Affair at the first coffee: “It immediately felt like cheating”

The German has cheated before – but what is behind the desire for an affair? In the star series ““People talk openly about secret relationships, hidden longings and moments in which loyalty and partnership are renegotiated.

She suddenly stood in front of me and said: You can sit there. I replied that I would sit over there, where the men were getting their hair done. Oh, she said, today I’m going to cut your hair. I was confused, such a beautiful woman in a shop where only hairdressers cut other men’s hair, or rather shaved it. It was a Saturday in spring 2018, I went to my hairdresser as usual every six weeks and was surprised by the situation. While I was sitting under her scissors, we started talking. She told me her name, Elena*. Her hair was dark like her eyes. In addition to her looks, I was impressed by her interested, open nature. As a master hairdresser, she was of course also a communication professional. We talked about my job. She talked about Kosovo, where she grew up. I asked her number without any ulterior motive and suggested we meet for coffee sometime. Yes, she said, gladly.

I was in a relationship at the time. For 18 years. We had argued months before and I had moved into my own apartment. Since then we saw each other on the weekends, I visited her, she visited me, and then we slept together. It was a long-distance relationship. In recent years we have also had sexual encounters with other people. Two lovers accompanied us one after the other, one for more than ten years. We always went on sex dates together, and Corinna* only rarely met her lover alone. So we lived a monogamous life not sexually, but emotionally. And yet what I was experiencing with Elena immediately felt like cheating.

The day after my visit to the hairdresser, Elena wrote me a message and asked if I had forgotten her. I thought: What does she mean? I was just in the store yesterday! Since I had nothing else to do, we arranged to meet at a café. And while we were still sitting there, our affair began. When we hugged for the first time, she was shaking all over, something she had never experienced with a man before, she said. We felt so strongly attracted to each other that we moved to a table in the next room. A small group of people had been sitting there and the waiter was cleaning up. We sat apart and kissed and touched each other for three hours. I found the scene exciting, this erotic game in public space. That seemed wicked to me. I also felt more wanted than I had in a long time.

A few days later she visited me at my apartment where we had sex for the first time. We met six times in just over two months, and each time we fell over each other. I was horny for her, and she for me. There was a greed, a desire, a lust that I hadn’t felt for a long time. Open the door, take off your clothes, like in the movie. Wow, I thought, how can Elena be interested in me, of all people? I was 52 at the time, and if you had asked me a few weeks earlier if I felt desirable and attractive, I would have said no. But Elena stroked my ego. She was maybe 45 years old and looked so sexy. Much more feminine than my partner Corinna, who rarely emphasized her charms and dressed rather simply and casually.

One night, two months later, I was lying in bed with Corinna. We had had a great day together and fucked in the evening, were comfortably exhausted, and then a sentence formed in my mind: I hope we can stay friends. What? How? No, I thought. I turned to the other side, but the sentence came back. I turned back, the sentence stayed. And that’s how I pronounced it. Corinna asked: Are you just breaking up with me? And I replied: I think so. I hadn’t intended that. It was as if something had spoken through me. Corinna cried, me too. We cuddled up and hugged each other harder than we had in a long time. There was a great pain of saying goodbye.

When I went to the bathroom later that night, I checked the messages on my phone and saw that Elena had written: There’s no future with us, it’s over. She was single, she saw our affair as a possible new relationship, she told me later. However, I didn’t expect us to get together. I suddenly realized: Now I no longer have anyone I can be naked with. No one to eat breakfast with, cuddle with, have sex with, share life with me. I had never been alone, and I had ended most of my relationships, not women. So what had I gotten myself into? I am a believer in a spiritual sense. But that was extremely intense and disturbed me emotionally and mentally. Why did this happen to me? What was the message? What did I have to learn? These were agonizing questions to which I had no answers or received no answers.

Looking back, I am grateful for that night. I am grateful for the affair because it was a beautiful, horny experience and it marked the end of a relationship that was actually no longer a relationship. She triggered a development in me. I dealt with my ex-relationships, reflected on my behavioral patterns and embarked on a journey to myself. At the same time I registered on Parship. In order to design my profile, I had to answer so many questions: Who am I actually? What type of person am I, what values ​​do I stand for? How do I want to live relationships in the future? What interests do I have? How do I want us to treat each other when we have an argument? How do I want to live my sexuality? For the first time, I was single and trying to be enough for myself. I went hiking. I wrote down how I imagine my future partner to be. Ovisually, but also in terms of character. Spirituality should be important to her. DI placed the lines on a small altar. I had short relationships every now and then lasting two or three months until I met my current girlfriend six years ago.

The first time I visited Sophie*, she put her hands on my forearms as soon as I entered. She wanted to feel whether we fit together on an energetic level. Despite my own energetic training, this seemed strange to me. Then we put our hands on each other’s chests. She later told me that this was the tantric greeting. After I passed this kind of test, we sat on the balcony. We talked until three o’clock the next morning about how we wanted to live our sexuality. What our weaknesses are. How we imagine a relationship. We were brutally honest with each other. Sophie said: Everything else doesn’t make sense. On our first two nights we didn’t attack each other. Instead I kept my underwear on and just took care of Sophie. This irritated her at first, but she enjoyed my touch. We cuddled more than I had ever experienced in my two previous long-term relationships.

In the meantime, I have had hundreds of hours of personal experience and have dealt with my childhood impressions and my attachment behavior. I underwent coaching with a trauma-sensitive psychologist, underwent therapy that dealt with childhood experiences or unrecognized traumas from childhood, and at the same time I completed training as a psychosocial counselor. I wouldn’t have gone through this development without the shock of finding myself alone overnight. This mental crisis is one of the best things that has happened to me in my life.

I believe that the passion of an affair doesn’t translate to a relationship that is about so much more than lust. It requires self-reflection, tolerance, appreciation and respect, and yes, it also means work. I had an affair before Elena, it was decades ago. The sex in both affairs was similar: animalistic, passionate and valuable in its own way. It only becomes dangerous when people get lost in affairs and think that they are better than their relationship because the sex is good. No passion is permanent, and that is perhaps the secret of an affair: it thrives on the exception, on the special.

*The names of the female protagonists have been anonymized.