I am not “better looking” or “a lot younger” than the wife. I am not a “glamor girl” or a doll with mind-blowing looks and a body to die for. I am as regular as a woman can get, with bad hair days and dark circles and bags beneath my eyes.
I am not a “kept woman”. I work, pay rent and take care of my bills. I may struggle at times, but have never really had the “need” to rely on a man financially, regardless of my situation. I pick up the check, I book movie tickets, I arrange surprises, I shower him with gifts.
I serve as a release. A place to go to, a person who understands, the comfortable shoulder to cry on. As crazy as it sounds, after he spends some time with me, he goes home a happier man, husband, and father. I am his own little Nirvana, if only for a few hours.
It is not always fun. It hurts to be in love with someone whom I cannot spend important days, special occasions or holidays with. For all the pain I have caused his wife, I suffer in my own way too.
I don’t go out of my way to justify my wrongdoing; but I am not this horrible, heartless woman anyone would imagine. Sometimes you can’t choose whom you love, and just because that person happens to be married doesn’t mean I’m evil to the core.
I am not an overly sexualized predator nor an irresistible temptress. Mine is a complex, personal, and extremely difficult position. The stats are very much against me. I read somewhere that only three percent of men end up marrying the “other woman” and I have a very firm belief that he is not a part of that percentage.
Our relationship always had its own complexities, and it is difficult to understand our dynamics from the outside. I have long accepted the fact that I will always be painted as the villain, a home-wrecker, a monstrous seductress. I constantly try to prepare myself for the consequences of my choices and the responsiblities I must bear:
To be quiet.
To be patient.
To set aside expectations.
Esther Perel once wrote, “Just because something is hurtful, does not mean it’s wrong.” and somehow, it stuck with me. A sort of solace and self comfort that something about my situation may be right, after all.
I read a lot of articles and watched a ton of clips tackling the idea of infidelity and the pain that inflicts on all parties involved. I was in search of self-help books that could “potentially” shed some light onto my “insanity” because deep in my heart, I know I am not in this for fun and games. How could I tell people that yes, I am madly in love with a married man and I know there is more than a slight chance that I may ruin a family, but fuck it, I am happy, so I just brush the guilt off? There is no stepping back from that. There’s no way I can downplay the harsh reality that I am the other woman, the lover, the mistress.
I always thought of how his wife was probably once in my current state of bliss. She probably also fell in love with him from the other side of the table, too.
In an attempt to keep myself “dignified” in my own terms, I never asked him to leave his wife nor felt any resentment that he doesn’t even bring up the idea of giving things up for me, for us. Although I must confess, I felt a certain glow when after three and a half years into our affair, he finally admitted that they were not okay. That he was not happy. That I “ruined” his standards in terms of intimacy. That I was the only one whom he felt comfortable sharing his deep thoughts with. That only I could persuade him to let go when he felt the need to unload and cry. For some reason, this was an entitlement for me. I may not be his wife, but I was everything else. In turn, I controlled my curiosity, always hung on to the thought that what I don’t know can’t hurt me.
I am not proud of it and I don’t seek approval from anyone. He and I had unspoken conditions in our relationship. There’s heart-stopping excitement, moments of desire and the need to be together even to this day.
He’s brought me so much love and joy, more than anyone could imagine. I’ve always said it was the kind of happiness I wish everyone would have the pleasure to experience. The mere existence of somebody who genuinely appreciates you is pure ecstasy. We endured a lot of devastating sadness, too. To the point that we tried to stay away from each other, but just like magnets, we kept coming back to our little bubble we liked to call “The Matrix”.
This love we have for one another is tricky. It sometimes astounds me how loving him can cause so many feelings. Our love is so beautiful. As much as it is beautiful, we can easily and comfortably become lost in it. The thing about being lost is the inevitable cold hard truth of our reality.
When I think of the love I have for him, I think of the happy kind of love, the kind that is beautiful and unique. It’s a love that breathes life into me.
There is, however, a much darker and sadder side to the love I feel for him. There is a side to this love that doesn’t signal the beginning of something beautiful, but rather the knowledge that it is the type of love that even though it was meant to be, it may never amount to anything more than what it is. It’s that love that leaves a longing because I love someone I cannot be with and may never have.
It does not matter that I love him with all my soul, I am not able to have the chance to be with him. I know he loves me from the depths of his soul, and yet there is no possibility that the two of us can be together. It’s a sad truth, but a truth, nonetheless.
The fact is, love is not enough. All those fairytales, all those stories and movies I heard and watched growing up, they’re all lies and fantasies. Love is never enough because love is not rational.
We are forever running from reality, but the real world always catches up to us and forces our irrational illusions to dissipate into thin air. When the reality hits me, it cuts deep, it scars, and the pain isn’t easy to handle.
But what would I be without him? He has become part of me and to let go would feel like I was no longer whole. Sometimes I wonder if he would feel the same way if I was no longer in his life. If he lost me, would he feel a vacant space in his life that was once filled with something beautiful — even if that something beautiful was only the dream of having someone he knew could not have? I am sure that I would feel vacant, it hurts to even imagine the feeling if I were no longer his woman.
I ask myself, do I really have the right to call myself his woman? He already has a woman in his life; a woman who wears his ring on her finger. A woman that came before me. A woman that is the mother of his children. A woman, he says, that doesn’t want him the way I want him, that doesn’t satisfy him the way I do. I am her husband’s best kept secret. Sometimes I am so full of guilt. I know she would not believe me if I told her that I wish I wasn’t doing this. I am sure she would call me selfish if I tried to explain that my love for her husband has pulled me in so far, and I cannot find my way out. She would hate me; his family would hate me. I am the other woman, not HIS woman.
The truth is that I might be the other woman, but I am not a monster... I am just a woman. A woman who will end up with a broken heart. I will never have him next to me all night, share a holiday with him, know his children, or know his family and friends... I will have a few stolen minutes (or hours, if I am lucky) and a lot of time alone to grieve over the fact that he's at home with his family, and not with me.
But through all this, no matter how hard I try to pull away, I find myself broken and unhappy beyond words when I don’t have him. Even if I have to love him from a distance, I will. Even if I have to wait, I will. I know it sounds weak and unreasonable, but things just aren’t the same when I don’t have him. Everything just seems like a huge blob of mess. I keep myself occupied and I enjoy the flourishing success of my career; but at the end of the day, I only want to share it with him. It’s like none of these things matter when he’s not around. My bad days become the worst, and it’s not even funny how only the awful things get magnified whenever I feel like we’re not okay.
