I want to preface this post by saying mental health is important and I’m in no way disparaging therapy. I’ll admit the post title is a bit clickbait-ish, but still accurate.

The story starts a few months ago when I joined a friend on an impromptu bar crawl and met a cute girl (who we’ll call KJ). During the course of the crawl and in between flights of local IPAs, we bond over the fact we both had recently got out of serious relationships and moved into apartments of our own. Turns out, her place is a stones throw away from my new bachelor pad.

Post crawl, she DMs me on Instagram and we continue to talk. Soon enough we start casually seeing each other. I learn KJ is a therapist who specializes in marriage and family therapy. As time goes by, we see each other with increased frequency and the Define the Relationship topic starts to sneak into the conversations. We agree to take things slow as we both have wounds to heal from our past, but since our “activities” were becoming less protected she ensured that she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else and on birth control. We agreed that if we do happen to get with someone else, we’d let the other party know and take proper precautions to protect ourselves. This arrangement worked until yesterday.

We had plans to hang out yesterday afternoon but she texted me the night before to talk about us. She wanted to take our relationship to the next level and be fully exclusive. I was hesitant because I honestly didn’t feel like I was a priority to her as she’d often cancel planned hang outs and only seemed to have time for me on some odd night out of the week. We’re both busy people and she had a new job so I tried not to fault her for it. Anyways, I let her know I wasn’t ready for that commitment yet and we decide to just remain friends. We also cancel our plans to hang out the next day to give her some space.

Cut to yesterday, KJ is out with some coworkers at a bar nearby my apartment. I receive a badly spelled text asking if she can come over. It’s raining pretty hard and I’m thinking she just wants to wait it out before walking back up to her place. Probably a bit naive, I know. She shows up soaking wet and clearly a few adult beverages down. She tells me she lost her phone and proceeds to lay on my bathroom shower floor. Eventually I her off the floor and into the bed with a glass of water to sleep it off. I call her phone a few times and eventually someone picks up. It’s a police officer at the station a few blocks from me. Someone had found the phone and turned it in. Since she was in no state to walk, let alone show up to the station, I ask the officer if I can pick it up for her. He assures me I can as long as I can unlock the phone. I proceed to get the code from KJ and head to the station.

At the station, the officer holds the phone up to me and I type the code in. It unlocks to her text message list and immediately below my texts I see her ex’s name with a ❤️. I’ll admit, curiousity got the better of me and I shouldn’t have snooped but on the walk back… I did. I didn’t even have to scroll to see on Friday, the day before she asked to take our relationship to the next level, she had been sleeping with her ex. It stings a little extra as I had asked her to hang out that day and she told me she was taking a “self care / mental health day”.

I get back to my place and confront her, she can’t explain anything besides being sorry and repeating “you don’t deserve this”. I know. She leaves. Oh and she had puked in my bed, so it became laundry day.

I also get the feeling KJ’s ex either doesn’t know he’s being described as an ex or at the very least doesn’t know about me. This morning I break off all communication but also give her a chance to come clean to the “ex” or I’ll message him myself. She confirms and sends screenshots of her confession. Who knew a marriage therapist would have such messy relationships, I definitely didn’t expect it.

TLDR: Met cute girl, pukes in my bed and I discover I may be the side piece at the police station.