Why everyone who cheats should be made to do a kiss and tell.

“Because it was winter I was coming straight from my plastering job filthy and wearing long johns.”

No, that’s not a line from a game to teach syntax and punctuation to children who have expressed an interest in plastering from a very early age; it’s actually a quote from Keiran Hayler’s (you know, Katie Price’s latest ex? The guy who looks like he’s definitely, after a night at Yates, hung out of a cab and shouted ‘bus wankers’ to people wearing headphones at a bus stop) kiss and tell story, published in The Sun last week. I realise that I will have lost a few of you here, but, in my defense, at 5:27 on a Wednesday, when you’ve finished everything that you had to get done that day but can’t risk leaving early because someone will shout “PART-TIMER” across the room and draw attention to you, this kind of shit becomes interesting, and so I found myself reading the grisly details of Keiran Hayler’s ‘full blown affair.’

At first, I felt sorry for ol’ KP, having to read that her husband banged her best friend in a pub car park, whilst wearing long johns. Then, around halfway through the article, I stopped feeling sympathetic and started to feel jealous.  

I didn’t get a kiss and tell when someone cheated on me and I think that I really would have appreciated one. I know that, upon finding out that someone has cheated on you, you’re supposed to be concerned with the emotional side of things. Was there a level of intimacy between them? Did they lie next to each other whilst reading books and feel totally ok with it? Had he helped her through a particularly vengeful bout of cystitis by holding her hand when she peed?
Well, I didn’t care about any of that, initially. I just wanted to know about the sex. I was very concerned with the sex that they’d been doing. How many times? What was it like? Was it better than our sex? Where did they do it? What positions did they do? Was it better than our sex? Was she always waxed? I mean, like always impossibly waxed? Did she do things that I wouldn’t do? Was it better than our sex? Honestly, I was one step away from tracking down a fucking plethysmograph.

I think it’s at this stage of the post-cheating-discovery meltdown that a kiss and tell would come in handy. Sure, you might vomit so violently that you turn yourself completely inside out whilst reading it, but it would give you the details that your brain uses the eight hours in which you would normally sleep to imagine. I’m not talking the details that you see in films, or the details that your own cruel mind is busy coming up with; a lip being tenderly bitten, a solitary bead of sweat running between two breasts, fingers digging into a muscular back. No, the details that are given in kiss and tell stories are always much more mundane and at times slightly bizarre, often geared towards landing a sponsorship deal. In the case of Mr Katie Price, he’s clearly hoping to at least get a meeting with the guys over at Ford- “I arrived in my Ford Focus and she arrived in her Ford Fiesta.” I bet you did Keiran, I fucking bet you did.

For a start, the questions about how many times they’ve sexed someone else and for how long they sexed someone else are always dealt with in a kiss and tell story; they really like to focus on figures, so that’s those queries ticked off right away. If you reduce sex down to nothing more than statistics, then it really starts to lose its sexiness. Keiran Hayler tells us that “the sex usually lasted around ten minutes.” Sidestepping the obvious jokes here, I’ve always found that if you can recall, with any amount of accuracy, how long sex lasted, it really wasn’t all that. The story later goes on to say that “Keiran had 25 secret trysts with Jane over the course of seven months” – past the count of 6, I’m not sure that there is anything less sexy than being able to say without doubt how many times you’ve had sex with someone.

Most importantly, in every kiss and tell story, there’s always one detail, often made into a sub-heading, that renders the whole thing about as sexy as leather-look t-shirts (or leather-look anything, for that matter). For Joey Essex it was the fact that he’d eaten too many sweets before sex and gave himself stomachache and for Keiran Hayler it was the long johns. These seemingly insignificant details prove one thing to a person who’s imagining the person they love doing impossible sex positions (the kind that More! Magazine used to have to illustrate using Barbie dolls because they were that impossible) with the bitch who you once leant a hair band to on a night out, or whatever. That thing is this- the sex they had with the other person is no sexier than the sex that they had with you. It’s prone to exactly the same impracticalities that your sex was prone to. He probably did keep putting all of his body weight onto her hair, she probably did keep getting her hair in her mouth ALL THE BLOODY TIME and someone’s digestive system definitely did let out a poorly timed gurgle.

I actually managed to find out two bizarre details about my ex’s cheating. The first being that my ex was banging a girl on his desk when the whole thing gave way, landing on his foot and turning his big toenail black (he originally told me that this was a football injury) and the second being that the girl who he was sleeping with wore underwear that had Snoopy on it. I found this out when, during one of those silent ‘talks’ that happen after a break up, I found a pair of Snoopy pants in his room, which he later tried to convince me were mine.

Those details actually really helped me stop being mental and start being fine again. Luckily, I don’t prescribe to the opinion that people have sex so hard, and so good, that they break furniture – the furniture is cheaply made and that’s why it broke, so the desk landing on his foot really did feel like some sort of karma. It was the thought of those Snoopy knickers being pulled off and hitting the floor that really made me realise how ridiculous the whole thing was. The more I imagined it, the more absurd, and less sexy, the image became - like when you say a word over and over again until it has no meaning. The image just becomes two people having sex and I soon stopped thinking about those two people having sex, because when I imagine two people having sex, I prefer it if I’m one of them.

However, I had to turn into a puffy eyed, knotty eyed, permanently pajama clad Nancy Drew to find out exactly what happened when I got cheated on and I don’t think that’s fair, which is why I’m putting a case forward for some kind of organization (possibly just use the guys who work at the Job Centre, because they do fuck all) to enforce a new rule – if you cheat, you have to do a kiss and tell. It doesn’t have to make it into a national newspaper, let’s just start things off local, and I don’t care if you write it or dictate it, but honestly, it really would save everyone a lot of time and humiliating conversations with your mum asking if she’ll help you pay your phone bill if, upon being found out, The Cheater was made to submit an 800 word account of what they had been doing. Preferably with a covering note, held together with a treasury tag.