Six years ago I came home from work to find my then husband had thoughtfully changed the locks on the house before eloping with the woman down the road. When I finally gained entry, I discovered that they had everything useful and even my poor dog.
It’s a common enough story. However, the lady in question was someone I felt close to. She had successfully posed as a friend to both of us, so successfully in fact that I never had an inkling that she had having an affair with my husband for eighteen months. I was later to learn that they had planned their departure to coincide with her reaching pensionable age (at 50, I might add), so that they could both retire to the area where my then husband and I had for years planned to spend our twilight years. Every detail had been carefully put in place. I was left to discover over the ensuing few months not only how methodical and comprehensive their planning had been, but how heavily it had relied upon my ignorance of it. I still struggle with the scale of that duplicity and the extent of my own wilful blindness.
In the intervening years I have given considerable thought to the steely nerves and the sheer brazenness it must have taken for her to maintain that equaniminous demeanour of unruffled nonchalance whilst pursuing a project that she knew would rob me not just of my future, but my faith in human nature and in my own judgement. I’m not suggesting that she owed me a duty of loyalty – far from it - she owed me much less than my equally devious ex-husband. But strangely, I have actually wondered more about her role in it than his. My question is not: have you ever been the Other Woman? There have been plenty of threads in that particular well-worn vein, though I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage anyone with that particular experience from posting, in fact I’d be very interested to hear your point of view. It is however rather, have you ever been a party to the carefully-planned and protracted deception of a third party, particularly someone you knew well? If so, why? Was it for personal gain? Did you despise your victim? Feel they deserved what they got? Ever feel a tinsy bit guilty or the need to justify/rationalise it to yourself? What were your motives exactly? I’m not here to judge anyone, I’m long beyong that now, I’m just still curious about the psychological dynmamic of cheating, the whole process of misleading, placating, dissembling before another person, of not being yourself, of not showing your true face and the strain that places, if any, on the person practising deception. Please feel free to be brutally honest. If only they had been.