My Ex-Lover Drove Me to Get My COVID Vaccine

The line between cheating and not cheating becomes blurry after an open marriage.

In January of 2020, my life exploded.

My husband and I had become deeply unhappy in our marriage. Raising two difficult children and working full time, we had exhausted our reserves. We hadn’t slept together in nearly three years.

I proposed an open marriage to ward off divorce, and he reluctantly accepted.

I’ve written more about what happened next here and here. For me, dating for the first time in 15 years was heavenly. With our arrangement, I could enjoy the rush of male attention while still having the comfort of a home and family to return to at night.

That rush was brief, though. I soon fell deeply in love, and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I lived a dual life for months. During the day, my husband and I would juggle the stress of caring for our two young children while logging remote hours at work.

At night, I would visit Collin.

It wasn’t cheating, because my husband knew about it. He gave me two nights a week.

For those two nights, I would put my children to bed and then drive to Collin’s apartment. I would collapse into Collin’s arms the instant I saw him, and we would often make love until one or two o’clock in the morning. I would then drive home on empty roads, tiptoe into my home, and slip back into the bed I still shared with my husband.

I often wondered what the neighbors on my block might assume I was doing coming home at 2:30 in the morning during a city-wide lockdown.

This only worked for a few months. My husband was terribly jealous and visibly suffering from the arrangement. He had been sleeping with one other woman off and on, but he didn’t feel the way I did. He wanted to make our marriage work.

It was clear to me that I couldn’t live this dual life for long. I would have to make an actual decision. And I knew that leaving my family in this moment would never feel right. So I broke things off with Collin. But it was very much a “one day maybe this can work” goodbye as opposed to a full break.

We continued to text constantly. Sometimes I would take evening walks and call him just to hear his voice. A few times, I parked near his apartment on the way back from picking up groceries and met him on the sidewalk just to hug for a few minutes. I couldn’t risk hugging him inside my car and leaving the scent of another man on the passenger seat.

My open marriage fling, an escape that was only supposed to be about sex, had morphed into a deeply emotional affair.

Over time, I did various things to cope with my separation from Collin. The world slowly started picking up again after COVID, and my longing for him began to feel less acute. I stopped seeing him in person but continued to communicate. I created tidy categories in my head to separate admissible interactions from those that seemed like cheating. As long as I didn’t veer into the “bad” list, I felt like I could keep it up.

Cheating was: Sex, hugging, kissing, meeting with romantic intent, flirtatious texts with sexual undertones, telling him I missed him, sending a sexy photo.

Admissible interactions included: Liking a Facebook post, wishing him a Happy Birthday, texting about how my life was going as long as I didn’t include any expressions of longing, sending a photo of myself as long as it also included my kids.

I didn’t tell my husband I had maintained any contact with Collin. I had no intention of hurting him, and cheating was completely unappealing to me. But I was afraid of losing Collin.

One day that winter I received notice that I was eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. It was earlier than most because of my public school job, and the vaccination site was at a public arena 30 minutes from my home. I realized it was the first time in months that I had a valid reason to spend an extended time away from my house.

So I texted Collin to take me there. It looked like cheating, but it felt more meaningful. We met at a coffee shop, where I parked and cautiously got into his car.

He put his hand on my knee, and his eyes teared up just a little. We drove to the clinic mostly in silence, both feeling relieved to have this time together.

Somehow, “driving me in his car to get my COVID vaccine as long as we aren’t kissing or expressing longing for each other” had made it on my list of “admissible” activities to do with my ex-lover.

Getting my vaccine felt momentous. It felt like the first time I could walk on land after treading water for a year. And I wanted to share that moment with Collin, the ex-lover who had held me during those worst days of uncertainty.

That afternoon together didn’t restart our romance. It didn’t lead to a more expansive list of acceptable activities we could do together. If anything, we drifted further apart.

But I had longed that winter to make one more memory with him that I would hold with me, to attach him to something important to justify that what we had together had been real.

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