The Other Woman

Today, I read some of the journal entries I wrote in the past few years. One I wrote “I am angry at her. She knew he was married and she knew he was not going to leave his family, so what did she want? Was it the privilege of hurting Tom, me and our perfect family that she wanted? To destroy? Does she think so little of herself that she only deserved the few crumbs that fell from our table?”

One of the things Tom said afterwards that she reminded him of his mother, which always seemed a bit incestuous and anyway Tom’s mum is still alive and is a wonderful lady, but in another entry, I wrote “I am not his mother and he has his pseudo-mother in her. I have no intention in competing for any sort of motherly role. I am his wife, his partner and his equal”. I suppose being likened to a mother could be to do with the role she played. Think of a little child that has fallen and hurt themselves. What does Mummy do? Mummy kisses it and makes it all better. All the pain goes away like magic. Is that the role she played?

It is actually amazing how little I refer to her and I believe that that is the way it should be. In the aftermath of affairs, generally she gets the blame. She tempted him, but he is supposed to be an adult and adults are able to resist temptation. Unless we accept this principle that no matter how tempting she may be, the husband must take responsibility for his choices, the other woman after the discovery of an affair will hang like a giant thundercloud over the remnants of the marriage.

However, I have tried to understand it from her point of view, but I am not sure that is possible. I did see her once after my husband confessed that he had grown close to someone, though, while I suspected it was her, I could not believe it as at that stage I laboured under the misapprehension that most men traded up when they had affairs. She gave me a Judas kiss on the lips, although she must have known I was close to discovering what was going on. I have not seen her since, though I did phone her once to ask for her side of the story. She refused, though she did say “she fell in love”. She then asked me not to contact her since and I have not done so except when she sent a message to my husband and I reminded her of the agreement.

So who is this woman who fell in love and had an affair with a married man who she knew was married? Apparently, she is very sociable and has lots of friends. She is fond of entertaining and eating out and is rarely photographed without a glass of red wine in her hand. She was married with a daughter, but got divorced about 15 years ago. Her only serious “relationship” in that time was also an affair with someone from her work and that dragged on for 7 years, before the man concerned eventually committed to rebuilding his marriage. There was about a 3 year gap between the end of that affair and the start of the one with Tom.

So, we have established that she was familiar with the consequences of affairs and must have learnt that they are extremely unlikely to lead to an actual relationship.

Tom said that he told her that he would never leave his children, so he did not string her along sprinkling fairy dust and promises of Never Never Land. They never talked about the future at all, which confirms again her familiarity with the boundaries of affairs and was content to live within those boundaries.

As I said above, entertaining and going out are a large part of her life. However, her arrangements with my husband were of a much more mundane variety. Sometimes, he would tell me that he was going to gym early in the morning, but would visit her for some horizontal gymnastics instead. Sometimes, he would call in after work or after gym at the weekend. He very rarely took her out, except for a few lunches here and there to the type of places I would never go to. That is fantastic from my point of view as he did not commit financial infidelity with the family’s resources, but for someone who is so sociable and outgoing it must have been quite disappointing.

She and Tom never discussed his sex life in the marriage and never discussed whether I was being faithful and they never used protection and never had tests. How can a supposedly intelligent woman take such a gamble with her own sexual health? It is no wonder that sexual diseases are becoming so common in the over 50’s age group if their behavior is typical. The average teenager with raging hormones is better educated. Tom never talked about me with her, so he never denigrated me, he never said to her that we had being living separate lives for years or all the usual hogwash. He came home every night for his dinner and slept spooned up to me in our marital bed with his arm wrapped around me. The only time he slept over at her flat was a few nights while I was away visiting my mum and he never brought her into our home. Again, it is clear that she was highly familiar with the rules of affairs and was happy to live within them.

One of the checks I did after Tom’s confession was go through the credit card statements to check for things such as unexpected meals out or presents for his mistress to try to get some sense of the affair. I found nothing, and Tom confirms that he never bought her any gifts. I do not believe that she ever bought him anything either, as I never discovered any clothing or other personal effects where I did not know where it came from.

She did push for more interaction with her friends and family. For example, she organized an accidental meeting with her sister in a bar and I believe he visited her sister’s home. She also had invited him to her niece’s wedding which was to take place over a weekend with 6 month’s warning. So in some ways, it looks like she was heading for some sort of showdown. However, when I first found out, she stayed in the background and played it very cool for a month before the affair was back on. She only got upset in the New Year after Tom told her it was over for the second time. She did try to contact him again a few weeks after that, but eventually the message got through to her that it was over.

So what did she get out of the affair? I do not know. It must have been difficult for such an outwardly confident and sociable person to carry on in such a sordid hole-in-the-corner manner. Imagine living your life depending on the whims of the wife. For example, I sub-consciously knew something was wrong and started only telling Tom if I had an evening meeting on the day of the meeting. So, he would come home, work out what time I was going to be home at and then contact her to make arrangements. Presumably, she would then have to drop all arrangements that she had made previously. It must have been an incredibly isolating existence.

I keep thinking that I am missing something. She had to be getting something from the affair and I cannot help think that it could have been the satisfaction of “besting” another woman. Is she a grown-up playground bully who wants everybody else’s toys? Frank Pittman describes the spider woman in a 1993 article about the different types of infidelity and in my mind, some of it applies but in a very passive aggressive way.

I have a mathematical bent and understand how to make investment decisions. You weigh up what you are giving up today with what you expect to get in the future and you can apply the same principles to other life decisions. However, in this case, it simply does not make sense. As she started the affair, she gave up her integrity, her self-respect and a lot of her lifestyle in exchange for some illicit sex and no promise of a future at all. .

I have tried and failed to understand what motivates the other woman and now 2 years down the line, I have accepted that. It is completely outside my comprehension and anyway it is not my problem. My problem was and still is to stand beside my husband as he grows into an honourable man once again.