So I Wrote “The Other Woman” A Letter…

So, I wrote a letter to the woman that helped destroy my marriage.  Yes, I know that my husband deserves most of the anger , but there is plenty to go around for her too, which is why I prefer the term “co-wrecker”. You could say “mistress” if you preferred to class it up a bit- though I assure you this woman doesn’t warrant it. 

I wrote the letter primarily because I wanted her to know the pain she has caused my daughters and I through her decision to pursue a relationship with my husband. She had to have been aware of it on some level distant enough for her to dismiss it, but I wanted to make sure. I doubt my husband  would have shared how our daughters are struggling through his decision to just walk out of our family, even if he were around to see it himself. 

I wanted her to know how their father leaving has deeply affected how they see him and that it will continue to do so as they get older and the gravity of his actions really sinks in; when they understand what it means to be in a committed relationship and how cheating shatters one’s ability to trust and truly damages a person, as all of this will also affect how they see her going forward.

 I wanted her to know that she is my daughter’s first lesson on how low a woman like her will sink, who she will step over to get what she wants, because women like her are not allies to any mothers or any daughters. Women like her are drifting, empty, hungry souls latching onto whatever makes them feel relevant.

I’ve already established that she knew all along that he was married with young children at home. She had even been there one night when we had stopped by the restaurant with our daughters and so was very aware that we were together as a family. And I find it very unlikely that when researching her new love interest she wouldn’t have stumbled across his wife’s blog- where just in October I had posted about what would end up being my very last date night with my husband. It was plain to see that we weren’t just living together out of some necessity, we were not in the midst of separating, and we weren’t “glorified roommates”, as he is so fond of saying now.

Soon after everyone heard that he had cheated on me and walked out on his family, I heard- 3 or 4th hand info mind you, that “the girl” didn’t know he was going to leave his family. That she thought it was just a fling and that she was “freaking out” that he had done this. They were saying that she was just young and dumb.  Nope. That statement is only half right and I correct anyone who wants to give her even the slightest out: 

“The girl” is Amanda Mullen (let’s just call her Mandy- she feels more like a Mandy)and she was 34- old enough to know better and to deal with any consequences of being outed as a homewrecker, because make no mistake, that is what she is. Despite my husband’s attempts to say otherwise, she is lying to herself if she thinks she didn’t play a significant role in destroying my family, and that is a stain I hope never washes off. I hope it follows her everywhere and I hope that someday, someone does the same thing to her.

If she stays with my husband, that is a solid guarantee.

She must have known he was leaving me before I did. What did she think he was telling me this whole time? She had to wonder about those things, right?  Did she know he left on the premise of rebuilding the marriage he suddenly said was broken? How about that when I discovered her existence, he swore that he broke things off with her and that he was committed to working things out with me and saving his family? Surely she couldn’t have been aware of that last lie, because if she  knew that he had told me such a thing and then continued to see him, that would make her just completely immoral garbage.

Just how rotten was her heart? 

Some had suggested that even though she knew he was married, he might have told her lies about our relationship being some nightmare, but as I’ve said before, a brighter, more decent woman would think to tell him to work on it, to come back when he was single if that were really the case. But not Amanda “Mandy” Mullen! Because she knew what she wanted and fuck the rest. I now know that she was indeed a willing, conniving  party in this since the beginning. And how do I know? Because I wrote her that letter.

I wrote her a letter. By hand. It was a little old fashioned, but messaging seems so impersonal and what Amanda did to my family was so deeply personal. Given that branding someone with a scarlet letter would alas be frowned upon, I decided a written letter was the more appropriate, law abiding way to reach out to the woman who fucked my husband.

In that letter, I made sure to include information that Mark did not know, like that I had recorded  the conversations between he and I since he left, including the ones where he is telling me that he knows he never tried to tell me he was unhappy, never attempted to work on any of these issues that he was just then suddenly telling me he was having in the marriage, but that “he wishes he would have”.  Also, all of the ones where he is telling me about her, lying about what they did and then later admitting to all of it. Those are always a good listen.

I did this for two reasons. One, to let her know that I have all these receipts, but also, I thought that would be a good indicator of her character here.

I figured that I would either never even really know if she read it because I did not for a second think she would ever reach out to me (not that I even remotely would have wanted that) OR I’d be hearing from an irate husband in the near future because she immediately ran to him with it, rather than consider a single thing I had said on her own.

The man was knocking on my door the next MORNING.

*****

Affairs start with a conversation. 

There’s some connection made over drinks and shared interests, just like any other relationship, only with affairs, there is also a  great bit of pretending involved. Both people have to pretend that the spouse and their children don’t exist. They have to pretend that things aren’t going where they know they will lead. And most of all, they both have to pretend that they aren’t two bags of garbage who know that they are doing something extraordinarily wrong. Or not. I’m pretty sure that in this case the ‘doing something wrong’ part was a turn on.

Then there are the affairs that may have stayed as flirtations until someone makes a drunken mistake, a kiss or a full on fuck, and they figure that the damage is done so they might as well continue with it.

I can’t say for sure how exactly my husband and Amanda “Mandy”Mullen got to the point of no return, but my money is on it being a combination of all of those things. I know when he started going to her house (January 3rd),  where they hung out before and after work and for how long thanks to his open and unlocked google location history. I know that he was looking up lingerie to dress her in on December 15th thanks to his search history on the same browser that he was aware that I also sometimes used. I know that there were an awful lot of late night video chats between them well before that. Then all the phone calls. The texts. 

But there was build up to all of that, and that started in the workplace. The flirting. Then they would both be seen out together by coworkers long after their shifts were done. I’ve learned quite a bit about Mandy Mullen since finding out she had been screwing my husband for months before he left me out of the blue back in March. 

I’ve been in touch  with people who know or worked with her and it….really paints a picture. Of course, all hearsey. However when you hold it up to what I know for definite fucking sure, it all seems pretty credible to me. 

Speaking of hearsay, let me randomly tell you about some relevant  laws: In Louisiana, you can record someone without their knowledge or consent. 

My husband, since leaving me, has forgotten how to fact check himself. Which makes a lot of sense, given all the lying. He has tried to vaguely threaten me with fake legalease a couple of times now in efforts to scare me away from doing something he didn’t like. But not only have I been researching my legal rights since he left me, but I actually have a lawyer that I run things by to make sure I stay on the right side of the law here.

I would further like to tell you, for free you guys, that it is incredibly stupid to send your married boyfriend sleazy pictures or videos of yourself, along with messages and texts you wouldn’t want anyone else to read. It is positively moronic to send things like that to someone who lives with a significant other. I get that I’m old and that’s just what people send each other now I guess, but if he’s married or living with someone-just don’t do it.

Anyone who has been cheated on will tell you that their investigative skills become almost  otherworldly when they suspect that their spouse is being unfaithful and if your married boyfriend doesn’t even know how to log out of and erase their location history, or even their search history, it ‘s probably very likely that they also would not  have thought to properly log out of all of their social media before the betrayed wife went digging.

I would be very uncomfortable if I had to wonder if my married boyfriend’s wife had very easily uncovered things that I would not want to be leaked.  Because if my married boyfriend’s wife just discovered that she was being cheated on, she would probably think to gather as much evidence of the infidelity as possible because she would have to assume the worst about someone that would betray her like that and think a divorce, with adultery at the heart of it, was imminent.

Of course, I’m not saying I have any such evidence, this is just me giving advice that I hope no one reading this ever needs because you’re all  decent enough not  to mess around in someone’s marriage.

 Oh-another legal note here: you can record conversations, but you can’t post them. Publicly. At least not in the exact form of the original recordings. Transcribing them would be fine if you wanted to take the time. As for me, I just made sure that all of these recordings are safe by backing them up. EVERYWHERE. I backed up everything. Gosh, I only hope I’m not hacked or anything and that no one anonymously posts any of it somewhere. 

How embarrassing that would be. 

Anyway, that morning, sure enough  one of the first things out of his mouth was how stupid it was to admit that I had been recording our conversations. Obviously I knew then that she had run right to him with my handcrafted letter, but he also told me more. 

He said that I , “didn’t tell her anything in that letter that she didn’t already know.”

So. There you have it.  She knew what he was doing the whole time, and she went along with him anyway. She did this all with legs and eyes wide open. That means she wasn’t just  complacent, it makes her conniving too.

A word now on libel laws, and I’ll keep it simple: It’s not libel if it’s true. 

It’s also not libel if you are stating an opinion, as opinions are a First Amendment privilege. For example I can say that Amanda Mullen is a complete desperate scumbag who goes after married men and a heartless, lowlife snake. While I believe that to be true, it’s obviously in part my opinion. 

I say that she is desperate because I’ve heard (hearsay again!) that she was already sleeping with one server at the restaurant before cheating on him with her boss: my husband. I’ve also heard that at the same time she was sleeping with the server, she would also get drunk and throw herself at other employees  at afterhour get- togethers, all the while flirting with my husband until he took her up on it. As a woman on the make, he was the bigger prize.

She told a formerly mutual friend that she hadn’t actually been having sex with the adult heterosexual server that she was sleeping with, but that she would spend the night with him to “cuddle”.

Sure. 

Look, if it weren’t for the fact that she included my husband in hers, I wouldn’t judge someone else’s sex life, but in my opinion, flinging herself at whoever she might stick to seems rather classless and desperate behavior for someone in their mid thirties. But, far be it from me to look down on someone’s downward spiral when for all I know I’ll be heading toward my own soon enough because of what I’ve been put through.

*****

Everything my husband has said and done this year has shown him to be, among other things, a deceitful, deceitful man and a prolific liar. One of the biggest lies, the one he pushes hardest, is that Mandy Mullen had nothing to do with his decision to leave me. He has tried to push this on anyone he thinks gullible enough to believe it and, unfortunately, on those that aren’t in a position to argue.

He’s even tried to sell that lie to me, as though I hadn’t been standing by his side as his wife and partner for all of these twelve years. As though I hadn’t been his friend for even longer than that.  As though I didn’t know who he was.

His story evolved from accepting full responsibility for his leaving to (after I began blogging about what he’d done) blaming me almost entirely for it. It seems like once he realized that leaving your family out of nowhere, then having it come out that you had been having an affair for months and that you refused to even try to salvage the marriage you just destroyed because you wanted to be with the other woman wasn’t a good look. So he’s trying to do damage control.

“Did you think I wasn’t going to leave you?” 

There was almost a desperation in his exasperated voice when he asked this after confronting me about the letter and I hope that the look I gave him really conveyed the amount of dumbfounded shock that I felt over how deranged the question was. I would have been less disturbed if he had just sprouted six new heads, each one continuously vomiting snakes until the ground was roiling with them.

I pointed out, speaking slowly and clearly, that well, since we got along just as we always had and he had never bothered  talking to me about being unhappy with me, our marriage or our family life, and that even in the months leading up to this, when I’d question his behavior that he attributed to mourning, he would lie to me…no. No, no I did not. Not only didn’t I even suspect he was leaving  me, but I truly believed he would never have done any of this to me and to our children. Hence all of my obvious shock and grief since day one-what the hell was wrong with him?

Understand that thinking you want to leave your wife and  actually doing it are two very different things. 

In the case of the first, you can still change your mind, especially when you get to the point any normal undistracted man would get to before making a decision like this where a conversation needs to happen with your spouse. With that conversation, both parties are forced to face harsh realities about the relationship and that can be a catalyst for change, ideally one that will be the least damaging to all involved. It is likely a solution can be found, or at least the means of working toward one. 

If you have children, finding a solution is always preferable to the destruction of your family. 

But to just leave without that conversation or anything that should have a chance to happen afterward is undeniably an act of selfishness and cowardice. It is the most damaging thing you could do to your partner. Why would anyone choose to do this when it very likely would not leave a door open to an amicable relationship with the mother of your children, not to mention negatively affecting your relationship with those children?  Assuming that matters to you of course.

Well, from what I’ve seen, men that do this have been exposed to a different kind of catalyst, one that doesn’t take their family into account in any realistic way and one that often elicits hasty action.

That catalyst, ladies and gentlemen, would be a ho.

A workplace trollop, a bimbo, a guttersnipe, a lowlife moralless, heartless slag. (Thanks for my UK readers for the colloquialisms.) I have never publicly referred to Amanda Mullen as a whore because I don’t want to insult sex workers who are as a whole probably more honest and upstanding people than she is, but I admit it’s often at the tip of my tongue.

The simple fact is that if Mandy Mullen did not have anything to do with his leaving, she wouldn’t have been in the picture at all. My husband would have respected me and our children enough to be a better man. He was an otherwise, thoughtful rational person and even if he were really planning to leave his wife and family,  he would have done it in a careful, well thought out, and dignified way. But he didn’t have time for any of that.

Instead, he barrelled his way out of our home like mangy wolf going after a lame cow, making the most sloppy mess of things as humanly fucking possible. This was a man with tunnel vision and she was where his sights were set. Fuck the rest.

The letter did what it was meant to. It clarified things.

And Amanda Mullen, heartless and proud of her prize of a man, just looks away from the pain she has caused and continues to cause. I imagine they both must be continuing to pretend a good bit too when it comes to my daughters and I.

But I’m sure he’ll be writing her a letter as well: a gushing letter of recommendation for her next job, since she cannot possibly get  anymore out of the one he hired her for.  I really hope that in that letter he glowingly refers to her the same way he did when he  talked to me about her before he left me, when I didn’t suspect a thing, and told me that she’s “the best hostess I’ve ever had.”