It is January 2005 and my boyfriend is squinting at a restaurant menu. ‘So you were back late again last night,’ he murmurs. It’s a good job he’s not looking at me, as I am instantly aflame with shame. ‘Ahhh, yeah… we went to see the King Kong reboot.’ A red bus emblazoned with a King Kong poster has just sailed past.
Here’s the thing I’m yet to learn about lies. You stay as close to the truth as possible, rather than taking your cue from buses. And the truth is, last night I stayed later in the pub than my friends, and kissed somebody random.
The other truth is, having moved to London and started partying even more than I did at university, my ‘drink ’n’ cheat’ pattern has become more pronounced.
I spend great swathes of time, forehead concertinaed, meditating on how I am going to stop my no-good cheating ways. Mostly, I alight on ‘drink responsibly’, but when I drink I become flagrantly irresponsible.
‘I’ve been dying to see that!’ he exclaims. ‘Tell me all about it!’ Shiiitt. I abruptly change the subject. The next day, I attempt to go to the cinema, alone, to see King Kong, to discover that showings have now ceased. I read every review I can instead.
King Kong becomes a supersized emblem of my guilt. Any conversational mention of Godzilla, Bigfoot, even the chuffin’ Loch Ness monster, has the ability to prick my scalp with beads of sweat. Because what if it sets my boyfriend off again on what I thought of the movie?
This type of sweaty-palmed scenario is not a one-off. For the next eight years, my drinking (twinned with my terrible self-esteem) is kindling for a dozen more infidelities. There’s the time I’m lying in bed with another boyfriend and receive a ‘You left your bangle at mine’ text; I lob my phone across the room as if it’s a live, unpinned grenade. Or the time I am two bottles of wine deep and wanton enough to kiss another guy on the doorstep of the flat I share with another boyfriend.
The mornings after, I wake up with flashbulb split-second recalls in my blackout drunkenness, as if a dark room is briefly illuminated, and feel the shame cover me like a dirty eiderdown. Not again.
I’m convinced I am a reprehensible, despicable, morally malfunctioning human being. So, I do what I always do when I find myself in this pitch-black place. I tell some friends. I choose them carefully. They’re the libertarians, the cocaine-takers, the wild ones. And yet, they are appalled. ‘Ugh, Cath, how could you,’ says one. And so, I start keeping it to myself. Which means nobody ever really knows me; a really lonely place to live.
‘I’d say that cheating men are just as likely to be disapproved of by their friends,’ says psychotherapist and couples counsellor Hilda Burke. ‘But their friends are less likely to vocalise this disapproval.’
Finally, aged 33, I decide to quit drinking. And overnight, without any effort or ‘work’ on my part whatsoever, my fidelity record became flawless. Huh. And it’s stayed that way for the past eight years.
Curious, I research it and find that the chances of cheating when drunk are astronomical when compared with cheating while not drunk. A 2017 study published in The Journal Of Sex Research found that 70% of cheaters give the main reason for their infidelity as ‘I was drunk and not thinking clearly.’ Ergo, seven in 10 infidelities are enabled by alcohol.
I mean, we know this, don’t we? But what is rarely talked about is this: how often the ‘drink ’n’ cheat’ pattern is cured by one simple change. Either finding a way to drink moderately (personally, one or two drinks were a mere appetiser for me, so that wasn’t in my playbook) or cutting it out altogether.
I thought the solution to my drink-cheating was to go home at midnight, grow better morals, or beat myself up on a daily basis about my transgressions. I thought my propensity for infidelity was a bad-to-the-bone character flaw, but it wasn’t. Because now that I don’t partake in booze, fidelity comes as naturally as breathing.
‘I thought you had a cheating problem, but not a drinking problem,’ a friend said to me when I quit. Me too. But it turns out it was both. And I can confidently say I’ll never do either again. Which feels lovely.
Catherine Gray’s new book, ‘Sunshine Warm Sober: Unexpected Sober Joy That Lasts’ (£14.99, Aster) is out now