Was Any one on here the OW?

[Mindovermatter247]

I always see a woman go nuts at the other women when obviously it takes 2 to tango and the men are defo not blameless, in fact sometime the Ow is a victim too, especially if they had no idea about man’s real or other life.
live always wanted to h3ar the experiences of the other woman…
did you know he was married/in a relationship? If so why did you continue affair?
how many didn’t know bloke had another life?
we always hear the males point of view, Hardly the point of view of the other person..

Yes I am, and have been for almost 9 years. I have known him much much longer, and what started off as friendship slowly drifted across the line. I am single, he is married.

It's been a minefield and I do not recommend it. People who think the OW swans in and out of the MM's life are so wrong, it can be catastrophic although to be fair, it is deserved. I have tried to forge new relationships, move on and meet someone else but it's impossible to do when you are in love with someone else. He has been caught out by his wife many many times, they are both weak. I no longer let it rule my life like it used to, I enjoy staying in touch with him and he makes me happy. No one who is not in the situation will see the logic in that but there we are. When it suits me I shall move on, when that day comes I have no idea but for now it is what it is. I don't feel guilty about his wife at all. I used to but not for a long time.

I've NC to post this.
I am currently one now. Been seeing him for nearly 2 years.. We met when he was separated from his wife, he joined a dating app and we matched. We met a handful of times for dates and got to know each other during that time. After a few months I invited him to my house and we were intimate for the first time. We started dating properly for a few months..
It was complicated by the fact his wife and him still owned the family home jointly and have a daughter.
He told his wife that he had met someone else and she was distraught. Few days later she asks him to reconcile the marriage and they move back home.. He told me and he was devastated as he said he missed so much of his daughter growing up he wanted her back home but that also means being with his wife..

I told him I loved him and said if he still wants me, I'll be there for him.
We agreed to carry on seeing each other in secret. He comes over once or twice a month during the day. He's so kind to me and has bought things for me and my daughter. He's recently booked a trip to Disney land Paris for me to take my daughter as I'm struggling single parent. I don't ask for any of this.

I understand fully what we're doing is wrong. I have no expectation or desire of him to leave his wife. I don't want to hurt his wife or his daughter but I also know how much I love him, I know others will say find your self respect, but it's not that black and white.

I completely understand the morality of affairs are inherently wrong, but they're not all sordid and dirty.. I don't meet him at every opportunity just for a bunk up.. The last time he was here we just went for dessert and he came back to mine for a film and we just cuddled. It wasn't sordid, it wasn't dirty.

I appreciate affairs destroys marriages and lives and that it's wrong, but it's not always that simple.

NC for this too. I’m the OW at the moment. We were in an unusual situation in that both our spouses and children left the continent (due to covid) to live somewhere else. We live very close to each other and we’re friends and colleagues.

We decided to have a FWB arrangement, but it was so good we did it all the time, and then fell in love. I’ve left my husband (we’re still in different continents, one year later), and I’ve spent every night for almost a year with my AP. AP is really struggling with the decision to leave his wife. Keeps going back and forth, as his children are very young. It’s all our own fault, but I find it emotionally devastating as I’m completely in love with him. I’m on Xanax and having counselling. If I could switch my love off, then I would do it. He’s also about to start counselling.

Yes I was. Well, I believed my work colleague when he said he and his partner had split some time before and that they were only flat-sharing.
So they 'split' and almost immediately we got together.
2 months or so into our new relationship she tells him that she's pregnant. She wasn't, it was a ploy to try to get him back, but it forced him to admit that while he was with me, he was still sleeping with her.

I should have walked then but I didn't.

She hated my guts and rightly so. If it's any consolation though, he did the exact same thing to me when he met his next girlfriend and worse. I fully deserved it, but it's taught me to have an almost instinctive eyeroll of disbelief whenever I hear a man tell that he's in a 'complicated' situation. It's never fucking complicated, not for most men. They can and do up and leave no matter how it fucks up who's left to pick up the pieces, all the time.

@NoGood22 it actually is that simple. No one has a gun to your head or his. But I believe there is something inheritly emotionally wrong with people who engage in affairs. All the dramatics of they couldn't help themselves and falling in love. Its a sign of a weakass character at best and narcissism at worst.

The saddest thing is you are so grateful to a married man paying for what should be magical event for your daughter, accepting crumbs of a relationship from someone else's husband and all the while blocking yourself from having a relationship that could actually be a healthy example for your child. I hope she hasn't met him, because kids grow up and do judge their parents through an adult lense.

Would you want her to do as your doing?

My dd loves her dad but she doesn't respect him for cheating. My dad cheated on my mum and I honestly have never gotten over the disgust I felt for him and doubt I ever will.

@Whattodo112222

He's so kind to me and has bought things for me and my daughter. He's recently booked a trip to Disney land Paris for me to take my daughter as I'm struggling single parent. I don't ask for any of this.

You are accepting it though.

Can you imagine being married to someone and having kids together and finding out that he's secretly using your family's money to pay for the woman he's having an affair with and her little girl to go to Disneyland? It's heartbreaking that you think that makes him a kind person.

He says he has to stay with her in order to not lose his daughter. Firstly, he could pursue 50/50 custody through official channels. Secondly, if he really thinks that a relationship with his daughter hinges on him being with their mum, and he believes that leaving would mean losing his relationship wit his daughter... why is he risking that by having an affair?

Please don't waste your one precious life on this man.

I think you have the wrong poster.

@maybe83 My dad cheated on my mum and I’ve actually never held that against him. Life is complicated. You have no insight whatsoever into my life, so there is really no point in judging me.

I was, for 12 years. Unfortunately I was a young, naïve virgin when I first met him and him being my first ingrained him in my brain. I thought he was single when we first met (can't be sure either way now), we only saw each other for a few months but I never forgot about him.

We got back in touch 4 years later and were both in a relationship at this point. I'm not proud of how I treated my partner at the time, but in my pathetic defence I'd caught my partner talking to other women online, including sending a dick pic so the relationship was doomed anyway. Instead of doing the grownup thing on any front, I started seeing this guy behind my partners back, this carried on for 5 months until I ended things with my partner.

I then continued to see the other man for 12 years, at first just seeing him every other weekend. He told his partner he was at a mates/hobby club that involved drinking and being out for the night. This then evolved to him being over every weekend so she must have known something was going on but turned a blind eye to it. We even went on holidays together.

Eventually he left his partner and we moved in together after 12 years. Karma got it's own back on me quite rightly when he cheated on me last year after 4 years of living together. I don't think he's actually ever been faithful in any relationship. He left me last year to be with his new gf and then proceeded to carry on sleeping with me several times. Stupidly I took him back and we gave things another go but have finally split up for good.

I deserved everything I got, I wasted nearly 17 years and the chance to have kids because of being with this man. I felt some guilt at the time but obviously not enough to tell him to sling his hook. I would never, ever cheat or be the OW again though. Painful lesson to learn.

Yes.

First time I was 15/16, he taught me at secondary school. He was 24. Typical crush that he acted on. Lots of lifts home, quiet ‘catch ups’ in school, one excrutiating kiss.

Second time, I was 24, he was 36 and our neighbour. He was a policeman. I was naive and thought he was a family friend. He would visit me and my family during his work breaks. Eventually it dawned when he continued his visits, yet knowing my parents were on holiday. He asked me to accompany him to a work activity, where he was ‘undercover’, getting known in a new area to infiltrate something else. I believed him when he said he couldn't take his DW because they didn't have a babysitter. We continued to frequent the new area for months. There was no sneaking around, he picked me up from home. I thought his DW knew, as this was a work thing. Stupid, I know.

When my DH ( now Ex) admitted to an affair, I felt I got my ‘come uppance’. The worst time of my life, being left with two LO’s. He and his OW treat me terribly for two years as we worked through the separation.
Definitely a sense of ‘what goes around, comes around’.

My wife has extremely complicated family dynamics with roots that extend way before we ever met. When we first started dating, she took the direction of radical openness, in no small part because there were many things she wanted to get out in the open fairly quickly as there was the possibility of things coming out further down the line.

One of those skeletons was that she was the other woman when she was a teenager. I think most fascinating to me was hearing how she described the situation and motivations all these years later with a practical lifetime of age and life experience since. Regardless of how black and white people try to frame things especially in todays day and age, they can be far more nuanced and complicated.

When my wife was 15, she did not like her own home life and so moved across country to live with her aunt. Within a couple of months living there, she grew to despise her aunt and began having sex with her aunts current husband.

In retrospect, my wife acknowledges that there may have been some grooming given her age and power imbalance, she says she never felt pressured or compelled, and felt safe to say no at any time. But she also says that she knew full well what she was doing and was in fact the aggressor. She says she knew it was wrong but just didn't care and was fully consenting over the few months the affair lasted. Where her age and lack of life experience comes into play is that while she was fully aware what she was doing was wrong, she had no comprehension of what the damage and fall out would be.

I think I may have been, albeit very briefly.

Met a guy on a night out and went for a date the following week. Went back to his place and it was just strange - absolutely nothing personal there at all. It felt like he didn't really live there.

Then I noticed that his messages massively dropped off at the weekend.

Never confronted him as I'd literally only met him a few times, but was fairly convinced that he had a wife but worked away from home during the week.

There was just something odd about the whole situation so I just distanced myself from him.

@HarleyLane

First time I was 15/16, he taught me at secondary school. He was 24. Typical crush that he acted on. Lots of lifts home, quiet ‘catch ups’ in school, one excrutiating kiss.

Please don't think of yourself as having been the 'OW' for this. You were groomed by a teacher, you were a child and he took advantage of you by grooming you. That one is all on him. I hope he left teaching quickly and didn't so this to anyone else.

I think women lash out at the OW rather than the man, because we want to know...why them? Are they prettier than me? Funnier? Better body? Its so easy to make the focus all about them and whats made them so special to turn the eye. I was cheated on relentlessly by a shithead boyfriend back in my 20s and I always found them on fb and became quite obsessive about it. There was also that feeling of, they know he had a girlfriend and they 'had something' over me.

I have never knowingly been the OW (absolutely had some tinder dates where it was clear girlfriend was away for the weekend) but I did make a move on a mates ex pretty quickly after he had ended things with her. She was devastated when she found out and I was very ashamed of myself in later years.

Apologies @NoGood22 that was for @Whattodo112222

@NoGood22 of course It doesn't matter what anyone on the Internet thinks of you. In regards your dad you couldn't really since you be quite hypocritical.

Seeing my dad sneak around, lie to my mother about working, trips away, spending family money leaving her at home with my younger siblings was so disrespectful. All to get his leg over someone younger made me think he was selfish weak ass disrespectful piece of shit to be honest.

I found out and told my mam. She stayed mainly for the kids and because she was a stay at home mother and they have been together since they were teens. I feel sorry for her that she felt she didn't have any other options. She deserves better than how he has treated her and he sure as shit doesn't deserve her as his wife.

There was also that feeling of, they know he had a girlfriend and they 'had something' over me.

This is one aspect that I think is widely downplayed, especially when it comes to women. Either consciously or subconsciously, a lot of women learn that certain sexual dynamics equals power, and that power can be, again either consciously or subconsciously, quite intoxicating.

Thank you for explaining it far more eloquently than I managed! This is exactly it. Its humiliation coupled with a loss of power.

I do understand, my ex partner (daughters father) cheated on me numerous times with different women, I know how that feels. My daughter has not met him, she does not see him or know about him.. Everything he's ever done for us he's told me to say it's from me.
I understand people's viewpoints, I do. I'm not in a position where I can be in a proper relationship with anyone because of certain factors in my life. I can't help how he makes me feel and how I feel for him.. I know bottom line I would be seen as a home wrecker.

‘I think women lash out at the OW rather than the man, because we want to know...why them? Are they prettier than me? Funnier? Better body? Its so easy to make the focus all about them and whats made them so special to turn the eye.’

I was a victim of infidelity with two young children. I can categorically say that this thinking was far from my mind and it belittles the trauma and minimises it to two women fighting over some shiny toy with some kind of triumphant winner. My experiences of being cheated on in my early adulthood (happened several times, survived and thrived) are profoundly different to my experiences of infidelity within a marriage and family.

I was traumatised. Traumatised because I was having sex with my husband not knowing that he’d had sex with someone else just hours earlier. My right to consent had been taken, by him AND by her. Every moment I spent trying my best to be a good wife and mum felt like a dagger in my heart after I found out, every smile I’d given to him, every kind thought felt sullied and dirty. My safe space, my home felt violated by their calls and texts. Watching his strange behaviours and blaming myself for them, wondering what I was doing wrong, every moment I tried to overcompensate to make him happy or worried that he was unwell. My safety felt compromised, I suffered with panic attacks which still take me by surprise, I had never suffered with these before.

I’m five years down the line and I still can’t read a book through, I used to love reading, but my mind won’t let me. It took so much from me. I can’t explain it, it’s trauma.

That is why I have issues with APs and their cheats. Nothing to do with wondering if they were prettier or funnier.

If I’d known that money that should have gone to the children and our family, had been spent on his AP and child going on holiday, it would have absolutely devastated me (as is the case in one post here).

This thread is such a horrible read.

I can't help how he makes me feel and how I feel for him

I think it would do your self worth so much good to reject this narrative. You can't help how you feel to an extent, but can absolutely help how you choose to act on those feelings. Your goal (especially with a little girl to model behaviour for) should be to feel empowered and in control, not resign yourself to 'but I love him' justification for behaviour that isn't really serving anyone other than the man having his cake and eating it too while his wife lives a lie and you live a secret life.

Him spending family money sending his affair partner and her child to Disneyland is disgusting and a sign he thinks he can throw money at problems to try and claim the moral high ground.

I wish you wanted more for your life. I hope that you can break away and not be living a life where you're someone's secret.

@Whattodo112222 that's even sadder that despite knowing how it feels you would willing take part in doing that to someone else and visiting that pain onwards.

Yes, I was.
I was in a relationship which was in its final death throes and he was in a long-term relationship (neither of us had children).
It both started as fun but a year or so later I decided that I was getting too emotionally involved to remain the OW and told him that we couldn't continue seeing each other under those circumstances.
He left his partner and we have been together since.

@monsteramunch I think that's a really thoughtful post.

I would absolutely be devastated if my daughters grew up thinking that was what they deserved out of relationship and didn't value themselves enough not to be something to be hidden and lied about.

Except it is sordid and dirty. He's sleeping with you then going home to his wife and sleeping with her. You're exposing your daughter to this as well, and she'll probably find out what you've been doing one day. He is lying to her daily for his own convenience, and probably to you as well. You make so many excuses in your post yet still acknowledge it is wrong. I just could never do this, morally to me, it's absolutely abhorrent, so find it very difficult to understand. I couldn't consider any person who does this inherently 'good' or decent, if that makes sense. And I know how judgemental that sounds, but I make no apology for judging dishonest people having affairs, just as I would judge thieves, etc.

I was non-judgemental about my dad for 30 years before I became an OW. But that doesn’t really matter as it isn’t really related to my predicament. I can see how your life experiences have led you to your pov though.

My relationship with my STBXH was open when he left the continent I’m living on. We split primarily because we had huge issues within our marriage. However, I really wouldn’t have found love with someone else had I been happy, and my STBXH refused to deal with the problems we had had.