About ten minutes after I followed him on Instagram, the app suggested another account. There he was again, this time beside his fiancée in a traditional Indian pre-wedding video. I had been exchanging flirty messages with a man I’d just slept with. He had apparently been celebrating his own bachelor party.
He had mentioned a bachelor party at the club. I just hadn’t understood that he was the bachelor.
I’m 27, and this was my first one-night stand. Before him, I’d only had long-term relationships. I wasn’t looking for another one that night. I wanted something fun and casual, maybe something that could turn into a relaxed arrangement if we liked each other enough. Being someone’s secret was never part of it.
He approached me, and the attraction was immediate. He was exactly my type. He noticed my hair, my dress, details about my body, and made the compliments feel personal. He was also considerate. Alongside the flirting, he asked about me and kept the conversation going. We laughed so much that it stood out to me even afterward.
That combination mattered. I could enjoy the fact that he wanted me without feeling as though everything I said was just a delay before sex. He seemed interested in the person who came with the body he was complimenting. We went back to his place and had sex. I had a great time.
We exchanged numbers during the night. The following evening, he texted me his Instagram details. I took that as an invitation to keep talking, so I did. The conversation picked up easily. We were flirting again, talking about missing what we’d enjoyed the night before. I was still enjoying it when his other life appeared in my suggested accounts.
At first, a couple’s account didn’t seem strange. He’d told me he was at a bachelor party, so there was an obvious wedding connection. Opening it changed who I thought I’d gone home with. The man in the video wasn’t a friend of the groom. He was the one getting married.
I confronted him. His response was so relaxed that it almost made the discovery feel stranger. He told me the wedding was a year away and that I should “assume he’s single for now.” I had expected an explanation. Instead, he was offering me a way to overlook the fact that he was engaged.
I ended it because he was already with someone. I don’t know what his fiancée knew. I suspect she didn’t know about me, but that is a suspicion, not something she told me. After I broke it off, he blocked me from both his personal account and the couple’s account.
That left me trying to understand why he’d sent me his contact details at all. Perhaps he thought I’d accept his version of being single. Perhaps he didn’t expect the accounts to connect so quickly. I can’t know. What I do know is that keeping in touch was his idea, and cutting off my access came after I refused to continue.
The detail I keep returning to is how different his fiancée looks from me. The features he’d been most enthusiastic about were some of the very things that made us look unlike each other. I can’t work out what that meant to him. I can only remember how special those compliments felt before I saw her.
