I'm an ow

[fuckitanyway]

I'm in love with a married man. He's my boss.

I am also married and have a lovely life. I love my husband and children. He doesn't hide the fact he loves his family and his wife.

I'm a member of mumsnet for about 7 years now - I'm not trolling - Friday night bumsex, Pom bears etc.

I'm not going to make the bazillion apologies I'm supposed to and know I should because it's ridiculous. I'm mortified, ashamed, I feel such a complete fucking moron at times. I keep doing it - so it's inexcusable and pointless and disingenuous to try rationalise it.

No one plans on leaving anyone. He's 24 years older than me.

It started one year and four months ago and now has run away with me.

I have attempted to post this a million times. I was too much of a coward.

I don't know what to do.

I'm sorry to anyone I've hurt. Could you help me? I understand and accept I'll be flamed.

Higgle I found some of that post very difficult to understand, but it appears you have misunderstood some of what I was saying about 'props' and love in long term relationships.

Having a high profile job and travelling the world does not insure against needing a life prop at some point in their lives. It matters not how full or even glamorous someone's life is, but how they cope with it. Personality matters too.

Neither was I saying that love in a long-term relationship is the dull, passionless existence that you seem to be describing in your post. How very odd that extrapolation is. Lots of couples in long-term relationships still desire their partners intensely, but have moved beyond the all-consuming chemical infatuation stage that is typically present at the beginning of the relationship. I'm not sure why you have interpreted posts about the positives of love in long-term relationships as 'putting up with crap and staying anyway'. Where did you get that from I wonder?

Tink, Arguments, Leavenheath...

All make great points.

But I have unusual views about this I think

My belief is that we should all have high expectations and high standards in our relationships. If we are conned by the idea that being "in love" will not endure and that we must put up with this somewhat insipid low key version labelled as "love" which seems to be a rather self sacrificing worthy sort of state and not at all exciting then yes, some people will be off to enjoy the undoubted pleasures of a new partner.

On mumsnet any notion that the "wronged" partner is not trying hard enough, has let standards slip, become frumpy etc. etc. is heresy but if you are not going to slide into a comfortable pair of slippers sort of relationship effort is necessary. But it is so much easier for posters on these threads to say there is a character fault with the OW or their partner, and seldom any analysis of what has gone wrong in the marriage. In real life you so often hear news of an affair or marriage breakdown commented on by words similar to "I', not surprised, have you seen the sate of her recently" which of course is really unkind but what people outside this site tend to think.

Having seen some of your other posts, I'm not altogether surprised you know people who would make comments like that Higgle. I don't. And if I heard someone saying anything as crass as that, I'd challenge it and move as far away as possible from their company.

Nothing anyone has said on this thread indicates that they see love in long term relationships as 'insipid' or 'unexciting'. Nor have they demonstrated that they have low expectations or low standards. Where are you getting this from?

I'm finding your posts not only difficult to understand but also quite noxious. I'm sure you have your reasons for posting in this way, but those posts do sound very bitter and quite nasty. You do not sound in the least like a happy person who relates well to other women.

I understand (I think) many of your points, Higgle and I actually agree with some of them, particularly the one about running a home and family being treated as a small business sometimes. Where did that ever feature in the hearts of a couple starting out a life together? Some of the posts that I've seen, not on this board but on others, make me wonder how long it will be before a split is inevitable as very often the female partner determines herself as 'leader' or 'boss of the family' and there doesn't appear to be much in the way of a partnership. Of course, it could all be desperate posturing amongst peers and maybe the relationship isn't like that at all but it does make me wonder sometimes.

The way that men and women have been brought up makes me think that there have been inherent differences from the start. Some things have changed/been modified, ie. men are no longer the breadwinners necessarily and women can and do decide to parent alone. When it comes to relationships however, I don't think that much has really changed. Women do want to feel cared for and cherished - as well as respected. Men want to feel looked up to and admired - as well as respected. I know that's really generalising but when you think about it, affair partners must be meeting those needs on some level that isn't being obviously met in the marriage/partnership.

There are other differences between men and women too in terms of how they view dating. I'm reminded of Yul Brynner in 'The King and I', as outdated as that film is, I think that the 'Bee gathers all the blossom he can but blossom must not ever fly from bee to bee to bee...'. As entrenched as that view is, it's still quite prevalent.

I feel desperately sorry for people that find themselves bereft at discovering betrayal and that they don't actually have what they thought they did. That's enough to swipe the legs out from anybody. Again, in a way I agree with Higgle that if people can manage affairs with kindness to their partners, taking steps to protect their family and conceal against discovery, it must be better than the devastation that is caused and the shattering of the family that ensues. It must take a certain type of character able to compartmentalise what is essentially a double life, so successfully but I believe there are people out there that can do that and there are many more affairs going on than we're ever aware of.

I personally think that women feel remorse more greatly than women do, irrespective of the fact that more women (therefore more OW) post on this board than men. I don't know how desperate OP feels about her situation, nobody other than her can really know, but if it were me, I'd wish that I'd never taken those steps into the affairs because I do hear sadness in her posts.

Hadn't seen Hinkle or Leavenheath's last posts when I posted. I'm several years on from having my 'legs swiped from under me' and I guess I'm trying to find some empathy (not sympathy) with the OP because I have a friend who was in her position. I'm sorry if my post reads as 'matter of fact', I certainly don't feel that way about women and their suffering.

I disagree that it's as simplistic as 'unmet needs in the relationship' and I especially disagree that compartmentalising and having undiscovered affairs is always the better option, even for the person having them. If as you're saying women seek those affairs to meet the need to be loved and cherished, when they get dumped by the OM and then realise that they were neither loved nor cherished by him, I think it would make a woman who wanted to be loved and cherished feel even worse- and can lead to bitterness and anger with the world.

I was thinking too about what you were saying about men's needs versus women's and how often we read on this site about men having affairs and the OP who's posting about it admitting she didn't feel loved or cherished while the affair was ongoing. Other posts too from women who are having affairs and have lost all respect and admiration for husbands they no longer 'look up to'.

Yet rarely do we hear either on here or in RL about those uncherished, unrespected partners having a simultaneous affair themselves despite those unmet needs. I wonder if they are and we just don't hear about it? Or whether they are just different personalities and have different ways of coping with their unhappiness?

i found your post interesting higgle. it is hard to discuss these issues as there is a sort of swarm response and anything you say that could be in any way construed as blaming the wife or sympathising/excusing the OW or cheating partner results in outrage and attack. that reduces things to a less than nuanced discussion.

i'm glad to hear 'in love' can last. i don't 'need' a partner to the point that i would stay with someone i wasn't in love with anymore (not talking about infatuation or being besotted - i mean something different by 'in love' than it tends to be assumed one means on here) hence being single despite having had perfectly 'adequate' relationships with lovely men i could have stayed with. i too find the way that alleged real 'love' quite sad sounding. i think you have to really want to be married or want that lifestyle or the security or something to stay married to someone you're not in love with and that's fine if those are your values and desires but it wouldn't do it for me. it's hard to not feel like there's something 'wrong with me' compared to the socially promoted right way to be but it feels very right to me.

i said before i grew up with a cheating father and the lesson i really took from it was that i would only be with someone who i was genuinely in lvoe with and vice versa because anything else is a sham and a waste of a life. i guess one reality no one likes to face about affairs is that there would be less of them in there were less people in marriages that don't make them happy and there was less societal pressure to be married, stay married and not 'break up the family'. most people seek happiness, joy and intimacy to feel alive and if they go too long without it they feel starved and a bit desperate at which point their judgment gets iffy. some embrace that starved state and call it 'real love' or 'being an adult' or 'staying together for the sake of the children'. others can't do that and get a lot more starved and desperate.

i don't know. i do find it hard to believe that someone who was in love, in connection, in real partnership and intimacy could cheat. i don't doubt that people settling for this 'love but not in love' alleged state long term will be susceptible to cheating.

leavenheath - maybe they're more inclined to the 'carrying my cross' state of being.

dunno about the whole gender generalisations. i think in a way relationships that assign gender roles and the partners live up to them or in expectation of them are more susceptable to infidelity or breakdown as how can their be real intimacy and connection in role play?

thank goodness for Leavenheath. The thread is otherwise unreadable.

It's to do with coping strategies, personality, opportunity, entitlement.. somewhere up thread some person blamed a woman for letting her husband's behaviour ruin her life - so cruel, so unkind. Look to yourselves.

Actually, Leavenheath, I think I am saying exactly that:

If as you're saying women seek those affairs to meet the need to be loved and cherished, when they get dumped by the OM and then realise that they were neither loved nor cherished by him, I think it would make a woman who wanted to be loved and cherished feel even worse- and can lead to bitterness and anger with the world.

There would be no sad OW otherwise, would there?

One anecdote worth trotting out because it did make me smile wryly is the situation of one of my closest friends. Her DH1 worked away from home and simply stopped coming home. This carried on for a couple of years. They had no kids. Eventually she found out that he was having an affair. Lots of shock, bitterness and anger. She used to talk about the OW being an adulteress as well because anyone (even if they are single themselves, which the OW was) who has an affair with someone who is married is guilty of adultery.

Fast forward three years, after her divorce, she starts having an affair with a married man. But that was okay because the marriage was dead. His children? Better for them to live with a single parent than in an unhappy marriage. She married this chap - now her DH2. She encouraged him to give up his work and go to university in his late thirties. She told him it didn't matter about his child support (which he never paid).

It is far too easy to paint things in black and white. People are complex beings capable of amazing contradictions and about-turns.

I think often the OW or OM can actually have a low self worth and low self esteem.........

There could be a sense of being made to feel wanted/desired/cherished/special - if they feel they are worthless then someone comes along and says no, I really want you, yours desired by me etc then the OM/OW really really want to believe this. Their current DP may love adore and cherish them but they don't express it as often or in the same way as the illicit partner does. Not intentionally but there are so many distractions in family life that little things can get over looked

It's just my opinion and won't be the case in every relationship

No, there wouldn't.

I'm surprised there has been so much misunderstanding by a couple of posters about love in long-term relationships. I tend to avoid talking about my own 30 + year relationship on threads about another's, but it bears no resemblance to these insipid, unexciting passionless ones Higgle and Numpty are describing. However I can think of times when it's gone through a bit of a dip in passion and 'in-loveness'- the small children years, periods when we were both working away from home a lot. This has also been the norm in all of my friends' long marriages. But marriages can also go through a renaissance when other pressures fade. Ours has, several times!

I'm sure some OW and OM have low self-esteem, but not all. I guess it comes down to what builds esteem in one person might be different in another, though. It has never built my esteem when a married bloke has come on to me, when single or married. Being desirable and wanted by men says nothing about my value as a person, just my sexual attractiveness. Sure, that's a part of me but it's never defined me, thank goodness.

Like I said - just my opinion that it could play a part in someone telling the person to bugger off or to accept the comments and begin believing them to be true.............wouldn't be a factor in all cases.

There's also the thrill of the chase too

people don't come onto purely based on your 'sexual attractiveness' though. come on! it's not all seedy shag tastic business. people are attracted to you for a myriad of reasons - you speak to them on a lot of levels not just some separable and 'not really you' factor of sexual attractiveness.

we're pretending here that sex exists in a vacuum from everything else and that unless it's within marriage and that grown up, family, etc 'love' it's something seedy.

that's now how attraction works for the vast majority of people. what triggers sexual attraction isn't that two dimentiona.

Yes that's right. It wouldn't be a factor for all people because not everyone gets their kicks from sexual flattery or chasing. I guess if you are someone like that and it's becoming destructive to you and others, it's worth doing some introspective work on yourself and looking at your life in the round. The generic 'you'. I do think some people get into these things because they have never got past the thrill of people thinking they are good-looking and desirable. While it's understandable to feel flattered by that, it's really no big deal either, is it?

Sorry, keep cross-posting! The 'that's right' was to Blushing.

we're pretending here that sex exists in a vacuum from everything else and that unless it's within marriage and that grown up, family, etc 'love' it's something seedy.

No, we're not. That's a straw man if ever I saw one.

I don't consider myself odd, and I sometimes think it is better to be open about your own life rather than leave other people guessing the perspective you are coming from. I grew up and supported myself in my student years working in my parents family business, 30 men, just me and a secretary mucking in to support them. (Plus my mother who worked off site) for 22 years I worked as a solicitor, family in the early years and then mostly crime, I was a law lecturer on a graduate course for a year and now, through strange co incidence and social conscience I run a care service for a charity. I'm also a charity trustee for another organisation. So, most of my working life experience has been in male environments, and a fair bit of out of hours drinking with colleagues where you tend to get the true perspective on people's lives from the male point of view. I don't name change and I speak my mind. I have the great good fortune to have been happily married for nearly 30 years to someone I still fancy and love to distraction. I believe my parents felt the same way about each other until my father sadly died of cancer at 63.

My life's experience tells me that marriages do survive affairs, that the man creating a stir with his mistress at one year's office party will be doing the same dance with his wife next year. In the real world marriages seem to have gone wrong before one partner has an affair, and people will comment to that effect. We only hear one side of the story on here when a poster is upset about her husband/partner's behaviour and have no idea what she is like to live with.

We all formulate our views on life from our personal experiences. You only need to look at the comments on relationship articles in The Guardian ( and of course, The Daily Mail, but I won't venture down that route) to see that the accepted MN line on relationships is not one held by a majority in the outside world. I simply tear myself away from Style and Beauty threads from time to time when I feel the need to chip in. I don't expect everyone to agree with me but the steamroller of orthodoxy on here sometimes needs someone to put their head above the parapet.

I have female friends, they tend to be a bit like me though.

It sounds as if you want the affair to stop because you know it’s jeopardising everything good you have in your life. So first things first. Change jobs. Your boss should write you a nice reference. Find a job that will not bring you into contact with your old employer. Then tell him it’s over. If your boss gets arsey about you changing jobs then it’s very clear that he is no longer a lover but a workplace sexual harasser, who is using his status as your boss to keep you available. Hopefully he is not.

And there is no “can’t” about leaving a job. You have to do it, at any cost, if you really want the affair to end. You can’t honestly expect to stay around this man and end the affair. Either you wont succeed at all, or you will do it but get very badly hurt, maybe even in a way that destroys your professional reputation or your marriage. Yes, there is a price for having a secret affair with your boss, and when you want to end it changing jobs is part of the price. If that means a huge salary cut or relocation then those knock-on effects on your family are also part of the price of your secret affair. So you can't talk about no-one getting hurt, it's only a matter of who, when and how much. Compared to what could happen if you stay in the job and what will happen if you don’t end the affair it’s a small price to pay.

When you’ve changed jobs and stopped seeing the OM then it’ll be time to have a think about your marriage. Without another man to perk things up in your life, is your marriage satisfying in itself? Or are things missing? That’s where it gets interesting.

But you can’t do that until you’re no longer having an affair.

And the OM is telling you the affair is OK if it “makes [you] even happier at home providing that my husband and children always come first.” Well that’s wishful thinking. It’s not OK and you feel inside that it’s not OK – if you felt it was OK you wouldn’t be wondering if he was spinning you a line.

You are trying to avoid both feeling hurt (including the pain of losing your lover) and you are trying to avoid hurting other people. But this isn’t just about hurt. Let’s talk about damage too. Hurt comes and goes, but damage lasts. You might not feel hurt but this affair is clearly damaging your self-respect or you wouldn’t have posted what you did. As for other people, what people don’t know doesn’t hurt them, but it can still damage them.

Think about his wife. Maybe she knows and accepts. Do you think she accepts without pain or without damage to her own self-respect? How do you think “he’s only able to be nice to me because he’s shagging someone else too” really feels? Or maybe she lives in blissful ignorance. Then she’s feeling no pain but a huge chunk of emotional openness and intimacy simply doesn’t exist for her, an important part of him is deliberately shut off from her. That is corrosive over time. Or maybe his wife suspects something is wrong but has no idea what, maybe even now she is secretly blaming herself for his remoteness or berating herself for mistrusting him? Perhaps the uncertainty is quietly damaging her own mental health and he isn’t even aware of it. Well, his family are his problem. But everything I’ve said about his wife is true of your husband too. Your family are your problem.

And one other thing’s for sure - by leaving the OM you may hurt him but you will not damage him. He may even learn something useful from it, something about deceiving himself or others. Or maybe he will learn nothing and the next nice lady who turns up in his office will replace you. But by staying with him, you damage yourself and your own family.

So get your backside out of that job! Take courage, and get your own real life back.

I agree with Leavenheath on the value and depth of love and passion in a long term marriage. Yes there have been times when one or other of us was so overwhelmed by exhaustion or kids or work that the love seemed to have disappeared. I find it desperately sad that people end marriages at that stage or look elsewhere. That's like setting out to climb Everest and then deciding not to bother because your muscles ache or your feet feel cold.

Most of the truly worthwhile, life enriching things we can do include periods of real difficulty where we feel like giving up: learning an instrument, training to excel in a sport, doing a phD, writing a book, launching a new business, renovating a heap of a house. All have boring and ugly bits in them, groundhog days. Why give a marriage less commitment than other tough projects? Why assume that love should always be easy, that if it isn't, it's not really working any more? Niggle - you'd really rather be alone than put some effort in or weather the bad days?

I love DH so much now, and he loves me. He knows and accepts me better than anyone else in the world. I'm happier and feel securer with him than I ever did with my parents as a child. He is central to my life. We have fun. We have been together 20 years but still go for romantic weekends, or to gigs or the theatre together. He makes me howl with laughter most days and teaches me stuff. He buys me presents I didn't even know I wanted, like if I mention a piece of music on the radio is lovely it turns up in my Christmas stocking. We discuss our dreams for our life together when the kids are grown. We support each other in achieving our current dreams and developing our careers and our lives.

That's the good stuff. And yet before Christmas I was on a thread bitching away about him because he was annoying the life out of me and I could scream. We sometimes bicker and frustrate each other and get in and out of ruts of our own and each other's making. So what? better that and the rich, deep seam of love that keeps revealing new qualities and strengths, than always hunting for those first throes of excitement which are wonderful and genuine but shallow.