Cheating.

I have really strong beliefs about marriage and monogamy.

Not in the extreme right, Carrie Prejean kind of way.

Two dudes, two ladies, I don’t care.  As long as they are of age and one of them is not Charlie Sheen, they have my blessing.

Extra blessings if I can be the Maid of Honor and make some sort of belligerent toast that results in me crying in the middle of the dance floor singing Total Eclipse of the Heart into the microphone.

If there is one thing in the world that I find unacceptable, it’s infidelity.

I appreciate the concept of marriage, and partnership, and unions based on equality and love and respect.

Add cheating to the mix, and the fall out is usually disastrous and damn near fatal.

I don’t know that anyone really heals from it.   I mean, you recover and learn to function and love again.   But, the wound is still there.   Somewhere deep and festering, all puss like and paranoid.

The first time I was cheated on was when I was a sophomore in High School.

I had just started dating a senior, his parents were out of town, and the first night they were away, I went over to surprise him, and he was in bed with an exotic dancer he had met at a local strip club.  I am not even sure how he got into the strip club, but he was excessively hairy, and looked way older.  Kind of like David Letterman meets Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

I have no idea what I saw in him.

Anyways, I started yelling at him, and he was like, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but don’t usually date virgins, I need blow jobs and sex before bed or I get mean and cranky, and I was like, what are you, a fucking gremlin?

I never spoke to him again.

Eight weeks before our wedding, I was in the dining room assembling invitations, when Andy mentioned, in this weird, cliche moment of pre-wedding honesty, that a girl had kissed him however many months before, and he wanted me to know.

And, because two of my bridesmaids were fighting, and we owed the caterer his final four billion dollars, and the color of red roses I wanted wasn’t available in the winter months,  I put the invitations in the box, threw them out the window, grabbed my purse and the pugs, and jumped in my car.

I never left, though.  Andy laid down behind my back tires so I couldn’t back out, and spent the next 2 hours standing in the snow outside my driver’s side window trying to talk me down into operating at only a 50% level of psycho.

Two days ago, when I drove Andy’s car to the bank, I found a teeny tiny, almost empty bottle of Cover Girl foundation in his center console while I was looking for candy.

It was dark, matching the skin tone of someone very Italian or Latina or black.   Not pale.  Not me.

I immediately thought, there’s somebody else.

Someone less crazy, with less maintenance.  Someone whose body hasn’t labored three kids and remembers how jokes end or to buy the peanut butter extra crunchy.

So, I raced home to tell him how hurt I was, that he was a liar and that I hoped he would have a wonderful life with his way more ethnic than me mistress

He told me he had no idea what I was talking about.

So, I handed him the bottle of foundation.

Foundation that he, apparently, stole from the make up aisle of the pharmacy a month ago, when he had a big zit (that he wouldn’t let me pop) on his way to a work meeting, and he didn’t want to look like some weird guy who buys make up, but the zit was insane and since I don’t use cover up, he didn’t know what else to do.

He threw the bottle away and told me he loved me, even when I was crazy and irrational.

I told him I loved him, too…and, that if he ever needs to steal sample size zit cover up again, to match it to the skin on the back of his hand, and think Eva Longoria Parker or Demi Moore.

Not Grace Jones.

Boys clearly don’t learn the same things as girls do in the Junior High restroom while stuffing our bras and burning the ends of black eyeliner with a lighter.