Read Being The Other Woman: Who we are, what every woman should know and how to avoid us Online
Authors: Micalle A. Culver
Beth was portrayed in a way that made it seem that she had no idea how lucky she was to have a man like this. Especially to someone like me who had been single for a good length of time and had dated my fair shares of duds. But I knew it! I knew how difficult it is to find a man willing to be as open, honest, and vulnerable as Blake, someone as giving and loving, someone who wanted to share all of his time with me. I longed to give him everything he deserved and shower him with enough affection for a lifetime.
He was my lucky find and so I enjoyed all of our time together. Any worries that existed united us as a team. We were Romeo and Juliet. The world was against us, and it was us against the world. It’s like that with affairs—until the day they are discovered.
Despite what Blake told me about his wife, my guilt held me to the vision of Beth as a sweet, innocent and very boring mommy. Blake had a friend who he confided in about our affair early on. One afternoon the friend phoned me at my office to talk to me about the situation between me and Blake. I shared with Dave my feelings of guilt and the vision that I had of Beth. Even though Dave was telling me to cease and desist the affair, in response to my vision of Beth being sweet, he asked “You don’t know Beth do you?”
In some ways, I perceived myself to be superior to her because I was out there in the business world, whereas she was a stay-at-home mother. But at the same time, she intimidated me as a homemaker. One of the things Blake loved most about her—and even bragged to me about—was her ability to cook. I serve three kinds of meals: microwavable, dine-in and take-out. I was afraid he would miss her domestic ability and that later my lack of skill would be disappointing.
I felt sorry for Beth and guilty, guilty, guilty because I believed that she had gotten too comfortable. She’d wrapped her life in her children and neglected her husband, carelessly taking him for granted, so much so that he fell out of love with her. I pictured her learning about us and being destroyed. I saw her in total despair. I myself have felt the hurt of being cheated on, and in no way did I wish to hand deliver that pain to another person. My compassion led to understanding this “stuck” place Blake and I were in and his not wanting to “devastate her.”
At first I did not want to see her, did not want to know what she looked like. I assumed that I was more attractive or Blake would not be with me, so I had no desire to “size her up.” Knowing I was sleeping with her husband, there would be no way that I could look this woman in the eye. I feared that if I saw her, my guilt would consume me. I would be sickened with myself and, being unable to turn back time, I would feel trapped in the body of a blackened soul I couldn’t sever. The thought of hurting her constantly drove me away from Blake emotionally.
At times Blake, too, would be so guilt-ridden that when he said things like, “She is a good woman who puts up with a lot of shit” or “I feel bad, she is trying so hard to be cool, but I just can’t do it, I can’t be with her anymore,” it caused the sweetness to thicken around my vision of her. This paradox created insecurity inside of me. Because he was soft and sensitive to his wife’s emotions, I was left to question where I stood in things. But at other times he seemed vengeful, as if he wanted to hurt her. For example, after she found out about us, she wanted to believe that I was unattractive. Several times, she told Blake that she thought I was ugly. His ego would have no part of that conversation, however, no matter how it might help her to feel better. He always insisted that I was not ugly, which enraged her and led her to demand to see what I looked like. This led to his rifling through my photo album one evening until he stumbled across an old set of boudoir photos in which I had posed for a photographer to use to market her business at a bridal fair. He asked if he could have the photos. Flattered, I said yes. A few days later, he told me that Beth had “found” the photos and “spun out of orbit,” tearing them up as she “went all crazy.” I realized then what he had done to both of us.
Another example; Beth purchased a parking space that was auctioned off in a fundraiser at their children’s private school. She was proud of the parking space because previous year’s ownership of said space had belonged to some prestigious names in the community. The delightful front row of cement in the front of the children’s school parking lot now displayed her name, and she would seethe if anyone used it for passenger drop-off or pick-up. Blake said he wanted to park in her precious space and have sex in the car. It would be his private “ha-ha” on her pompous attitude. I declined to participate in his revenge plot. Putting such energy and focus onto hurting her and wanting to use our love making as means to express hatred, hurt me.
I started to feel like Blake’s feelings toward me were tainted because I was willing to be a part in victimizing Beth by being his lover. Blake always trusted Beth. His guilt made him blind to her manipulative tactics, and eventually he began to question my deepest honesty. He made slighting comments that let me know that in some ways he wondered if he shouldn’t share Beth’s vision of me as “the evil one.” The signs were not always simple to read, of course. When someone is showering you with love, it is difficult to see where he can simultaneously think ill of you just for loving him back. The relationship became convoluted and the emotions went back and forth like ping pong balls. He loves her. He hates her. I was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to him. His attitude confused me. But then I began to persuade myself that it was obvious that
she
was an awful person who created hatred in him and that it was the goodness in
him
that caused him to feel guilty for breaking his marriage vows. He suggested that we do many hateful things to get back at her, but at the same time he also said he did not want to hurt her or “shove things in her face.” Seeing his wife as the enemy I became hungry to hear and see ugliness in her. I needed to justify my actions, lest Blake and I become total shits. As he griped about her unpleasant characteristics, I clung to them and hated how she used their finances and children to hold him captive in a loveless marriage.
As time went on, I heard stories from Blake and even others about Beth screaming at him in public, tales of dinner parties where the guests were taken aback by the way she spoke to him. These events happened before we became involved, and they supported what I was being told of their relationship and her character. Hearing the stories, I opened my heart to trust and receive him. She sounded like someone to be greatly disliked and I began picturing her as a haggard bitch. I was blessed with the removal of a large part of my guilt after his wife discovered the affair and staged an angry confrontation. Seldom does the wife take the broken-hearted approach. She is usually insane with rage. Jackpot! Beth’s hostility showed me why Blake would want out of a relationship with such a hateful person. It didn’t matter to me if it made sense that Beth would lose her mind and spew hatred at me in words or flying objects. I didn’t really want to consider how the shoe would feel on the other foot. Ugly confrontation is what was needed to firmly convince me that Beth was just an awful person. I was off the hook. I didn’t have to understand her hurt any longer. Everything I looked for to justify our behavior was handed to me through her hostel actions. I held tightly to these “facts” of his wife being a bad person and reminded him of them when he had a moment of confusion about what direction our affair was moving. Her display of poor character offered me help in pleading our case of a better life together and showing him the light. I then simply wanted to help Blake end his marriage. I personally believed that Beth didn’t really love Blake—she loved the ease of her lifestyle. She just didn’t want things in her life to change. I believed deeply in my heart that I had something in this guy that I wouldn’t find anywhere else. I didn’t want to give that up for what someone else might feel. What about how I feel? I love the man! Why should I care about her? I don’t want to be hurt myself! He wanted love. If it wasn’t me he found love in, eventually he would find love in someone else. Why rob myself of my soul mate for someone who didn’t love him enough anyway?
It was an anonymous letter that revealed our affair to Beth and prompted her to drive Blake to my doorstep. He was instructed to end the relationship just three weeks before Christmas.
He had been at my house for less than an hour when Beth called him several times frantically on his cell phone. When he eventually answered, she cleverly told him that her mother had been rushed to the hospital. He darted out of my house in a flash, but I intuitively knew something wasn’t right. I phoned my sister, who picked me up and drove me by their house so my vehicle wouldn’t be spotted. We passed Blake’s car, parked on the side of the road about a block from their driveway. I could see that an intense conversation was taking place. Blake later described it to me as Beth luring him away while he was oblivious to the hammer that was about to be dropped on his lap. They began driving to the hospital he thought, and she tossed a letter at him, demanding, “Read this!” Seeing this was a serious matter, he pulled over and began reading the letter. His hands started to shake halfway through the letter, which described in detail the affair that was taking place behind her back. While his heart was racing, she beseeched him to tell her the truth and, under duress, he confessed.
After seeing them in conversation off the road side, I drove home. Shortly after I arrived back at my house, I heard a knock at my door. Seeing his lifeless expression, I knew in that instant what had happened. She knew.
He stepped inside and spoke in an almost still voice. He told me that someone had written an anonymous letter to Beth, informing her that I had been to Europe with Blake and that we had been having an affair for at least six months. We had become too public. Someone had informed his wife. “I already know where she lives,” Beth had apparently told Blake, and she’d ordered him to drive to my house and break it off immediately. The fool bought it and had just led her right to my home.
I had tried to prepare myself for this day. Knowing the statistics, I tried to expect that if Beth were to ever find us out, I would most likely face the brutality of being cut when he was presented with losing what had been his “life” for so long. I tried to remind myself to not cling to his words and promises in case the worst happened. I didn’t want to experience the shock of rejection. I’m a “pessimist with such negative thinking,” Blake often told me when I expressed concern that we would be discovered and I would be tossed.
We walked into my bedroom and closed the door for privacy from my children, then Blake began speaking to me. I hardened anticipating the verbiage I had always expected would come should we ever be caught. I am a strong woman and have always preferred straight talk. I have always found it insulting when words are prepped to not crush the fragile as if I don’t know what is really being said. When I told Blake to give it to me straight, he could not speak. Standing pensive, all he could do was grab a pen and write “Wait for me” on a piece of paper sitting on my night stand. Are you out of your freakin’ mind? I thought. Then Beth honked from my driveway and he scrambled out the door like a child caught smoking. She had sat in their car and waited for him while he entered my home. At first I felt for her and agonized about what she must be going through but later I took that as a power play, and not a step to save her marriage. At least that’s how I read into it as he told me how the event played out. In the end, all I saw in her action was a game that she was playing against me, a game I vowed to myself I would never play. I had decided that I would never try to manipulate Blake. Whatever was real and pure would be the final outcome.
He left, and I sat on my bed for what must have been an hour staring at the wall feeling numb. It was a day later that he called from a pay phone down the street (so the call could not be tracked from a cell bill) and asked me to pick him up. When I went to him, I saw tears streaming down his face as he began desperately trying to explain his predicament in not knowing what to do the night before. It was so sudden, he told me. He’d been thinking his mother-in-law was in danger, and then he was broadsided by his wife and the anonymous letter. He hadn’t seen it coming. He couldn’t think anything through. He panicked. That’s not entirely unreasonable, I thought. “The clutch is pushed,” he told me. He was going to leave her and move into my home while we searched for a new house, as he felt mine to be too small for his comfort. And this is when I discovered what must be lurking in the subconscious of a large percentage of other women: an overwhelming fear of commitment. It engulfed me. Had enough time passed for me to determine who this man really was? What if we do not work out? What if I have cost him his marriage, his children and his savings? It was all happening too much too fast. Do or die! Did I know enough about Blake to take things to this next level? And what about his wife? Now that she knew about us, things were sure to get ugly. It would have been different if he had asked for a divorce and then she had found him dating, none the wiser that it had begun before they split. That is the way I had always imagined things would go down.
I was certain that I was not prepared to move so quickly, but I was also overwhelmed by a sense of obligation around what I had participated in creating. How could I reject him at a time like this?
I said nothing at the time. I just listened to him speak frantic while he laid out the plan. I decided to allow things to play themselves out. Luckily, what he was saying was just the chaos coming out of his mind. He decided very quickly that Christmas was not the time to pack and move. This sounded reasonable to me. I have children, too, and I would not wish a Christmas to remember of that negative magnitude on anyone. Besides, the delay would give me time to breathe and sort my thoughts. It also gave me the luxury of not having to share my own panicked concerns with him. Were I to do that, it would only have made him more afraid. All I needed was a moment to digest the news and think things over.
So instead of shifting the gear while the clutch was pushed, we simply hit neutral and coasted downhill for the next eighteen months, sometimes breaking to allow life to pass us. I started to realize how much intensity was in our relationship. I saw that when a “normal” couple begins dating, there is the slow process of getting to know one another. There is no unnatural pressure on them, they are able to easily find out what they like and dislike without heavy consequences. In our affair, however, everything occurred at warp speed. Choices had heavier weights.