I know where OW works and when she is on shift - shall I go and humiliate her?

[ShouldiOrNot]

Fors -
I can see what she looks like
She can be made to look small and seedy
I can humiliate her by throwing a £10 fee as H obviously didnt pay her for her services
She will think twice about knowingly having sex with a married man again, hopefully
It will wind H up when he knows I know her and have confronted her
If all goes well my dc will know that to commit adultery has consequences

Againsts -
May be thrown out of the shop
Um....may lose my dignity or not get any words out above a squeak with anger

would you? I am tempted and have nothing to lose, and seriously it may make her think again.
H has been kicked to the curb and humiliated too btw so dont think i am just blaming her, im not. It's just she took something that did not belong to her and why not tell her?

Over to you jury ............

go see her - but no speeches or silly gestures, no £10 notes or squashed tomatoes. Any kind of scene will backfire on you - you look undignified and all her colleagues will be on her side.

just say to her calmly 'I'm xxx .. you're sleeping with my husband'

and then remain silent.

she'll find it difficult not to say anything at all, and anything she does say is going to make her look undignfied. she may well lose her cool and squeak

then just leave.

No, don't. Trust me, if you remain dignified and keep your head up, she will be more likely to feel ashamed and she might also learn something.

If you do this you are just going to look like an eejit, and she will have even less respect for you than she already has.

Just fantasise then chuck your fantasy where it belongs, and you'll be so glad when you look back.

This sort of feeling is normal when you feel very angry but acting it out is NEVER a good idea. The anger will fade and you will feel better in time, doing something like this just prolongs the embarrassment and anguish imo.

Mumfun said: "I see a correlation between honesty and outrage at the OW..."

Whereas I see a correletion between honesty and treating others the way you'd be treated yourself. So the people who would admit to being under-charged, damaging a vehicle and having found a purse, even if there's no chance of being found out, seem much less likely to hurt a stranger and her children, by having an affair with her spouse.

It's not about sisterhood either - it's about humanity, but of course it exists.

I've certainly said "no", even when sorely tempted, as have many of my friends. Amongst all the other reasons about having too much self-esteem to become an OW and self-protection, a strong reason not to, has been that some poor woman and her children would get hurt. It always surprises me when that's not a bigger deterrent to people, but I am less surprised when it turns out that they are dishonest in other areas of their lives.

As for relying on others' consciences for one's own happiness and that way madness lies, what a strange statement. I don't think it's mad to expect others to treat us with decency and kindness, or to have high expectations of oneself and others. Whereas I think if you expect to be treated badly - and assume that everyone is out for themselves and therefore this lets you off the hook if you behave badly, poor treatment will no doubt come your way.

I've been really lucky in my life to have made and kept friendships with women that have lasted for decades. I realised years ago that I am pretty discerning about who I make friends with and I know I have rejected friendship from women I've met who've adopted a "we're all in it for ourselves" mentality.

Hence it's not surprising that not one of these 20 or so women friends has ever treated me badly or let me down, because although we are very different in character and personality, we share similar values and have high expectations of the way we will treat eachother. Those friendships have been a source of enduring personal happiness.

If a stranger behaves badly to me, yes of course it defies my expectations, but I tend to rationalise that this person would never have become a friend - they would be someone I would never want to know, if their values and humanity are that flawed. So their behaviour doesn't induce madness, just a strong instinct that my life will (and has been) happier than theirs.

No

Take a bag of his clothes / belongings. Without histrionics, hand it over and ask her to pass it on to your husband, now he is with her. Then walk out.

You will see her. Her colleagues will get the message. You won't have made a scene.

No, don't do it. The moral high ground is very valuable real estate, and should never be given away. Maintain your dignity, and everyone will admire you and condemn the pair of lying twats secretly anyway.

I would only do this if you can be calm and rational and not cause a scene.
My friend's Mum found out her dad had an affair and took all his dirty washing in a bin bag to the pub where he and the OW were drinking. She marched in, gave OW the bag and thanked her for taking him and his dirty pants off her hands.
I'd love to be that cool but in reality I know I'd be a gibbering snivelling wreck, which is why I never confronted the OW.
I used to have lots of imaginary fights with her in my head though

No - scenes like this make me think of Jeremy Kyle and fishwifery both of which are low rent and abhorrent.

Don't make a spectacle of yourself as my mother would probably say!!

how about remaining outside the shop, in order to keep you dignity, and using a hosepipe.

Can I give you my perspective on this.

I have rung the OW and told her exactly what I thought of her when she was trying to cosy up to my children whilst still living with her H. I told her if she didnt leave my kids alone I would turn up at her doorstep and I laid out in cold terms exactly the impact the fallout from her fun had had on me and my children.

I was very calm, very clear about what I thought of them both and apparently was very frightening!! She cried. Im gald I did it.

She got to understand precisely the fall out from her affair and so did my ex. Everyone is responsible for their own behaviour but time after time we say dont confront the OW.
Why not??

BUT only do it if you can keep your self control and not act like a loon.

Interestingly, all my friends thought it was absolutely great that I had the courage to confront both of them head on. I didnt lose my dignity and it made me feel so much better at the time. If it ever happened again I would not sit and do nothing

Laughed at the hosepipe image Stubbornhubby

I agree Elastamum and applaud you. This is what I meant by dignified contempt. I think a lot of OW would be surprised by the realisation that the woman they've been colluding against feels no jealousy, just contempt and disgust. Your approach allowed you to end the interaction with your esteem intact, but the key to this was I think, being calm and measured.

There's really no defence for an OW's behaviour, although it is depressing the amount of justifications we see on here over and over again - she was being told lies, she fell victim to an unscrupulous man, she didn't know he was married, she had low self-esteem etc. Why do we need to paint women as hapless victims with no esteem or intelligence? How insulting is that to women? It's a bizarre form of sexism between women and just as insulting IMO, as the notion that men are hapless idiots who fell victim to a nasty predatory OW.

Lets face it, adulterous women are not helpless victims here. Every man who has an affair is having sex with someone - and 99% of the time they know he is married.

As a post script. I told the OW that she wasnt the first and even though she thought she was special she wouldnt be the last - a month later he dumped her for someone else

I agree with you WWIFN.
There is no excuse for going with a married man imo. However you feel about him, you should have the self control and self respect to refuse to have anything to do with him until he is single.
Its down to morals at the end of the day.
Rant over!

I find the general viciousness directed at other women really disturbing.

The man doesn't belong to his wife, he's agreed to be faithful and then foundhimself unable or unwilling to remain so. He's then offered his love to someone else.

It's very sad that it happens and ideally it shouldn't, but the love is his to give.

The dishonesty is the bad bit imo.

Women who sleep with married men are enabling the behaviour but I don't see them as - well, not usually, anyway - all the horrible name calling seen regularly on here.

Clearly some of them are deranged and seek actively to undermine marriages but I don't think this is usually the case from what I have read.

Sorry, that was meant to say deserving of the name calling

Many of the marriages I know of began as relationships where someone was already seeing another person.

It's really, really common, it's just that in a marriage there is often a lot more emotional investment and therefore people have, rightly, higher expectations.

Everything that WWIFN wrote 24/06/10 @ 01.49, bottom of page 2. Excellent.

I would add that the OW does indeed have a responsibility for the destruction and havoc caused by marital breakdown due to infidelity. If children are suffering as a result then she has played a part in those children's pain and hurt.

Also elastamum's post was great and was what I did, except I did not meet the OW but emailed her.

She has not cried, knows no shame and continues to believe that everything is rosy and cosy, to the extent she has rewritten history saying we all broke up amicably due to meeting other partners, which is news to me and her husband. She has no intentions of meeting the young people she has caused hurt to.

I think everyone on here is right, as wonderful as it would feel to front her out and humiliate her it may not go the way you want it to in your head.

She is a slapper who has no morals so it probably won't make her think twice before doing it again.

Why does everyone forget that sometimes the 'betrayed' wife is a bitch - just as much as sometimes the OW really has deliberately targeted a married man in order to cause havoc.
And women who actually physically attack their successors are IMO the type who deserved to get dumped in the first place as they seem to think that other human beings are property and that it's OK to commit assault and criminal damage in order to keep a virtual padlock on someone else's genitals.

Yes yes yes blah blah blah... we can all theorise about the OW motives as much as we like, imagining forms of revenge, providing a nice distraction from the reality of the situation which is, in essence, a man who has cheated on his wife.
End of.

I agree with you SGB on that point. Nobody belongs to or is the property of anyone else.

It's very, very unlikely a woman would force a man to sleep with her, however seductive her behaviour if a man isn't up for it he isn't up for it.

I hate to say it but I do struggle to understand where the vitriol towards mistresses actually originates, which leads me to suspect it is often a huge deflection of the real problem, which is that the man has betrayed us and we feel sickened by it.

StubbornHubby has the right idea with the cool,calm approach.
Satisfyingly evil & I think still maintaining the higher moral ground.

To do it properly get into the role,imagine you are Alexis Colby or Cruella DeVil.Wear a fantastic swish classy outfit & be impeccably groomed.

Do it!

ah unfortunately if you do the hosepipe thing you stand quite a good chance of being prosecuted for assault. Then she'll have definitely won

Actually, flightattendant and SGB believe it or not it isn't always about you, you, you.

No one belongs to anybody, least of all those within a family. Your children don't belong to you, your husband doesn't, brothers and sisters, parents.

The only place where you belong to anyone else is work, in which you sign a legal contract.

Those who marry also sign a legal contract. To have and to hold for better and for worse. Unfortunately, some marry people who run the minute the worse comes into it. In the main this legal contract of marriage offers some form of protection to the woman. Sadly though it offers no protection to the children.

Good grief - the "fragrant saintly wife" is just as much of a stereotype as the "victim OW", or the "hapless man" but if she is a "bitch" as SGB says, then why not have the balls to leave her, instead of deceiving her until you've made a decision that the OW isn't a bitch and therefore a good bet?

And Flight, of course no-one can make someone sleep with them - the man in the OP's case is just as much to blame, but this happens every time we debate this on these threads - posters assume that the OW is being blamed exclusively when it is perfectly possible to direct blame in more than one direction. Both parties are to blame - deceiving others is pretty shitty behaviour and indefensible, in my view.

I agree with SGB that violence is reprehensible in this - or any other - situation, but hadn't noticed anyone advocating it, apart from Hubby's hosepipe suggestion, which I took to be a joke....