My suitor is a policeman, but his sleazy habits disgust me
DEAR BEL,
TEN years ago, I met a man online. He lives some distance away, has not been married, has no children — like me. He’s in his 50s, I’m 47.
I’ve only met him about ten times and we’ve never slept together. A few days ago he set a definite date for us to sleep together — in about three weeks’ time.
He also wants us to get tattoos which he thinks are significant to my religion, as he wants to move our relationship on.
I have told him I dislike tattoos and, in any case, I’m not religious. About three years ago I found out he was registered on a swingers website as well as a similar one.
His profile said he’s had a number of threesomes — ‘nights to remember’. I understand everyone has a past, especially when you get to his age, but I find this group sex part disgusting and especially him advertising for it.
His profile is still up on this website. When I asked him about it he went ballistic and said it wasn’t my business.
He is a serving police officer who is due to retire soon. A part of me wants him to get found out, but I won’t be the one responsible. When I met him a few days ago, I asked him why some of his family want nothing to do with him.
He said a sister with sons thinks he will lead them astray. My instinct tends to agree with her, as I think she must also know what her brother gets up to.
How can a police officer be allowed to get away with having his photo up on those disgusting sites? I am scared I will catch something from him when I finally sleep with him and his grubby web presence scares me.
My feelings for him run deep and I want to confront him with everything, but I am frightened of his reaction. I am too embarrassed to confide in anyone else and you are my last hope.
UMA
Surely there are two separate issues here, which you need to be clear about?
The first is your sense of outrage that a police officer can get away with sexual behaviour you consider inappropriate to his job.
The second is the extraordinary position you are in — telling me you have ‘deep feelings’ for a man you have only met ten times in as many years, who coolly fixes a date to have sex, whose picture is on sleazy websites advertising himself for kinky sex — and whom you can’t talk to because you’re ‘frightened of his reaction’.
First, nobody should be under any illusion that serving police officers are all paragons of virtue, any more than people in any other job. There are good eggs, bad eggs, and eggs
which are distinctly whiffy. Years ago, reporting in Manchester, I met a detective who was quite happy to take ‘free goes’ from prostitutes as of right. Like your man, it didn’t occur to him that circumstances might arise where his position would be compromised.
Disapproval of his actions from that perspective is one thing; your own position of strange, humiliating compromise is quite another — and much more the business of this column.
My central question is how you can possibly have ‘deep feelings’ for somebody with whom you do not have (in any sense) a proper relationship and whose sexual proclivities you find revolting.
Although I pride myself on imagination, and have experienced whirlwind love, the strange obsession you describe is hard to understand. If you were in sexual thrall to this man, it would not be difficult to understand, because passion can lead people into dark alleyways from which there is no escape. Yet you haven’t even slept with this man once.
So what is going on? At 47, you are hardly an impressionable young woman forced into having sex. Yet you seem committed to taking this non-relationship to the next stage, even though any sensible woman would want to rinse the sex-mad, three-in-a-bed cop under a tap pouring with disinfectant.
I suspect your ‘embarrassment’ springs from the knowledge you have been very foolish — and would be mad to continue to have anything to do with him. You say you are ‘not religious’, but I can’t help wondering about your relationship with your family and community — and whether it is a sense of disaffection and loneliness that has driven you towards somebody so obviously unsuitable.
Since you are ‘scared’ of his online activities and ‘frightened’ of his anger if you attempt to talk about your worries, it suggests that he has a dangerous control over you that needs to be admitted and addressed. how else could you have sustained what you think of as a relationship for so long?
HIS peculiar wish that you both get tattoos suggests branding, doesn’t it? In your circumstances, I would cut off all contact with this man. What he does as a policeman should concern you less than the strange hold he seems to have over you.
You need to examine what led you to seek out a partner online in the first place, when you were only 37, and consider the way you have developed all relationships, including friendships, ever since.
Be honest and ask yourself whether the hope that this man might become your life partner (and maybe that you could change him) has prevented you from leading a full life. he’s done enough damage already. End it.