I Was the other man

I Was The Other Man

I have a confession to make. About twenty years ago I had an affair with a married woman. It was an affair filled with lies and manipulation and one I wish I never had. One until I had written this article, I hadn’t realised quite how bad it was.

At the time I was single. Not very experienced sexually. I was emotionally immature and low on self-confidence. Easy prey for this extremely narcissistic woman.

The story began when I was working for a company in London at the beginning of the century about the time when the tech bubble burst. I was working in a small IT department and was very unhappy in my job. My career was going nowhere and job opportunities were few and far between as companies tightened their belts for the expected recession that never arrived.

I had been flirting a lot with several of the young women in the office yet, I did not have the confidence to ask any of them out. All this flirting though made it clear that I was very available.

Out of the blue, I received an email from the Brazilian lady in the Marketing department. She was exotic and six years older than me. In her email, she confessed that she had feelings for me.

There is something about Latin women which I love. I previously had a fling with an Italian lesbian who had just come out of a bad break-up with a woman so she wanted to give men a try. It was never going to work but she was a lovely woman. She broke up with me in the nicest way. When we were at the same party, she told me that she was now dating a woman and kindly asked me if I was okay. I was and I have no regrets.

Returning to this married Brazilian woman. She told me that she was separated from her husband. This was true. She was living in a bedsit at the time.

We ended up going on a date. Our date was incredible. We went into Central London and had dinner at an Italian restaurant. She told me of a Brazilian nightclub she knew of and I suggested we go there. We danced and we kissed. She kissed me with a passion I had never experienced before. She had me hooked and I was too inexperienced to escape. Finding out that I had missed our train home we booked a hotel for the night and had sex.

At the beginning of the century, the internet was in its infancy, so I was unaware of terms that are commonplace in dating today. One that would have been appropriate, even on our first date, is red flag.

I think that a Marxist parade walked through that nightclub that night and I inexplicably missed it. She was strangely jittery and she was worried that she was going to be spotted out with me. She was separated from her husband. They were going to get divorced. Her husband was a bad guy. He never made her happy. Why did it matter if we were seen together? All lies.

Red flag number one.

I was too infatuated with her to notice, though. I was into her and she was into me, at least I thought she was.

Red flag number two was she never called me her boyfriend.

Over the next two months, we spent a lot of time together. The sex was incredible and we had sex a lot. I would go to her place, she would go to mine. I introduced her to my friends. Nothing could go wrong. But there was a problem. Her husband.

She would switch her phone off at night and wake up to a huge number of text messages and voicemails from her husband pleading with her to come home. We would be driving somewhere and she would get a desperate call from him.

Red flag number three and the biggest of them all.

By this time I should have smelt a rat. But I didn’t. I felt sorry for the guy. His wife had moved on with me and he needed to let go. I was secure in our relationship.

Infatuation is a powerful drug and one that is hard to kick. Add that to the fact that she hadn’t finished with me, I was never going to escape from her clutches.

I am sure he knew she was being unfaithful. At least I was sure he suspected. What he certainly doing was what I now know is called the pick me dance. His self-respect was close to non-existent.

This heady and exciting affair wouldn’t go on forever like I thought. We were having sex one night and in the middle, she stopped and told me that she couldn’t feel anything, I was smaller than her husband and she needed to imagine that she was with her husband to have an orgasm.

I was crushed, humiliated and emasculated. I had no idea why she would do that.

The reason soon became apparent. She called me one evening to tell me she had returned to her husband. I could hear him in the background joking with her.

“You used me,” I tearfully accused her.

“Yes, I did,” she unashamedly laughed.

It was my turn to play the pick-me dance. It was my turn to lose all my self-respect. How bad did it get? She asked me to help her move back to her husband. I stupidly agreed.

How badly did she manipulate me? If getting me to move her back with her husband wasn’t bad enough, when I was helping her we would kiss back at the bedsit she was moving out of. Once she was back and settled with her husband, she told me to stay away from her and promptly ghosted me.

And that was the end of my dalliance with a married woman. It turned out I wasn’t the first person she cheated on her husband with. I had got myself involved with a serial cheater.

A harsh lesson learnt.

She did later call me a few months later. I don’t know why. Maybe guilt drove her to call me. She admitted that what she did was wrong and I hadn’t deserved it without apologising. Maybe she was unhappy with her husband again and was seeing if I was available. I wasn’t and especially not to her. I had gone from being besotted with her to finding her ugly.

About a year later she tried to friend me on Facebook. She also sent me a cryptic text message saying she didn’t expect it to be well received. It wasn’t. I just told her that she had sent it to the wrong number. Maybe she did feel guilty after all.

As far as I know, she is still married to her husband. I know they never had children which is a blessing, I suppose. It would have made for one dysfunctional family.

Why did I decide to tell my story? One is probably because, with all the stories I write about infidelity, I get recommended stories by people who are having an affair or had an affair with a married person, and I am sick of their self-pity and their poor me justification, and I want to comment on their stories from a position of authority. Maybe, it was these stories that prompted me to tell my story, instead. Who knows?

Maybe it was this affair that subconsciously got me to start to write stories about unfaithful women.

Do I want sympathy?

No, absolutely not!

I don’t deserve any. Add this to a few years prior when we met, my dad had an affair with a divorcee and left my mum for her. My paternal grandfather had an affair too. Yeah, the hypocrisy is not lost on me.

My experience and the history of it in my family has given me a zero tolerance to infidelity.

There was a happy ending for me though. A few months after my affair, my roommate’s girlfriend asked me what I thought of their Spanish friend. I talked to and kissed that Spanish friend at a Halloween party. I asked her out, we moved in together. A few years later we were married and we are still together with two kids. Twenty years committed to the same woman. Wow!