There are plenty of people who feel you shouldn’t take your anger over your husband’s affair out on the other woman. After all, she didn’t owe you anything so she shouldn’t be the one shamed.
I half agree.
You shouldn’t take your anger out only on the other woman when it was your husband who betrayed you. But it turns out, when it comes to the destruction of my life and family, oh-I have plenty of rage to go around.
Plenty of questions too.
First of all, for the sake of this post, I don’t like the term “the other woman”. Too vague. We’re all other women. I don’t like the term “affair partner” either- it sounds too clinical. ‘Mistress’ seems too classy for a situation where, going by my husband’s google locator, aside from some very lovely sounding Valentines Day lodgings they were likely rutting away in a parking lot or up against a tree in the park somewhere. ‘Homewrecker’ suits- it’s feels archaic, but it suits.
Now she isn’t the one who wrecked my home- he is. But she certainly fucking helped. It seems to me that makes her his co-homewrecker. Co-wrecker? She was his escape hatch, and had it not been for her and his…’eagerness’ to be be with her, things would not have unfolded how they did, he wouldn’t have just walked out on us out of nowhere and the bridge back to his family would not have been torched.
It’s odd that a complete stranger can play such an intimate role in undoing my life. It’s such a personal thing to do to someone you don’t even know. So to keep things feeling personal, I’m going to assign a name to my husband’s co-wrecker. Just something random, like, oh- I don’t know, Amanda
There are only a couple of things I know for sure about Amanda:
Amanda is really into makeup and married men.
Amanda knew her boss had a family at home and still decided to have an affair with him.
And Amanda probably doesn’t think it’s fair for anyone to judge her over any of this. But the thing is, you can and should judge someone based on their actions. You don’t need to know their backstory. Any good she may have been in some area of her existence doesn’t change the fact the she pursued and slept with a married man with and played a significant role in breaking up a family. Does she even understand that?
I am a little fascinated by how a woman can just do something like this to another. I wonder if as a child her home was broken up by an affair too, and maybe she grew up in the same situation where my girls are now where the safety, stability and comfort they once had in their parent is forever shaken. Does she have some of the approval- seeking daddy issues my girls might now grow up with too?
What went wrong in a heart like hers to make her think this was okay?
And what makes someone think this is a good way to start a relationship? He’s got children and because of that, will be unfortunately tied to ME, an established lunatic (I mean read the blog) who is now very, very volatile when it comes to the people who have wrecked my family and hurt my daughters. For the next twelve years, I’m going to be tethered to this man and therefor be some peripheral part of her life for however long they stay together. Twelve goddamn years- but that’s another post.
Looking for answers, I’ve read many articles like this one lately on what makes a woman go for a married man. There’s some interesting psychology behind it I suppose, but really the simplest explanation is that sometimes the woman is just… a heartless low life, just human shaped garbage with no moral compass or sense of decency.
Of course often, the co-wrecker is being lied to as well. I am fairly certain that was what my dear husband did here. He told me that he never talked to her about our relationship. He was very insistent on that point. But if that were true, then it actually makes her look even worse because otherwise she absolutely knew full well that he was happily married and that he had two little girls at home. He was always bragging about his wife and kids at work, to friends, to family- because he had a good life, until…well.
Interesting that the only person he ever suddenly mentioned his being super secretly miserable to was also the person he wanted to fuck. That might have given a brighter person pause.
I also wonder how she imagines that he has been and will be honest with her- someone he’s only known for months, knowing for how long and how often he had decided to deceive me: his wife, partner and friend of over twelve years.
But no matter what he told her, she chose to pursue the relationship. She could’ve just told him to go fix his life or to call her when he was actually single. A decent woman would have done that. She didn’t. My husband enjoys the thrill of sneaking around and apparently she does too. I can only hope they get the shame they should have earned because of it.
She was at his restaurant the last time I was there. That still really bothers me when I think of it. She knew I was a real live person, not some abstract concept. She knew about our children- also real people. And she just carried on with him anyway. How does someone just do something like that?
Most of my ire goes to my husband where it belongs, he has earned that and more. I’m going to be dealing with all of the consequences of his selfish actions, as will my children, for a very long, long time. It’s a slow motion explosion and I don’t know where it’s going to land us.
But sometimes, in the chaos of it all, I do spare a thought for Amanda. And I hope, on behalf of my daughters and I, that she dies in a fire. I don’t mean of smoke inhalation-I want her to be awake and aware for every bit of it. I want for her to somehow not go into shock as all that makeup melts off her face and her skin starts to blister. I want her to feel her eyes start to liquify and for her last sensation to be that of her brain starting to boil in the bowl of her skull. I want her to smell herself roasting.
It’s a seconds long fantasy I indulge in as all of the comfort and goodness I had in my life are really burns what away. The future I was meant to have with my partner is in ashes. My husband decided he wanted to be with her instead and because of this, I get to feel used up, boring, old, unattractive, and alone.
I get to watch my daughter experience real dread for the first time as she is trying to come to terms with her father deciding he didn’t want to live with us anymore and all of the uncertainty she’s going through as she now knows, at ten, that you can’t trust people to always be there for you like they ought to be because if one parent can lie and break big promises to the other, what’s to stop them from doing the same to her?
I get to go cry in the girl’s bedroom when he comes and takes them away on his day off because that’s just how things are now. There are no more family outings together. There is no more together. Everything, everything is divided now. This is what a broken family feels like. The edges are sharp and cut so deeply.
So I hope dear Amanda sleeps well, right there next to my husband and father of my children. I hope she’s proud of herself and her prize and that she thinks it was all worth it.
Most of all, I really hope that she someday gets what she really, truly deserves.
