Question to the OW

[Wintersnow17]

My DH had an affair and is now with the OW.

I feel betrayed, devastated, sad beyond belief.

So I have questions in all honesty to anyone out there who is the OW.

How do you justify it to yourself?
What is it that makes you do it?
How can you live with yourself knowing what it does to the other person?
I really want to know to try to stop tying myself up in knots.

And I know it's not just the OW but you see your DH but not the OW.

I'll be honest at the risk of being flamed.

I was a kinda OW, I met my then DF when he was married. I didn't go out looking (much to the stereotype) I dong wear short skirts, trampy red lipstick and my whole purpose in life is to snare married men, and wreck marriages.

We became friends, very quickly. And we talked about a lot. The cliche of his marriage being over came up, and we spoke as friends. He confined in me that they didn't have sex at all anymore, she showed him no physical attention, and they loved like friends or siblings. The cliche.

We started flirting, it wasn't an active choice. It just happened and we began to talk a lot more. He would give me a lift home, and he had kissed me once in his car. I told his straight that I wasn't interested in a married man. I had no desire to be the OW, I did say he was a nice guy and if it wasn't for his wife then I would be interested.

We stayed friends. What you could say was an emotional affair for about a month. We had conversations about him wanting to leave. I remained his friend, I said he needed to decide what he wanted. What made him happy. His kids would still be his kids even if he wasn't married to their Mum.

About a month and a half later she attacked him. Which prompted him leaving. We stayed friends for 6 months out of respect. Then got together, we are now engaged to be married and ttc.

Do I feel remorse? Maybe. I feel like I didn't lead him on. I was honest. I didn't pursue a relationship with him while he was married. I told him I was attracted to him and if it wasn't for his wife something would happen.

Nothing made me do it. I found a person and feelings developed organically. I nearly left my job over it, to get away from him. But I didn't. I maintained a healthy distance while still being a friend.

How can I live with myself knowing? I didn't encourage him to leave. I didn't lead him on, and I didn't have a physical relationship with him while he was married. I maintained my self respect throughout. Once he'd been left, and left long enough to ensure it was what he wanted and he didn't want to go back we gave us a chance. As if I'd only just met him.

I feel bad for her, of course I do. But people grow apart and relationships fail.

A friend of mine is currently having an affair with a married man.

She's completely smitten and believes he is 'the love of her life'.

Apparently the marriage has been dead for years, his wife only wants him for his money and doesn't love him at all, they've not slept together in years and he has only stayed because of the children.

I suspect it's a common story.

From her perspective, why should she sacrifice 'the love of her life' and the amazing future he's promised her for a woman she doesn't know or care about, who is not in a loving relationship but a dead marriage? Of course, from an outsiders perspective there is a high chance that everything he's said is absolute bullshit and his wife will be heartbroken when she finds out.

There's nothing more selfish than a person in love and they will twist things in their head to justify their behaviour.

Before all this, I wouldn't have said my friend was particularly naive, or malicious. She has been cheated on in the past and was devastated. But we lie best when we lie to ourselves, I guess.

I always find the 'she didn't make any promises to you' narrative really weird tbh.

Yes, the bigger betrayal is from the person who said they loved you and led you to believe they were faithful and long term.
But that doesn't mean that the OW isn't also responsible for her own actions.

Hell, look at all the CFs mentioned in AIBU, and everyone gets furious at their cheek when it comes to parking spaces or cadging endless lifts or expecting free babysitting.
Knowingly shagging someone else's spouse behind their back is a lot ruder than that.

The OW does it knowing that her actions risk a child's family breaking up, that they will probably see a lot less of their DF if the couple divorce, that the wife may be devastated and so on. She does it anyway because it's what she wants.

Yes, the ultimate responsibility is with the spouse to end or fix a marriage of its going wrong, but at best having an affair with someone else's spouse is just bad manners (to put it mildly)

When you in the situation as the OW ,you weighing the options either let go and don't hurt other people or choose your own happiness above the hurt of other people. Most likely cheater will say he is not in love with the wife, they don't sleep together for long time and they are not happy. In that case there's no much hurting the wife because they are unhappy anyway.
In my case I met him on OLD when he portrayed himself as separated man, she moved out and he lives alone. By the time he gave me his version of the truth and said he still lives with her ,but expect to split up as they argue constantly and he doesn't find her attractive anymore, I already developed feeling for him.
The wife was an illusive idea, she wasn't real person to me, I didn't know her at all.
It turned out to be the second kind of affair: he only wanted fun.
Or maybe not but he definitely felt guilty, he said he felt guilty to his marriage vows and also for not leaving up to my expectations.
I didn't know him well as I was never in day to day L8TR with him , I only knew a version of him that he showed me.
And he was great, he was everything I wanted in a man and if he wanted to be with me and leave his wife I'd be extremely happy. But he didn't.
I met his wife briefly, not even that just seen her from short distance away. She looked nothing like me , at that moment I felt sorry for her and guilty too.But ultimately she is his responsibility, his life and it's his duty to protect her , if he chose to have an affair it's his fault not mine.

I'd be wary of a married man who promises the OW a great future. That sounds like manipulation. Because if he is so certain he will be with the OW why isn't he yet? I have only sympathy for someone who is having an affair because they don't know what to do about their feelings. And if that is the case they can't make promises of a great future. Simply because they are in so much turmoil themselves that they don't don't what the future holds.

Op I am sure he has minimised, as I said before justified it in his own head

That's what people do. We all do it.

I think there is a massive difference between people who have affairs because they're players or they're inherently unhappy.

Only you really know that, and deep down most people do know. Whatever we want to think
With my exdp, we were very unhappy, I was unhappy. It was all unhappy! But I blamed them for a good few years.

I'm sorry you're going through this, I think one of the hardest things is thinking someone else is wonderfully happy and they've walked off into the sunset. Fuck me I know how awful that is.

Start being selfish. And time, i know it's trite but time.

I was the OW and he left his partner for me. Do I regret it no I don’t. We had what you would call an emotional affair for around a year and we were completely besotted with each other then we had sex and the relationship started.

I never made demands on him or asked him to leave he made that decision when I told him I had to move on and meet someone as I was getting older and didn’t want to be someone’s second thought.

I cut contact then left him to carry on with his relationship then he contacted me to say he had ended his relationship as he was in love with me.

What I would say is regardless of how much I love him it’s a bizarre feeling as I definitely do not trust him 100%.

Agree with Winchester's. Not involving yourself with someone else's spouse is such an embarrassingly low bar to fall short of.

He could love her or she could just be a stop gap. Who cares? Focus on you, not them. I would personally try to be happy just to spite them.

No one knows how they would deal with any sitiuation until their in it.

Simply that.

I think in some cases the ow is just another victim of the man's lies.

SusanDelfino I think you may he right, perhaps he was unhappy and couldn't tell me. That hurts too. But it is the cowards way out to have an affair. And it takes 2.

Is it ever worth letting them know the truth from the betrayed persons point of view? Just letting them know the real facts?

I don't think so. I've known a lot of people who cheat, due to a job I was in at the time where it was rife. I don't know a single OW/OM who would have cared. The only time they cared was when it affected their jobs because the spouse contacted their boss or made a big public scene of some kind.

But op
The person who really betrayed you was your DH
That's the bare bones of it. You can turn her into a siren or make her into the bad guy, but as hohoho says, it's highly likely she's been massively lied to also.

No one wins. Ever

He was a colleague I'd known & worked closely with for 18 months.

His wife lived abroad & he said the marriage was almost over.

I allowed myself to believe him & had a short fling with him but the guilt was too much.

Anyway, his wife moved over here & they've had another child!
Hmmm...

I'm a betrayed spouse.

You normally find that the sex declines in long term relationships. Bringing up children, working, keeping a home and life stressors distract both spouses.

On this journey, both spouses rely on trust and shared commitment and their love to keep everything together. They assume everything's ok because they both assume its obvious why they haven't got a lot of time for each other and again assume that things will get easier at some point eg kids will become older and more independent and they'll have a bit more time for each other. So although they know that things aren't ticketyboo and their relationship isn't loves young dream, based on the fact they did love each other and they're in this together, they'll be OK.

So one day, somebody comes on the scene who turns a spouses head. What you're supposed to do if this happens, is to protect your 'fragile' relationship by saying 'no' to intimate conversations ie cups of coffee, spending time with this person and so forth. But what the cheater does is go with it and their justification is 'me and the other half don't have sex blah blah! WHO DOES?! Who manages that shit in long term relationships?!

I think this is the back story the cheater rolls out to their Affair Partner...and this makes it all right because well, 'they weren't happy for years' and that's a green light for the affair right there!

What should have happened was the spouse protect his or her relationship and then work on their relationship and get it back on track. That's it! Anything else is bs.

Because they don't care. I didn't. My affair lasted something 4 months. He told his wife he was not happy and they separated. I felt like I won. Until I realised he was crazy and controlling. Split with him and his wife took him back :/

@Wintersnow17

Don't know why they do it OP. But I have a story that may cheer you up.

My friend's husband had an affair with a woman at his workplace for 10-12 months before she found out. Everyone seemed to know about it except my friend. She was devastated, and thought their marriage was strong, and that he would never, ever do it to her. 23 years they were together (1 daughter aged 20, at uni.)

The OW was all over him like a rash, and facebook messaged her saying 'you have never treated him right, so you can hardly blame him for wanting me.' And the OW told everyone at work, and her friends, that she was a lousy wife, she never cared about him, and they hadn't had sex in 5 years. (None of this was true.)

Long story short, just before Christmas 2016, he packed everything up and left my friend for the OW, and moved into her house. Cue all the bollocks on facebook from the OW about how she was now 'at one with her soulmate' and happier than she had ever been, yada yada.

Fast forward 8 months (to August 2017,) and the OW started contacting my friend asking her to let her DH move back in as she couldn't stand him being there! BA hahahahaha!!! My friend said' he's not a puppy, you can't return him because it didn't work out!'

Upshot it, once she had got her 'man,' - the man she had been having an affair with for a YEAR before he left his wife, it soon started to go sour. When my friend did a bit of digging, it turned out she started to get a bit sick of him within 5-6 weeks of him moving in LOL!

He is still with her too, in her home, and she makes no secret of how she is fucked off with him. And he won't leave.

Needless to say, my friend is NOT having him back, and his own daughter and mother have disowned him. He has nothing and no-one, and the OW can't stand him LOL!

So hopefully the same will happen to your DH and his OW!

OP, you're right. Men who do this are cowards. The women they hurt don't deserve the way they are treated.
But, you will probably never get the answers you seek. Because he's a coward, you see? And he won't even be able to be honest with himself enough to admit the truth.
The real key to getting past it is to realise that one fact alone.
It's a huge thing, and it took me a long time to get to. Once you get there, it's liberating - because you can then just sit back and think that they deserve each other.

Although the marital contract is between spouses, man and wife, society's implicit contract is that nobody should come between a man and wife. Everybody knows this. So yes the OW is complicit and involved and guilty of wrong doing.

However, I think the betrayed spouses 'beef', for want of a better word, should be with their wayward spouse and not the OW because more than likely, the 'me and my spouse haven't had sex blah blah' line will have likely been rolled out so until OW realise how and why this might have happened, this absolute stinker of an excuse will keep the unstoppable Infidelity Express choochooing for the next million years!

I was the OW many years ago.

I was young and flattered.

I managed to completely detach myself from the fact he was married and never, ever thought of him as having a wife.

I ended it with him however when he told me he wanted to leave his wife and be with me. That hit me like a ton of bricks and it made me realise what a stupid situation I had gotten myself in to. We were together about 10-11 months in total.

He ended up leaving his wife anyway so I guess things were rough between them generally anyway.

Although the marital contract is between spouses, man and wife, society's implicit contract is that nobody should come between a man and wife. Everybody knows this.

Do they? I don't.

I am perfectly happy for anyone to attempt to have an affair with my dh. I would hate to think that he would be with someone else if he could, but no one else would take him so he has to hang on to me!

No one has an affair 'by accident' or because the OW made them do it. It is up to the married parties to abide by the terms of their marriage, (whatever those may be, to each their own) regardless of what else is on offer.

A reluctant husband is not worth having.

OP, I have never been an OW, but I have several close friends who left their partners for OW/M. In all those cases they had felt trapped for years in marriages they were unhappy in but didn't have the guts to leave, and the 'affair' gave them the impetus to finally do it.

Thanks again everyone lots of different messages though...

Bibbidee- yes I think in my case his head was turned by a younger model and he should have worked it out with me.

Tuppz- thanks for that , that did cheer me up, I live in hope!

My main 'beef' is with my DH but whatever lies if any have been told the OW is still embarking on an affair where she knows it is likely to hurt others.

When I was 20, I was the OW. He was older, we met at work and he fed me a lot of information about the marriage that I now believe to be false. I believed that he was entirely in love with me and I with him. We never discussed him leaving, I think we both knew it was pointless. The relationship ended when I was 23, had grown up a bit, become a bit less selfish and was moving on to a new job. I'm ashamed looking back and would never do it again. As for why, I concur with those who have said that humans are fundamentally selfish, especially when we are young.

I've never been the other woman, how could you live with yourself knowing that you are causing someone so much pain. And if there are children involved, well I'll keep my opinion to myself on that.

I have no time for anyone that cheats. Had a great friend up until a couple of years ago, not friends anymore.

The other woman and the cheating husbands can dress it up however they want but its betrayal of the worst kind.

I'd much rather be the woman with class that he couldn't have.