There really is no shortage of men and no man is worth that kind of hurt and humiliation.
By: Lisa Hayes for YourTango.
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. One was a full blown relationship on the side. When I found out about this relationship, we agreed to get counselling. 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 that something was going on 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 and 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 counselling related to how we were going to manage the separation regarding our son. She had been told our marriage was mostly 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 work place 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.