’t blame her.