Dear Joely: Was I Just His Wank Bank?

The memories are warm. The messages are filthy. Then she suggests meeting in real life and discovers just how little of the relationship exists outside his trousers.

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Dear Joely,

An unanswered message has hurt me a bit, and I thought you might be able to give me some perspective.

Yes, it’s a man involved.

This man is not a current lover, far from it. I am not trying to win him back, and I wasn’t expecting some grand romantic reunion at the airport.

Here it is in a nutshell.

I met him when I was about 24, living and working in Scotland. I’m in Australia now. We worked together. He was married with two young children. We fell very hard for each other, and I became the other woman.

It went on for a few years and was exactly as intoxicating and dreadful as those situations tend to be. Ecstatic highs, terrible pain, an astonishing amount of sex and not nearly enough sense. I remember being convinced that I could no sooner hold back the tide than stop loving him.

Eventually he left his marriage, but he did not leave it for me. He left me as well and began a relationship with another woman from the office. They lived together for five years. I was heartbroken for much longer than I care to admit.

But somehow we never disappeared completely from one another’s lives.

Over the next thirty-five years there were occasional calls and messages. He would bring up old moments between us, sometimes very sentimental ones, as though they still meant something to him. I listened. I gave my best advice when he went through difficult times.

We have slept together a few times since, on my rare trips back. Our connection had always been intensely sexual.

About ten years ago, I suggested meeting while on one such trip and he sent me a very harsh reply. It was so dismissive that something in me finally woke up. I stopped speaking to him for years.

Then, around five years ago, he contacted me and asked whether I was really never going to speak to him again. We began corresponding once more. Some of it was ordinary conversation, some of it reminiscing, and quite a lot of it sexual.

To be blunt, I began to wonder whether I had become little more than a sort of wank bank.

He has old and newer photographs of me. He sends sexual scenarios and dick pics. I have joined in and sent him nude photographs too, although the truth is that I wasn’t really getting much from it anymore.

I wasn’t pining for him. I wasn’t imagining a future.

I simply thought there was affection there. History. Some basic friendship after all this time.

I told him I am going to Scotland for a holiday in a few months and will be flying home from his area. I asked whether he might like to spend a couple of days together at the end of the trip. I made it easy for him. I said that if he was happily involved with someone, or it simply wasn’t appropriate, that was completely fine.

He answered the next day with a breathless little message about how lovely the trip sounded, complete with enough exclamation marks to frighten a flock of birds, but he did not acknowledge my suggestion that we meet.

Not yes. Not no. Not even, “I’ll think about it.”

He simply stepped around it and carried on.

I wasn’t expecting sex. I wasn’t expecting declarations. I wasn’t even necessarily expecting him to say yes.

I was expecting a reply. I thought he'd be pleased to see me after all this time.

I think what has upset me is that for years he has spoken about our shared past as though it mattered to him. He has recalled rooms, moments, sex, things we said and things we did. He has accepted my listening, my advice, my photographs and my availability. He has behaved as though there is some tenderness attached to that history.

Yet when I appeared in the present as an actual person, asking for nothing more than a courteous answer, he vanished.

It feels awful. Worse, it feels familiar.

Not because I am still in love with him. I’m not.

It feels awful because I thought that after thirty-five years we had become old friends. Or, at the very least, two people who had once meant enough to each other to warrant basic respect.

Am I making too much of an unanswered message?

Or have I finally understood that he is sentimental about the memories, but not especially concerned with the woman who lived them?

Yours,
Closing an Account

Dear Closing an Account,

You are not upset because he did not agree to see you. You are upset because he could not bring himself to answer you plainly.

That distinction matters.

For years, he has revisited the history between you. He has remembered the sex, the rooms, the private moments and the woman who once loved him beyond reason. He has accepted your photographs, your attention, your advice and your willingness to enter his fantasies. This has apparently required no shortage of enthusiasm on his part.

Yet the moment you asked him to meet you in real life, he became strangely short of words.

There is something shabby about a man who can summon the energy to maintain a wank bank but not the manners to acknowledge the account holder.

He may insist, if challenged, that the memories meant something to him. Perhaps they did. But sentiment is very easy when it asks nothing of us. It can survive for decades on reminiscence, fantasy and selective tenderness. Ask it to do something as ordinary as answer an invitation and suddenly the whole structure begins to wobble.

That is because nostalgia can imitate intimacy for a very long time.

You thought the two of you had become old friends. He appears to have thought he had retained access to an old lover.

Those are not the same arrangement.

The unanswered message was not the wound. It was the diagnosis.

Never mistake someone’s ability to remember you for their willingness to show up for you. They are entirely different talents.

He has shown a considerable gift for the first and very little appetite for the second.

Do not ask again. Do not send a wounded follow-up. Do not explain why his response hurt you. Do not provide him with another opportunity to turn your perfectly reasonable expectation into an emotional discussion he can avoid, minimise or eroticise.

And when he next returns with a sentimental memory in one hand and his trousers unfastened with the other, do not confuse the performance with affection.

The house of cards has already fallen. You are simply no longer obliged to crawl underneath it looking for friendship.

Yours, in closed accounts and considerably better investments,
Joely

Dear Joely: The Affair Was Perfect. Then He Went Down on Me.

Dear Joely,

I am 44, married with two children, aged 12 and 8, but the relationship is all over bar the shouting. It won’t be easy to leave. My husband is abusive, not physically, but through a complex web of coercive control. I am seeing a psychologist. That’s just some background.

For a long while, I have felt as though I am ripe to have an affair. As I said, there is nothing between my husband and me, and I am constantly left alone while he works long hours and travels abroad for work. I work as well, but the childcare has somehow worked out to be my responsibility.

About four months ago, I met a man through work and we really hit it off straight away. He is intelligent, kind and generous, and we have heaps in common. We get together for meals whenever we can, normally lunches because of our commitments. We talk and talk and talk. He gets me, and for the first time in years I feel understood.

I should mention that he is also unhappily married. That’s just the start of it, though. Our lives are so similar it’s actually spooky.

Over time, we built up quite a closeness and, yes, an attraction as well. We ended up making a date to spend a night together at a hotel away from the area where we live. My children were spending the night with their grandparents.

It was really quite lovely being with him in those circumstances. I got to dress up, and we had drinks at a nice bar and then dinner together. It had been years since I had done anything even remotely like that.

After the drinks and food, we ended up back in the hotel room. Things progressed to kissing, then touching, and soon afterwards we were naked in bed.

He went down to give me oral sex, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

It was awful. It didn’t turn me on at all. He was all over the place and didn’t seem to have the first idea about female anatomy. I found myself in the really difficult position of not knowing whether to fake it or say something, which I think he detected.

I tried to encourage him to have normal sex, but that didn’t work either. He wasn’t erect. After all the weeks of build-up, talk, closeness and caring, followed by the drinks and dinner, it was a terrible outcome. I felt like crying.

He ended up pacing around the room, not naked, and I tried to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t speak for ages. Eventually, he told me he had never gone down on a woman before and had felt enough about me to make me his first.

My reaction was not what he had hoped for, and he felt ashamed and embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say.

We spent an awkward night together, and the atmosphere was horrible. Since then, things haven’t been the same between us. I miss him terribly because the messages and conversations haven’t been as they were.

Worst of all, I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams ever having sex with him again. It has completely turned me off. I wish I could change that, but I have the ick. A serious case of it.

If I’m honest, I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that he had never given oral sex to a woman at his age, he is 39, or that his first attempt, with me, was so bad.

I feel down in the dumps, lonely, sad and disappointed. To be honest, I wish I had just given an Oscar-worthy performance.

Pathetic in Putney

Dear Pathetic in Putney,

First, you are not pathetic. You are disappointed, lonely, sexually underwhelmed and currently living inside a marriage where your freedom has been slowly parcelled up and handed back to you in supervised portions. That is quite enough misery without adding self-contempt to the buffet.

And no, you should not have given an Oscar-worthy performance.

An Oscar-worthy performance might have spared him one mortifying evening, but it would have sentenced you to an entire sequel. Possibly a franchise.

The problem is not simply that he was bad at oral sex. People can learn. Female anatomy is not guarded by riddles, fire-breathing dragons or a subscription paywall. A willing, attentive adult can improve enormously by listening, asking and resisting the urge to approach a vulva like an unfamiliar control panel.

What seems to have killed the mood was the whole peculiar bundle: his inexperience, your shock, his shame, the pacing, the silence, the failed erection, and the crushing distance between the night you had imagined and the one you actually got.

You had not merely booked a hotel room. You had booked passage out of your life.

For weeks, this man had been intelligence, kindness, conversation, recognition and possibility. He made you feel understood after years of being controlled and neglected. By the time you reached that bed, he was carrying the combined weight of romance, escape, sexual resurrection and proof that another life was waiting.

That is an impossible amount of luggage for one man to bring into a hotel room, particularly when he has never previously travelled south.

Your ick may be permanent. Sometimes desire disappears with the speed and finality of a stage trapdoor. But it may also be protecting you from the humiliation and sadness of that night. You cannot order yourself to want him again, but you also do not need to decide immediately that the entire connection was fraudulent.

The more revealing question is whether the two of you can talk honestly now.

Can he say, “I was inexperienced, frightened and ashamed,” without making you responsible for repairing his pride?

Can you say, “I was disappointed and overwhelmed, and I did not know how to guide you,” without turning his lack of experience into a character defect?

And can either of you discuss what happened without pretending the evening was solely a technical malfunction involving his tongue?

Because there is another awkward truth here: neither of you is free. You are both using this relationship partly as refuge from unhappy marriages. That does not mean your feelings are unreal. It does mean the relationship has been growing in a greenhouse, protected from school runs, bills, domestic habits, difficult decisions and the full weather of ordinary life.

Before deciding whether this man deserves another chance in bed, I would concentrate on something more urgent: creating a safe, independent plan for leaving your abusive marriage.

Coercive control often intensifies when the controlling person senses separation. Please continue working with your psychologist, and seek specialist domestic-abuse support to help you plan practically and safely. Do not make your escape dependent on whether this affair survives. You need a door that belongs to you, not one held open by another unhappily married person.

As for your lover, one honest conversation is warranted. Not because you owe him another sexual audition, but because you miss the friendship and closeness that existed before the hotel. Tell him the night affected you, that his withdrawal has hurt, and that you would rather speak plainly than let embarrassment rot the whole relationship in silence.

Then see what he does.

A man can be forgiven for not knowing where everything is. At thirty-nine, however, he should be capable of having a conversation after getting lost.

Yours in better exits and considerably better sex,

Joely

Dear Joely: Should I Tell His Wife?

Dear Joely,

We had one of those workplace birthday things yesterday. You know the ones. Everyone gets called into the tea room, someone produces a Woolies or Coles cake in clear plastic — the sort that looks like it would still be technically edible in a month — and we all stand around singing like we haven’t got actual work to do.

Nobody really wants the cake. Everyone takes a piece anyway. Then half of it ends up in the bin later because, shock horror, shelf-stable supermarket icing is not actually a food group.

Anyway, I was already in a filthy mood because I’d barely slept the night before, so perhaps I wasn’t at my most generous.

There’s a woman at work — let’s call her Barbara — who has always got on my nerves a bit. She calls everyone “babe,” laughs too loudly at men who aren’t funny, and does that thing where she touches a man’s arm as if he’s just said something terribly clever when he’s only asked where the stapler is.

Normally I just roll my eyes internally and get on with life.

But yesterday, during the birthday cake hostage situation, I noticed something between Barbara and a married male colleague. I won’t name him, obviously, but let’s call him “Old Mate With A Wife.”

It was the looks. The stupid little smiles. The way they were trying so hard not to look like anything was going on that they looked exactly like something was going on.

Honestly, Joely, it was as obvious as a possum in a pantry.

The annoying thing is I know his wife. Not closely, but we go to the same yoga class and she seems like a perfectly decent person. Now I feel like I’m sitting on something.

I don’t especially like Barbara. I don’t feel any loyalty to him. And I fully admit I may have been fuelled by no sleep, terrible cake and general workplace irritation.

But if there is something going on, should I tell his wife?

Yours sincerely,

Namast-hey!!!

Dear Namast-hey!!!,

First of all, I would like to acknowledge the true villain of this piece: the workplace birthday cake.

There it sits, sweating gently in its plastic coffin, covered in icing the colour of printer toner’s breakdown. Everyone gathers around it pretending to be delighted, when in truth they are all thinking, I am an adult. I pay taxes. Why am I eating this?

So I understand the state you were in when Barbara began her mating display beside the urn.

Barbara sounds exhausting. Any woman who calls everyone “babe” while treating the office kitchenette like a cabaret stage is going to test the patience of the sleep-deprived. And yes, people conducting a new workplace flirtation often believe they are being wildly subtle when they are in fact lit up like a service station at midnight.

But should you tell his wife?

Not today.

I know. Unsatisfying. Joely has put the kettle on and hidden the matches.

The reason is this: you are currently angry, tired, cake-traumatised, and morally itchy. These are not ideal conditions for life-altering disclosure.

There is a big difference between acting from conscience and acting because Barbara has finally pushed your last nerve into traffic.

Ask yourself three questions.

First: what do I actually know?
Not suspect. Not smell in the air. Not “the way he looked at her near the paper plates.” Know.

Second: what is my relationship with his wife?
Are you close enough that silence would feel like betrayal, or are you yoga-adjacent acquaintances who once bonded over tight hamstrings and a shared hatred of crow pose?

Third: why do I want to tell her?
To protect her? To relieve your own discomfort? To punish him? To drop Barbara into a moral volcano and watch the plume?

Be honest. You don’t have to be pure, but you do have to know your motive.

If what you have is only a strong suspicion, do not march into yoga like the Angel of Adultery with a rolled-up mat. Watch. Wait. Say nothing yet.

If you later discover something concrete — not gossip, not vibes, but actual evidence — then the question changes. At that point, if this woman is genuinely in your life and you believe she is being deceived in a way that may harm her, a careful private conversation may be warranted.

But it would need to be calm, kind and clean. Not:

“Your husband and Barbara are at it.”

More like:

“I’m really sorry to say this, and I may be overstepping, but I’ve noticed something at work that made me uncomfortable. I don’t want to gossip, and I don’t want to hurt you, but I also didn’t feel right saying nothing.”

Then you give only what you know. No embroidery. No dramatic lighting. No Barbara character assassination, tempting though that may be.

For now, though, I prescribe sleep, distance, and not making lifelong decisions under the influence of Coles cake.

As for Barbara, let her keep calling people babe. Every office has one woman who treats married men like complimentary snacks. It is rarely as invisible as she thinks.

Do your yoga. Hold your tongue. Keep your eyes open.

And next time there’s a workplace birthday, bring your own biscuit.

Yours with clean hands and no office cake,

Joely

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