GIRLFRIEND #8

When on Adult FriendFinder, I penned a regular series of blog posts about my girlfriends - 16 out of 31 were covered. I'm going to continue this series here not least just to feel a sense of normalcy. Don't worry I have no intention of blogging about all 31 girlfriends (including two wives).

Girlfriend #8, and also wife #1, shares a first name with the three famous women shown in the photos above and below.

I met girlfriend #8 when I was living in London. She was, and maybe still is, a friend of one of my school friends. I had moved into his flat in north London after living in a multiple-occupied house in the East End. My friend was gay. He quite reasonably liked to keep his gay life separate from straight me. Girlfriend #8 was a self-styled fag hag, a straight woman preferring the safe company of gay men than heterosexual men particularly in pubs and clubs.

After a few months with my school friend and I getting on well in his flat, he said that one of his friends was moving in for a week while he was on holiday but under no circumstances should I get off with her. He said the same thing to her. I suspect that if he hadn't said to both of us, possibly nothing would have happened - he put it on the agenda! But we did get off with each other while our mutual friend was away. And it wasn't just a one-off, we became an item.

On return from his holiday, my friend was furious with me. He didn't speak to me properly for nearly a week. Things were very uncomfortable in the flat between us. All I got from him was that the flat was a mess on his return - it wasn't; at worst there were a couple of coffee mugs waiting to be washed up. He was and probably still is fastidious; though not as tidy as him, I was and still am a tidy person.

I decided to pay his brother, another school friend, a visit to a record shop where he was working on Tottenham Court Road in central London. He confirmed, as I suspected, that it was not my unwashed coffee mugs but my sexual dalliances with his brother's fag hag that was the cause of the problem.

Just over a week of seeing girlfriend #8, we agreed to get married. I blame cigarettes. She was a smoker, I wasn't at the time. Jokingly I said to her that if she lit up a cigarette it meant that she wanted to marry me. She did and we agreed to marry. Stupid, I know. On next seeing my parents, not only did I have to tell them I had a new girlfriend but also that I was getting married. They weren't impressed!

We got married within six months of meeting each other. As befitting of the yuppie 1980s, our wedding was a very pretentious affair - a black-and-white wedding.

We bought or rather she bought - she was a tax accountant on a big salary, I was just a poor PhD student - the downstairs of a house in north London to live in. Life was okay. But looking back, it was clear that she did her thing and I did my thing. Though we were both broadly happy with our lives in London, we did very little together. She didn't seem to like my friends and, more worryingly, she didn't seem to like my parents.

But things changed when I got a job in Portsmouth - accountants are very mobile, politics lecturers aren't. She agreed to move down with me. But our London friends weren't around to entertain us albeit separately. Instead we had to do more things together or not do things together. Again, she didn't seem to like my new Portsmouth friends, especially female friends.

This is when I realised I wasn't that happy in the marriage. And it was when I went on a two-week student trip to Germany that I realised I wanted out of the marriage. In Germany it was great to talk to others without having to account for myself to her. I felt freedom, even though I didn't get off with anyone in Germany. I just felt free to be myself.

On returning from Germany, I said to my wife that I wanted things to end between us. She wasn't happy. There was a lot of tension between us in the house despite us not sleeping in the same bed - we did once have sex in the shower. She confessed that she had an affair with a colleague while in London. But I suspected she just told me that, whether true or not, simply to get me mad. I decided not to react.

The divorce was bitter and hard-fought. I thought I was going to be 'homeless' because I couldn't afford to buy out my wife's share of the house. But in a conversation with my Mum, I was told that my grandmother had left a trust fund for me. As the sole trustee, my Mum said she was happy to release the funds to me to buy the house. The problem at the time was that I had already agreed to let my wife buy me out of the house.

My issue was how I could persuade my wife to allow her to be bought out rather than her buying me out, especially when relations between us were very bad and deteriorating by the day. I decided to do something sneaky. When she was out, I went into her 'private' drawer of a desk in which she kept all her bank statements, salary slips, etc. I then realised that her finances were very stretched to pay for a four-bedroomed house. She was on the financial edge buying me out.

I decided to make extra financial demands on her as a condition of me moving out of the house. because I'd be incurring costs. At the same time, I offered to buy her out. She relented and agreed to move out; at the time she said she wanted to travel the world so her decision seemed to make sense.

Though not proud of my sneakiness, in my twisted book I thought and still think that the ends justified the means. Or perhaps, following the words of the sixteenth century English writer John Lyly, all's fair in love and war!

After a year of her moving out, we bumped into each other on the streets of Portsmouth. In other occasions when I saw her, I would avoid her. But this was one of those moments when it was impossible to avoid her. I said hello. She pretended not to recognise me, so I had to remind her that I was her husband. We went for one drink in a nearby pub. The unpleasant conversation that we had, mainly having to listen to her slagging off my friends and parents, confirmed to me that my decision to split from her was the best decision. If only my head had listened to my heart earlier - I knew deep down in my heart before our wedding that the relationship wasn't going to work. That was a painful lesson learnt, I needed to listen to my heart when it came to relationships, especially romantic relationships.

I readily accept that my girlfriend #8 may have a different version of events than mine. But at the time of our split, I was beyond caring what she felt or thought about things. I just wanted out of the relationship and her out of the house.

Do you think all's fair in love and war?

Has you head thinking things will get better over-ruled your heart saying things aren't right?

Have you worked out the first name of girlfriend #8 (or wife #1)?

For the record, I don't think all's fair in love and war. I like to think there are or at least should be certain rules and standards which we adhere to when we date and kill people!