What you experienced happens to others as well,. it's happened to me on a couple of occasions.

I once had a neighbour help me with something. In those days I was in my late 40s, but I have always looked 20 years younger, and I was considred a very beautiful woman.

One day, for reasons I forget, she came to my apartment and screamed at me and told me i was a whore. It is my experience that women from the lower classes think that calling a woman a whore is the worst thing one can say to them.

In any event, a while later, her husband shot himself, and we both found ourselves going back to the UK. (We were neighbours in South Africa).

I offered her my condolences, and I suppose we got to speaking to each other after that. About six months in, she was speaking to me about all the men she slept with. She asked me about my experiences. I told her that I didn't have relationships - that I was celibate.

Then she asked me what I thought of women who slept around.

I said, "I suppose they're whores."

She never spoke to me again.

The bottom line was that she thought because her husband help me, I was at fault in some way. I ran into that a lot.