What makes a woman happy to be the Mistress?

[RedishBlonde]

This link got me thinking - forum.psychlinks.ca/relationships/829-the-other-woman.html

I suppose I'm interested in the "professional mistresses" - The women who seek out and only have (the majority of their) relationships with married men.

My sister (on her own admission) seems to be attracted to unobtainable men, whether it is emotionally unavailable men or attached men.

She has recently been exploring and resolving some emotional issues that stem from her childhood and speaks of these men within the context of these issues.

Now, I'm not making excuses, I have no sympathy for a woman that willingly enters a relationship with a married or attached man but there has to be underlying psychological reasons behind their motivations.

I believe that all ow are fully aware they are being lied to, not just the predatory ones. I suspect they pretend to fall for the married mans lies because they don't like to admit they are happy with being used.

Tbh, I have often found the idea of an unobtainable man (attached man) appealing, although I've noticed only when I'm feeling low on self esteem and NEVER when I'm at a happy place in my life. I have never acted on this and wouldn't, mainly because I know it's a sign I'm not in the right place emotionally. I believe a happy, well adjusted woman wouldn't willingly enter herself into a complicated relationship.

What are your thoughts on the motivations of OW? Are you a mistress? if so, do you explore the reasons behind why you're happy to take second place?

it's easy to theorise when you haven't been in the situation.

Some posters seem to be dealing in stereotypes on this thread which for me don't exist in RL.

The virtous, innocent wife (I know when I was married I wasn't like that or would have wanted to be seen like that I would have wanted to be seen as a person first and foremost not like a fragrant Mary Archer ), the man who is tempted by the evil OW with no morals and the mythical sisterhood which I may have believed existed in the 80s when I was young,idealistic and fairly naive.

I think where my notion of the sisterhood was disabused was in the workplace btw not in relationships. I do like women I have many RL long term friends but I don't expect any random woman to be helping me out.

And I have been cheated upon and have been OW so can see it in the round I think. I didn't see the OW as some demon trying to break up my marriage I saw the affair as a symptom of my bad marriage. But I also saw it as my then h's choice and responsibility.

But I have always had a realistic view of realationships and life.

Sorry, but it is NOT "realistic" to accept as inevitable, or normal, or even healthy, the model of a bad marriage breaking up through affairs by 1 or both partners.

It is dishonest to cheat, honest to end the marriage because it is not working.
You may be forced to end a marriage by circumstances, you are NOT forced to have an affair by circumstances. ie no justification for bad behaviour there.

Marriages usually have to be pretty appallingly dreadful for couples to want to divorce without there being any other party involved. Is it good for anyone to be in a really bad, acrimonious marriage? Is that helpful for children?

Maybe better to get out of a bad marriage earlier, before it has degenerated too much, and move on more easily to a new, happier relationship!

'In time I do hope DP's children can forgive and at least acknowledge their half sister.'

Thought you said they had and you'd all play happy families . . . if it weren't for that terrible wife of his, because he's still married to her so she is his wife.

'He is a wonderful man, kind and caring, '

Who didn't have the balls to end a relationship that was terrible for his children until he's shagged around and had someone else lined up.

TBH, I want to keep this thread for my daughters.

Because if I bring up my girls properly, they will think way too much of themselves to ever get involved with a married person.

They will know that they deserve better, that they are worth so much more than a person who lies and betrays his own children.

To me, I would feel I failed as a mother if they took up with someone married.

Because I didn't bring them up to be a secure, unselfish person who'd immediately cut everything off with a man the second she learned he was married.

She's worth so much more than that.

I didn't say it was ideal of course the best is for married couples to stay together for life failing which the marriage comes to an end after exhausting all other avenues such as relate.

BUT if as in my marriage your spouse refuses relate and withdraws all affection and physical contact and refuses to take any action to address it or would not discuss it then I would have felt quite within my rights to seek affection, company and sex elsewhere.

In the event I didn't but he had broken the marriage vows imo and whilst that's not dishonest, to be cruel and abusive like that is on an equivalent scale morally imo.

Expat, there I know lies in anything that I say. I advised earlier in this thread that DP children have now since many years past a good relationship with their Dad, thru his persistence. They have not shown any interest in acknowledging their half sister. They will not be pushed. I hope they will when they are ready ... They are showing signs of wanting too ...

Also I am one who is in favour of having a break between relationships or time alone.

I don't have much respect for people who can't not be in a relationship. But I know that many people will 'settle' because they need a partner in their life.

'There are also lots of women who claim that since they are single, they are deceiving no-one and it is up to the man to refuse their advances - thereby taking no responsibility whatsoever for their behaviour. A behaviour that they would take a very dim view of if another woman encroached like this when they were in a committed relationship.'

WWI I understand what you are saying here, but there are also women who consider the next person he moves onto is not to blame for his continuing infidelity.

I was in a situation where the man I was with was unfaithful in order to be with me, but once he was with me, he was unfaithful very quickly and I didn't really blame his next partner for this. In fact I thought she had little to do with it.

He chose to go with her and he had his reasons...I was angry with him for deceiving me, but then I was angry with him for deceiving the person before me. I only wanted him to be honest, right from the start, and staying with him in an affair was the alternative to not having him at all, which I was at that point (Immature, naive, for sure) unwilling and unable to countenance.

Now I know how wrong it was, but then, I felt overwhelmed and carried along and absolutely desperate to be with him.

Crap thing to do but it felt weirdly noble at the time...I ignored the fact he was being a lying twunt, for quite a while, because I hoped he would stop it - but it made me angrier and angrier. In the end I lost almost all my respect for him, which could well be why he left.

I didn't blame the next one though - she seems quite nice, though others have told me she isn't - I have no idea really. The pain was greater than the anger.

I agree that stereotypes don't help understanding. Actually it is because I wanted to challenge those stereotypes that I made my most recent comments. However, the notion that men are always the pursuers in these relationships is as stereotypical and sexist as the notion that there are evil other women out there intent on compromising a poor man's fidelity.

Anyone, be they male or female, who is propositioned to have an affair, has the opportunity to say "no". The moment they say "yes" they are are to blame. However, it seems totally erroneous to me that the person doing the chasing, or the person continuing with the relationship in the case of a "yes" isn't also to blame. Blame isn't an exclusive thing - it is not iniquitous to levy blame in several different directions.

I do think there are some very old-fashioned beliefs about infidelity that persist and some outdated beliefs about male and female responses to it. The landscape has changed enormously. So many myths are still peddled about it though, based on how life was even 20 years ago. And some of those myths are distressing to people going through the pain of infidelity - from which ever side of the "triangle". Wives being painted as "saintly and fragrant", OW as "evil harpies" or "victims of unscrupulous men", men being painted as "cheating scumbags who are in it just for the sex" or "poor and defenceless to temptation".

There are all sorts of affairs and all sorts of people. Affairs happen in happy marriages, they happen in bad ones. Men are as capable of falling in love as women and women are capable of having sex-only affairs.
Men pursue sex with women and women pursue sex with men.

I absolutely don't subscribe to the notion that once a cheater, always a cheater (another one of those pernicious myths...) as long as the betraying spouse delves deep into their character and recognises that adultery is a totally lousy way of expressing dissatisfaction in a marriage - or in the case of a happy marriage, getting an ego boost.

In MCDL's case, it sounds as though both of them are committed to fidelity in their relationship and regret the pain caused. MCDL has always said that they should have done things differently and the consequence of that has been enormous pain and fall-out. I can therefore absolutely believe that because they acknowledge that pain - and their own part in it - they would not be unfaithful to one another.

However, if anyone involved in these triangles emerges with a belief that "these things heppen" or that they were a victim, or that "all's fair in love and war and I had the right to my happiness" then there is no learning. Individuals like this will very often have further affairs, or continue to have relationships with attached people.

The happy ever after second wives' stories and Anna's comment - "Maybe better to get out of a bad marriage earlier, before it has degenerated too much, and move on more easily to a new, happier relationship! " those present a view that could say to me (single/divorced) so forth and rescue the hubsnad of a mumsnetter from what might in future or even today be a bad marriage and I am doing the first wife and the chidlren and him a favour and hero of the day medal for me. Is that what the mistresses are exhorting me to do? I'd rather have someone who wouldn't cheat.

I agree there are huge variations and some people won't cheat on one but will with the next or the first and plenty who never cheat are dreadful spouses and you divorce anyway (in my case) but in general if someone has cheated befoer they often do repeatedly.

It is 100% possible to avoid thing starting whether you're the married or not married one. It's not even as said above that you say no when they ask you to go to bed. It's much earlier. It's ceasing the emails when you know they're married. It's deliberately not going ton the work sales thing if the person who is interested but married is there. It's not going for that quick drink after work when they happen to end up alone with you.

And as said above blame may not always be the right word. If you've brought someone enduring life happiness and their children get over it that's not necessarily always a moral bad.

So on the basis of the rosy picture of taking a man from a woman above in earlier posts would I be better directing my energies to married men?

Also wanted to add Strawberry I understand where you are coming from, in that the person who keeps leaving after meeting someone else and then repeats the same pattern over and over again is selfish and immature. However, the person having a "discreet" affair which they believe will not threaten the marriage is also deluding themselves. Unless someone is skilled at compartmentalising their lives, there is always pain and suffering for the betrayed spouse. There is usually a whole set of "affair related behaviours" such as emotional and physical distance, being uncharacteristically argumentative and stressed and a lack of empathy and kindness for the primary partner.

Also wanted to say that I don't think that behaving decently to strangers is about "sisterhood" - it's more about your own moral code about how you treat other human beings, not just fellow women. I wouldn't feel comfortable knowingly deceiving a stranger, especially if that deceit was likely to devastate that person and their family. I don't think that's being old-fashioned, just decent as a human being.

Yes Xenia the "saying no" should happen long before the proposition of an affair. This is where I think many people kid themselves that they "fell into it" or "it just happened". Nearlyy can look back now probably and reason that her correspondence and renewed relationship with her old flame had warning claxons over it right from the start. In general, the only "safe" friendships are with people who wish the marriage well.

I do think that if someone is unfaithful and undiscovered, it is likely that they will cheat again. That taboo has been broken and it is always easier to do it again. And if someone is discovered, but never digs deep and takes personal responsibility for their behaviour, they will "repeat offend" without ever seeing that this is actually about them - not their partners or their marriages, or in the case of the perennial OW, their poor life experiences/victimhood.

There are however people who do dig deep and learn. They take full personal responsibility for their behaviour and their choices. They don't blame others and recognise their own selfishness. Infidelity is generally always about selfishness, be it on the part of the betrayer or his/her affair partner. Such people work on their own character first and don't repeat the same mistakes.

The whole moral issue about deceiving your spouse is a complicated one too. What if your spouse has broken all his/her marriage vows and is abusive and exploitative? Surely the moral thing is to look for a better relationship where there is love and respect?

No the moral thing is to leave - and in fact it is far better to spend some time on one's own, rather than get into another relationship so quickly.

And why is that? Children find it very burdensome to have single parents, quite apart from the fact that it is prohibitively costly for many families to pay for two fully-functioning households.

No one is going to agree with that bonsoir though, are they or should I not have divoreced and then looked but instead stayed married, played around and only left when I'd got someone lined up to move into his house or buy a new place together? What normal children would like that moving into the cost little love nest of the adulterer? Even adulterers I have known (not in the biblical sense) with a lover set up home alone first so the children can gradually get used to father apart and then eventually hated new woman who has destroyed the life of their mother and ruined their lives financially?

So on this moral basis I could widen my net and find married men such as bonsoir's husband or husbands of those who took their husbands from other women and help them move seamlessly to me so they don't have a period alone washing their own socks as long as I believe their stories about how bad their marriage was in the first place. Find perfect but married man, entice him away from his wife and live happily ever after. Are we saying that's better for everyone all round? (In the UK but not France that does have financial implications by the way - if you're housed you get less money; if you've a new partner you get less money etc etc)

'find married men such as bonsoir's husband '

Although Bonsoir's husband was married to his ex-wife, he is not married to Bonsoir.

The marriage market is just like any other: the very best goods never reach the open market. Houses, jobs, partners, you name it - if you need an estate agent/recruitment consultant/internet dating service to market you, you aren't top league. Best to avoid advertising that fact, IMO!

xenia, I have quietly agreed with everything you have said on this thread

Bonsoir, classic! That's almost as good as your reptilian love post.

So by such a train of thought, a serial twat like Charles Spencer, who drove one woman insane (literally) and denied his own sister a temporary home, is a top of the league catch.

lol @ reptilian love

that fond memory has just made my day !

that one was s-s-s-s-s-o funny.

Relationships are like anything else - they have to have utility to you to keep you interested and motivated. In fact, if they have no utility to you, you should seriously think about why you maintain them.