It was an experiment, at first. A lark. A one-off sort of thing bred from boredom and matured by desperation. I got the idea from an episode of a popular US sitcom. George – hapless, helpless, luckless, adorable George – he decided he would wear a fake wedding ring to attract women. Needless to say, it didn’t work out for him; nothing ever did. But the idea was intriguing. It could be done in the world that lived outside of the telly, couldn’t it? It would only require someone with the proper constitution, without the proper scruples. Someone raised to believe his own ambitions superseded those of others. Someone who believed in the capitalism of love. Someone willing to lie to great number of women.

I could do it.

So I bought a band, gold and thick, heavy and impressive. I wore it out to parties and chatted up all manner of birds, fit and unfit, because beggars can’t be choosers, after all. I was careful to slip into conversation details about my absent wife. The doctor. Away at theater. Operating. Fixing other people’s broken hearts with her hands while she left mine to decay inside of me. Poetic, these deceptions. I didn’t know I had it in me, this talent for the lie. It was lovely, really. It worked better than I could have hoped, than I dared dream. I had more sex in the space of four months than I had had in the two and a half years previous, notwithstanding those copulations that were the product of my own ministrations.

But then an odd thing happened.

My wife, distant as she was, began to make overtures at some kind of emotional mending. Perhaps having finally noticed the gulf that had come to separate us over these intervening loveless years, she cut back her hours in the hospital and spent more time at home, with me. Saturday afternoons in bed, together, not shagging but just talking, experiencing one another, the simplest of pleasures, as we had done lo those many years ago. I held her body in mine, her head on my chest, and we talked of having children, of starting a family, putting down roots in this world and staking a small patch of it as our own, a place to establish a common history.

It was lovely, really.

So I stopped going out, stopped seeing other people, stopped doing all the things I thought I really wanted out of my thirty-two year old life. Instead, I lay in the darkness with this idea of the future and refused to let go.

I had done the same thing all those women had done before.

I had fallen in love with a lie.

It was lovely, really.