“In another lifetime ago, I was married to a man who never stopped dating other people. Let’s just say he had more than one affair. Many of them were one-nighters or little flings — but one was a full-blown relationship on the side.
When I found out about this relationship, we agreed to get counseling. I agreed to stay. He agreed to call it off. However, it didn’t take long before all signs pointed to the fact that he was still seeing her. We’ll call her Kelly.
One of the signs he was continuing his affair was the hangup phone calls that kept coming to the house in the evening.
One evening when I was home alone there had been a series of them over a couple of hours. Finally, I picked up the phone and immediately said, “Kelly, I know it’s you.”
There was a long empty silence, and then she replied. “I am having a really bad day. I just want to talk to him.” She was crying.
“Well, then you can talk to me.” I replied. “Let’s go get a drink.”
And that’s how I began a conversation that changed the way I saw my life, the other woman, and women in general.
Kelly and I sat in the back of a very dark bar and faced each other woman to woman over the strongest drinks in town.
What we both learned was that neither of us could trust him. That might seem obvious given the situation but at the time it wasn’t. We also both figured out we were more alike than different.
Kelly had been told our marriage was over and he was only staying long enough to work through counseling related to how we were going to manage the separation regarding our son. She had been told our marriage was over long before they met.
We had a mostly “open” relationship. However, I was still very jealous.
She had been told I was cold, angry, and abusive. She also believed I knew about the affair all along and knew he intended to move in with her when our separation was complete. She had also been told I was dangerous and unstable and well worth avoiding at all costs because he didn’t know what I was capable of.
I had been told he didn’t have feelings for her. He never did. It “happened on accident” and he was afraid for me and our son because she was stalking him. I’d been told he’d actually had to tell his boss what happened because she was showing up at his workplace and it was getting scary. I had been told he’d cut off contact and thought about getting a restraining order except he didn’t want to put our family through any humiliation in court getting one.
The truth of the matter was she was showing up at work because she would pick him up there on his lunch break and go to a hotel at least two or three times a week. I learned that they’d actually been together the day before. As we sat there together we both realized that he probably wasn’t really working late that evening, and he obviously wasn’t with either of us…
I found out he’d taken her to our home. He’d introduced her to our three-year-old son behind my back. She spent time with him and his friends. She’d also met some of his family.
She’d even stayed nights at our place while I was out of town visiting my family. She had every reason to believe she was going to be the next in line for the closet where my clothes were hanging, which she’d looked at and even tried some of them on. I felt like I’d been violated in the most profound way.
She was a woman, in love with a man, believing his lies just like me. Although on one hand she knew in her gut she was the other woman, it was easy for her to paint that picture as being the “next” woman.
She was devastated by my version of reality and we were both devastated by the shared revelation of his version of reality.
Generally speaking, a man who cheats on his wife will cheat on his girlfriend. Like Kelly and I figured out that night he was, in fact, cheating on both of us, with someone else.
Kelly quit seeing him shortly thereafter and started dating women. I filed for divorce afterwards.
