I thought he was my boyfriend – then I walked in on him with my friend

Lying in bed in my university houseshare, I woke up to the noises of sex upstairs.

It took a minute to figure out what I was hearing, but when it clicked, I gasped. I jumped out of bed and stood still in my dark room, straining to listen.

I thought maybe I was hearing things.

But there it was again. A girl’s moan. And that girl wasn’t me.

I ran up the stairs two at a time and, slamming the door open, I walked into what I thought was my boyfriend’s bedroom.

There, in James’* bed, was my friend Gina*. Naked.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I stood in shock at the door, unable to move, staring at them writhing around in bed.

After a few seconds, James clocked me and screamed ‘Get out!’.

I recoiled from the room and shut the door. I could hear their hushed voices, so I walked quietly downstairs.

I was stupefied by what I’d seen. I couldn’t quite figure it out – my boyfriend was cheating on me and had made it seem like I, somehow, was at fault for walking in on him.

James and I met in our second year of university – we were in a houseshare with six other people.

He was a bit gangly and covered in acne, but he had ‘cool hair’, liked ‘cool music’ and, like many men, carried an air of confidence that outweighed his looks.

I also thought he had a nice smile and there was something about the way he looked at me that made me blush. I later found out he looked at all women that way.

I told my best friend Lara* that I thought he was cute. She told me to be bold and go for it.

So I went for it.

On one of the many nights we avoided assignments and drank heavily in the house, I flirted like I’ve never flirted before. While most of the night is a drunken haze, I remember finding myself on his lap too many times to count.

That night we slept together, and even though we never really said it out loud, we started dating.

I didn’t realise until later that he was awful.

I should not have gone for this guy. He almost instantly treated me badly.

The next day while sitting on his bed, eating and watching TV, he asked me, completely out of the blue, if I would ever get a boob job.

‘No, of course not’, I replied, smiling. I wanted to please him, even though I knew it was a backhanded comment.

A week later, a friend asked if we were dating and he laughed, saying ‘No!’, as if it was a crazy idea. I felt horrible at the time but assumed there must have been a reason behind it.

He later told me he didn’t want people knowing in case they ‘ruin what we have’.

I didn’t ask what they could have done to ruin it, but I knew I hated that moment.

A couple of months passed with these kinds of passive aggressive moments – until our first huge fight, when I saw him flirting with my friend Gina at the campus bar. Later that evening, I asked why most people didn’t know we were together.

He started screaming at me, saying he felt suffocated. I started crying. It was awful, but I let him get away with it, and he used the excuse of being suffocated regularly to explain why he’d been flirting with other girls.

We were five months into our relationship when I finally stood up for myself and screamed back at him. I couldn’t take it anymore and told him he needed to tell people we were dating.

‘I can’t do anything to make you happy’, he said, throwing his arms in the air.

‘You never think about how I feel’, I screamed back.

‘Whatever, I’m done with this’, he said, leaving and slamming the door of my bedroom, then the front door.

I lay in bed that evening crying, messaging Lara and asking her why I kept choosing losers who were hellbent on breaking my heart. Tomorrow, I decided, I would talk to him about how he was treating me and make a plan to tell people about us.

I wanted to be an adult about it.

In between sobs, I fell asleep; and that night, I found him cheating on me with Gina.

After I’d caught them in bed together, I sat in my room, trying to listen to what they were doing.

It was silent until suddenly the thundering sound of footsteps led to the front door as it slammed – Gina had left. I wondered if James would come downstairs to apologise.

But soon, I heard his signature snoring.

I couldn’t believe it.

The next day, I walked into his room and sheepishly asked what was happening. But he just pretended I wasn’t there.

‘James, talk to me!’ I pleaded, pathetically.

‘You’re not my girlfriend, I don’t have to answer to you’, he replied coldly, while staring at his TV. He didn’t even turn to look at me.

That’s when it hit me. When he said ‘I’m done with this’, he meant me, not the argument. And he’d hooked up with someone else, because he now considered himself single.

I was humiliated. I soon moved out of the house and avoided him at university. Any time we saw each other, we would pretend we never met; and Gina never brought up that night – I stopped talking to her soon after, anyway.

It felt like a surreal few months of my life.

But I had to start seeing my own self-worth. I was letting men walk all over me, and it was slowly destroying me.

So I made a promise – never again would I let a mediocre man pretend I don’t exist.

I haven’t let it happen since, and I never will again.

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