From The Times October 23, 2008
How my husband joined the Mile High Club
Diary of a marriage: week 1
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article4994003.ece
True story: a few months ago my husband boarded a long-haul flight back to the UK. He sat in economy next to a 27-year-old blonde. Before long they were chatting so intensely that the air hostess told them discreetly that they were disturbing other passengers and would they, please, step this way? “This way” was into first class. And it was there that my husband and the blonde proceeded to have sex. (If BA is the “World's Favourite Airline” then that flight must be the World's Most Misguidedly Accommodating.)
He left the plane having told the woman only his first name and what he did. No mobile number or e-mail address. He hadn't envisaged the encounter being any more than what it was. Two weeks later a letter arrived in his office from her with her number. Which he rang. So began an infatuated and obsessive affair that lasted several months and bloody nearly broke us before she was cast into the ether.
I blame him, of course, and myself. I also blame her because she turned out to be Miss Bunny Boiler, who was on a mission to get him, marry him and have his babies, whatever the cost. But I also blame Google. In the days before Google, sexwith a stranger on a plane could have gone no farther. A mere first name and an occupation would not have been enough even for the most determined Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, unless she had the wit secretly to follow the cab from the airport.
On his return home, and back down to earth, my husband was in a pig of a mood for four days, but the “affair” was over before it began in earnest (even if consummation on a plane is pretty darn earnest). Chances are, I would have been none the wiser. I'm not saying that that would have been a good thing, but it would have been a better thing if she had resisted the erotic charge of Googling my husband and left herself free to go off doing what she did best, namely whoring with other fantasists just panting to become members of the Mile High Club with a slut.
That she could trot off the plane and type a couple of words into Google with the same ease with which she habitually opens her legs to strangers, is an unsettling fact of modern life. Just as unsettling is that she was soon sending this stranger, and married man, no fewer than 45 texts a day. She could reach him any time, any place, anywhere, and she did. Her pretentious purple “poetry” would burp its little way into our lives day and night. At five in the morning another nugget of carefully crafted rubbish would ripple on his bedside table beside us and I would wake and remain tensely but silently hurting for the rest of the day. Once she rang him while he was driving me and the children back from a family holiday. The intrusion was manifest and preposterously painful. If Google facilitated the “relationship” in the first place, then the texts were a highly inflammable fuel to the fantasy.
I thought Google and texts were a force for good before the Boiler came along to haunt my marriage. As a wife wearied by their impact and power used in destructive ways, I am warier of them now and feel strongly that we all should be because no one can remain immune.
Affairs that in the past may have died a death before taking off, or remained for-ever undiscovered, have become more devastating because of technology, not less so. Prig that I may be, I don't read my husband's texts - I found out in a more old-fashioned way - but it was definitely Google and the toxic texting that turned their desultory relationship into something it would never otherwise have been. (They spent a great deal more time texting each other than they ever did in the same room. The time they spent in each other's presence, including the flight, was little more than the 30-degree programme on my washing-machine.)
I know things weren't perfect in our marriage and the “affair” was possibly an accident waiting to happen, but we do love each other and, texting apart, we might have been spared some of the more excruciating agonies that ensued.
How my husband joined the Mile High Club
Diary of a marriage: week 1
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article4994003.ece
True story: a few months ago my husband boarded a long-haul flight back to the UK. He sat in economy next to a 27-year-old blonde. Before long they were chatting so intensely that the air hostess told them discreetly that they were disturbing other passengers and would they, please, step this way? “This way” was into first class. And it was there that my husband and the blonde proceeded to have sex. (If BA is the “World's Favourite Airline” then that flight must be the World's Most Misguidedly Accommodating.)
He left the plane having told the woman only his first name and what he did. No mobile number or e-mail address. He hadn't envisaged the encounter being any more than what it was. Two weeks later a letter arrived in his office from her with her number. Which he rang. So began an infatuated and obsessive affair that lasted several months and bloody nearly broke us before she was cast into the ether.
I blame him, of course, and myself. I also blame her because she turned out to be Miss Bunny Boiler, who was on a mission to get him, marry him and have his babies, whatever the cost. But I also blame Google. In the days before Google, sexwith a stranger on a plane could have gone no farther. A mere first name and an occupation would not have been enough even for the most determined Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, unless she had the wit secretly to follow the cab from the airport.
On his return home, and back down to earth, my husband was in a pig of a mood for four days, but the “affair” was over before it began in earnest (even if consummation on a plane is pretty darn earnest). Chances are, I would have been none the wiser. I'm not saying that that would have been a good thing, but it would have been a better thing if she had resisted the erotic charge of Googling my husband and left herself free to go off doing what she did best, namely whoring with other fantasists just panting to become members of the Mile High Club with a slut.
That she could trot off the plane and type a couple of words into Google with the same ease with which she habitually opens her legs to strangers, is an unsettling fact of modern life. Just as unsettling is that she was soon sending this stranger, and married man, no fewer than 45 texts a day. She could reach him any time, any place, anywhere, and she did. Her pretentious purple “poetry” would burp its little way into our lives day and night. At five in the morning another nugget of carefully crafted rubbish would ripple on his bedside table beside us and I would wake and remain tensely but silently hurting for the rest of the day. Once she rang him while he was driving me and the children back from a family holiday. The intrusion was manifest and preposterously painful. If Google facilitated the “relationship” in the first place, then the texts were a highly inflammable fuel to the fantasy.
I thought Google and texts were a force for good before the Boiler came along to haunt my marriage. As a wife wearied by their impact and power used in destructive ways, I am warier of them now and feel strongly that we all should be because no one can remain immune.
Affairs that in the past may have died a death before taking off, or remained for-ever undiscovered, have become more devastating because of technology, not less so. Prig that I may be, I don't read my husband's texts - I found out in a more old-fashioned way - but it was definitely Google and the toxic texting that turned their desultory relationship into something it would never otherwise have been. (They spent a great deal more time texting each other than they ever did in the same room. The time they spent in each other's presence, including the flight, was little more than the 30-degree programme on my washing-machine.)
I know things weren't perfect in our marriage and the “affair” was possibly an accident waiting to happen, but we do love each other and, texting apart, we might have been spared some of the more excruciating agonies that ensued.
