I Booked a Room Under a Fake Name for a Man I Met Three Days Earlier

The Telegraph ran a piece recently about a woman looking back on her holiday affair without an ounce of regret dressed up as remorse, and I read it twice because I recognized every word she wasn't quite saying. She wasn't proud. She'd never do it again, probably. But she'd never forget it either, and God help her, she understood exactly why she did it. I felt that in my teeth.

Mine happened in a resort town I won't name, at a hotel bar where the drinks were too strong and the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle against July. My husband was three thousand miles away running a golf tournament he'd planned for eight months. I was there with my sister-in-law for a wedding, and by the second night I'd met a man named Marcus who fixed boats for a living and talked with his hands like he was conducting an orchestra only he could hear.

Three days later I was standing at a hotel front desk giving a fake first name to a clerk who didn't care, sliding a credit card across the counter that wasn't linked to a joint account, and feeling my heart do something it hadn't done in six years of marriage. That's the part nobody tells you about holiday affairs. It's not the sex, though the sex was good. It's the aliveness. The feeling that you've slipped out of your own skin for forty-eight hours and gotten to try on someone else's life, someone who isn't anybody's mother or wife or the person who remembers to buy the paper towels.

Here's my holy shit moment, and I'll own it: I stood in that hotel bathroom afterward, looking at myself in the mirror with his handprint still faintly pink on my hip, and I wasn't thinking about my husband. I wasn't thinking about guilt or God or the flight home. I was thinking, I forgot I could feel like this. That's the sentence that should scare you. Not the affair itself, but how easily your own marriage can make you forget you're a person with a pulse.

So what's this telling us? Holiday affairs aren't really about the holiday, and they sure as hell aren't about the affair partner, who you'll likely never think about again once you're back in your own kitchen arguing about whose turn it is to call the plumber. They're about permission. Vacation gives you permission to be someone without a backstory. Nobody at that bar knew I hated my job or that my husband and I hadn't had a real conversation in months that wasn't logistics. Marcus didn't know me well enough to disappoint me, and I didn't know him well enough to resent him. That's not love. That's a clean slate with good lighting, and it is intoxicating precisely because it's temporary.

The Telegraph woman said she understands the allure even now, years later, married to someone else, presumably wiser. I believe her completely, because the allure doesn't come from the man. It comes from remembering there's a version of you that still exists outside your role. Wife. Mother. Employee. The one who packs the lunches and remembers the dentist appointments. That version doesn't get a vacation from herself very often, and when she does, she tends to do something stupid with it.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you not to have the affair, because you already know the arithmetic, and moralizing at you would be about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. What I will tell you is this: if you're going on a trip without your spouse and you feel that electric hum starting up in your chest before you've even left the driveway, ask yourself what's missing at home that a stranger with a hotel key is about to fill. That's not rhetorical. Write it down if you have to.

And if you do it anyway, because some of you will, don't lie to yourself about what it was. It wasn't love. It was oxygen. Go home, breathe out slow, and go fix whatever's been suffocating you before your next flight boards, because the resort towns will always be there, and so will the men who fix boats, and so will the version of you that forgets she's alive if nobody reminds her often enough.