Woman's Boyfriend Blames The Emotional Effects Of Altitude For Why He Cheated On Her With A Man During His Business Trip
That's not how anything — not sexuality, not identity and certainly not altitude — works.
Piyoros C | Shutterstock | Canva Pro We all have our moments of farcical denial — it's part of the human condition to be full-tilt delusional from time to time.
But there's regular delusion, and then there's… whatever the heck is going on in the head of a woman's boyfriend, whose explanation for why he cheated on her with a man is so absurd it's possibly the most unintentionally hilarious thing ever spoken in the English language.
Her boyfriend said that he cheated on her with a man because of the emotional effects of altitude.
Now, as a gay man myself, I admit I come to this with a certain amount of bias.
But I would like to state for the record that as the kind of gay man who was putting on the tutu in the preschool dress-up box instead of the fireman's outfit at the age of 5 because he thought it was a Madonna costume AND is an avid hiker and camper who just hiked to an 11,000-foot alpine lake in Colorado a month ago and is still very gay in the aftermath — I do not think this is how anything works!
And neither, it seems, does this Redditor. "I can hardly believe that I am writing this or that it happened, but I am and it did so here we go," she began her post. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, is convinced that the thin air up in those mountains can Jedi-mind-trick a person right into switching teams.
It all began when her boyfriend went on a business trip to a mountainous part of Utah. While he was gone, she got a text from one of his colleagues letting her know that he'd been caught cheating on her with a guy while on the trip.
"When he got home I asked him about it, basically expecting him to confirm it was nonsense," she wrote. That is not at all how it went down.
Her boyfriend told her that the altitude made him 'gay, temporarily.'
This woman confronted her beau when he returned home, assuming there was some reasonable explanation. Instead, he confessed it was true — but not because he'd realized he was gay or bisexual, as she assumed. Instead, he told her that "the strangest thing happened" while at dinner with his co-workers, and he "suddenly became gay."
"He said he thinks it was 'due to the altitude,'" she added.
Altitude, especially above 8,000 feet, can indeed affect cognitive performance and mood as part of elevation-related illnesses like "mountain sickness" or high altitude cerebral edema, where your brain swells due to the difference in air pressure.
According to this woman's boyfriend, it "made him gay, temporarily." Incidentally, "Gay, Temporarily" is the forthcoming sequel to "Love, Actually" I am currently writing in which all of the couples who found each other that magical Christmas meet up at a remote lodge in the Wasatch for whatever a British "bank holiday" is and all end up going gay for each other.
Hilarity ensues; Laura Linney still dies alone, and obviously, someone takes a comical fall off a ski lift at some point because it's a rom-com, of course. If you are a literary agent or film producer, please get in touch.
After 'a lot of thinking,' her boyfriend determined that he was definitely still straight and altitude was the only explanation.
Whatever happened in this particular reboot of "Brokeback Mountain," it seems to have quickly reversed itself somehow.
"He said that as soon as he landed back home he was 'back to being straight," and mulling it over further during the long drive home from the airport confirmed that "his 'only conclusion' could be that he was 'temporarily turned gay due to the attitude.'" Sure!
His girlfriend had a far calmer reaction than most of us probably would. "I was like, whatever," she wrote, "I guess we are breaking up."
But her boyfriend couldn't believe she'd dump him over the "medical and scientific… byproduct of accidental brain chemistry… due to the higher altitudes of Utah." Medical and scientific?! Now, SIR.
People on Reddit were obviously not buying this either, which makes sense, given that IT IS ACTIVELY INSANE.
"Been to UT a ton. Haven’t felt the slightest change in sexuality," one person wrote. "You realize that he’s feeding you a crock of [junk], right?"
Another put an even finer point on it. "By that logic, anyone flying in a plane becomes gay for the duration of the flight????" On the other hand, maybe that's what's actually meant by "the mile-high club," and the rest of us just aren't in the know.
Whatever the case, this is not real — her boyfriend is just panicking about his sexuality. This is, you know, obviously sad, and we should probably have a discussion about how the combination of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and cultural pressures causes some people such anxiety that they end up grasping at truly absurd straws.
But unfortunately, "suddenly became gay due to the altitude" is so brain-meltingly hilarious that I am rendered incapacitated and incapable of drawing any kind of constructive takeaway for this story.
Perhaps I can explore it in "Gay, Temporarily," assuming my next trip to the mountains hasn't rendered me too straight to complete it. Wish me luck!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.