"I have two boyfriends:" How one collegiette™ dated two boys for over four months, without getting caught

Alice* has been a friend of mine for years. Everyone has their stories of adventures and mistakes, but Alice has one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever heard: from November to March of her junior year of college, Alice was in two serious and committed relationships, one long-distance (Max*), the other at her college (David*).
 
I interviewed Alice about the experience, starting off with the basic question of why she did it: she laughed, hesitated and said with a guilty smile, her voice rising as if asking me a question: “Because I thought I needed it…and because I could…?”
 
Here’s the story: Towards the end of Alice’s sophomore year in college she reconnected with a high school crush, Max. For a few weeks they talked on the phone daily for hours at a time. After about a month Max planned a trip to visit her. Immediately after they saw each other and spent a few days hanging out, they were dating. Alice was thrilled: “I fell in love with Max in high school. I was so happy that he’d sought me out. And I realized that I was still in love with him.”
 
Their relationship was a dream come true, Alice says. They visited each other as much as they could over the following summer. She met his family and he met hers. They were instantly a serious couple, making plans for years in advance, when they’d both be finished with college and could try to go to graduate school in the same city. Alice explains why they got so serious so fast: “Max doesn’t do anything lightly. To date him is to be on the path to getting engaged, no question.”
 
Junior year started and they wouldn’t be able to see each other as often as they had over the summer. Max was determined to keep things working: he planned on either traveling to Alice’s school or flying Alice to where he lived at least once a month. Alice tells me that she was more in love with Max than she’d ever been with anyone before.  “He was my first love, and was probably the best boyfriend I will ever have,” she reminisces.
 
The early months of the semester went by and she and Max were still together. But this is where the story becomes complicated. The simple fact that Alice loved Max and Max loved Alice was not enough to keep Alice committed; it happened that almost all of Alice’s friends were abroad that semester, as is usual for the junior class at her college. Alice had studied abroad after freshman year and thus had decided to stay at school for the fall. She didn’t realize how lonely she would be and she cites this as one of the motivations behind her cheating. She began seeking out all of the friends she could find who hadn’t gone abroad.
 
Around October, Alice reconnected with a guy she’d studied abroad with the previous summer. “We began hanging out,” she says, “and before I knew it, I was flirting and we were going on dates and then I was introduced to his parents as his girlfriend.” But she doesn’t like how passive this makes her sound: “I didn’t try to stop us from becoming a couple. I saw it happening and I did nothing to get in its way. I could have stopped it and still been friends with David, but I didn’t.”