The Other Woman

Once, many moons ago, I was involved with a married mad. We met purely by chance. He called my office one day to get some information about a case he was working on. This one call let to several others doing investigation on this particular case until he said that he thinks he needs to get some more 411 from me and proceeded to ask for my phone number at home. I found him to be "interesting" so I gave it to him. And thus began our affair. We talked on the phone for about a month before we decided it was time to meet face to face. This was arranged and we met to have a drink. Needless to say I wasn't disappointed and neither was he. We continued to correspond with each other on the telephone, going out on an occasional date, to watch a movie, or a play or go to a club or whatever we felt we wanted to do. He was a very mature individual being 33 at the time and we spoke about various topics from politics, to religion to economics (which was his area of expertise), to relationships, to sex ... our conversations were endless, late in the night, early in the morning, during the day at work, when he picked me up from work, when I went to meet him at his office - we did a lot of talking and I loved that. Someone who challenged my in a different way and in some way forced me to read more so that I could converse with him on any topic.

As the time passed, we became intimate ... and we loved it! He was having problems in his marriage which (coincidentally) stemmed from his infidelity in the past. A very complicated individual he was. He had a child prior to his marriage, as did his wife, he and his wife had a child together and he had another child outside his marriage, this child being pretty much the same age as the child he had with his wife! What had I gotten myself into??????

Anyway, I kept telling myself that I would not get sucked into his life and that I would not allow myself to get too close to him for comfort. Easier said than done. Although we spent a lot of time together, you can understand that there were always restrictions to our "relationship". I couldn't call him whenever I felt the need to hear his voice, or to have phone sex in the middle of the night or go out on a date with him when he and the wife had to be somewhere with the children. RESTRICTIONS!! Any relationship with restrictions of any sort in my eyes is no relationship at all. When you are with someone, everything should be open, unhibited, free.

Because I knew that he wasn't really mine, I didn't make any demands of him - not his time, not his money, not his affection, not sex. If he said he couldn't pick me up from work, or couldn't see me on a particular evening, I was very understanding as I knew I was always second whether I liked it or not.

Eventually, I started to "wise up" and began to drift away from him. I didn't call him as often, didn't see him as often and we ended up having a big fight which was the beginning of the end of our blissful encounter. It eventually ended with him migrating with his family (a last minute decision). Even at this point, I was the one who made many a trip with him to his mother in the country, helped him to pack up the last of their belongings, cleaned out the house he and his wife lived in, dismantled the bed he and his wife slept in, made love in.

In talking to him since his departure more than 5 years ago, he has maintained that he never had a relationship such as the one he had with me. He viewed our connection as unique, complete, one that he says even his wife mentions to him from time to time - "the time when he was just so preoccupied". He still talks to me now about the challenges in his marriage and told me that if I had just demanded more from him, he knew that he would have left his wife and family to be with me as I gave him more satisfaction in every aspect of his life (not just sexually). I saw things differently thinking that I had no right to demand anything from someone who was not rightfully mine. I guess I will never know if he really meant this, although I think he did.

You live and learn from your experiences in life and know that I will never go down this road again. It is a lose-lose situation that will only cause pain and hurt for anyone who choses to live the life of another woman.

This post was inspired by "Diary of an Affair" and I pray that she will get hit by a brick of wisdom and reach for a bigger, brighter star and find a man she will love and call her very own.