Almost half of all married men, and slightly fewer married women, admit to having had at least one affair. Amongst those in long term relationships the percentage of those who admit to having strayed at least once is even higher. As this tends not to be something that is too cheerfully admitted to I suspect the real figure may scare the most hardened realist.
I have often heard an "Other Woman" say "But I don't know anyone else who has done this, no-one in my family has, and none of my friends have either." Well, they are very much mistaken. Chances are they know plenty of people who have had, and quite a few who are having, an affair. It's just not something people tell everyone around them.
If the statistics are even remotely accurate we can look at any group of women, anywhere (with the possible exception of a monastery), and roughly a third of them will have had an affair with a married man at some stage in the lives.
Scary, isn't it? And, at the same time, somewhat reassuring, because however alone we may feel at times with our situation, we are, in fact, not alone at all. We are many. Many more than society as a whole wishes to accept.
There are books about "how to be" just about everything under the sun, but for the woman who more or less unexpectedly finds herself in the situation where she has assumed a role that is rarely spoken about in polite company, there is little help except "Don't do it."
Now this is not particularly helpful when one is in emotional turmoil because things have gone past the point where "Don't go there, it will end in tears, most likely yours" is of any help at all.
This book is not intended to entice nice girls to don a short skirt, slap on the mascara and go on the hunt for a defenseless married man to drag kicking and screaming back to her lair.
It is absolutely not intended to be a "how to become a mistress" book either. Instead it is meant to be a book that will help those who are already finding themselves in this situation to survive, whilst doing the least harm to everyone involved, including themselves.
Those who may expect a step-by-step guide on "how to make one's lover leave his wife" will be disappointed I'm afraid. If we have chosen the man wisely, and have conducted our affair with care, love, dignity and intelligence, the above may be the outcome.
I won't promise that it will be in your case. It may be, but the statistics say that the odds are not great.
What I can promise you is the following:
If you have chosen wisely, and are taking at least some aspects of this book to heart, you will be better equipped to avoid "blowing it."
Title
-1- My story: How a nice girl turned mistress
-2- How to be "The perfect mistress" in 1 word or 5
-3- The 10 Commandments for The Other Woman
-4- A list of things we should not say
-5- Facing the facts and quitting the excuses
-6- Anatomy of adultery
-7- Prerequisites for having a successful affair
-8- Why he is having an affair (with you)
-9- Types of men to avoid at all cost
-10- Not getting caught
-11- Do no harm
-12- Looking at the bright side
-13- Having "a happy affair"
-14- The Waiting Game
-15- Matters of Conscience and Guilt
-16- Sex
-17- This is not a "normal relationship"
-18- Guard your heart
-19- No Promises / No Demands
-20- How to effectively ruin your affair
-21- Don't even think about it .....
-22- His wife and his family
-23- D-Day
-24- "Will he leave his wife for me?"
-25- The concept of "Making him leave his wife"
-26- So what if he does leave his wife
-27- Coping with the end
-28- Oops I did it again
-29- Quotations
-30- Wicket Web - A case study
-31- Famous Other Women throughout history
-32- Support
Postscript and "About the author
Once upon a time I was a perfectly normal, happy girl in my thirties, with a great job, a nice home (complete with a lovely husband) in the suburbs, a great social life, dogs and horses, and very little that I could possibly complain about. I was not unhappy in any way, shape or form, and there was nothing missing from my life as far as I was aware.
And, as far as the subject matter of affairs was concerned, well, I didn't just sit on the moral high horse, I owned it. Hell, I owned a whole herd of moral high horses. Have an affair? ME? Go anywhere near a married man? No chance! As far as I was concerned, in my probably somewhat complacent state of suburban bliss, having an affair was something which nasty, devious women did, or unattractive ones who could not get a man of their own. Not the likes of me and my girlfriends, not happy, attractive, smart young women with a great life.
That conviction was dealt its first, but not yet quite fatal blow when my best friend started an affair with a married man. My very beautiful, actually very moral best friend did something I never thought would enter her head.
She, who really should have known better, having been at the receiving end of own husband's infidelity, and who had always been so scathing about the type of woman who would as much as entertain the notion of having a fling with a married man, did just that.
Her affair ended fairly spectacularly (if I recall correctly much of the final act was played out quite publicly in a plowed field involving very noisy arguments that kept the local gossips in material to sneer about for weeks to come). The issue was rarely mentioned again, so in my naïve mind all appeared well again in Suburbia.
We were all leading the kind of lives where looking at things like that too closely might just have uncovered the cracks in our pseudo-happy little worlds, so we just carried on like we had before. Frankly, we were all too busy anyway juggling careers, homes, hobbies and social lives to dwell on "minor indiscretions."
Then I met Carl, who worked in the same building, just a floor below. We'd meet in the smoker's corner first by accident, then probably by design, and started talking. The frequency of my cigarette breaks increased and soon just "happened" to coincide with his by a mixture of subconscious clock-watching and semi-conscious synchronization of our nicotine addiction.
We became friends, and for the best part of 6 months we'd go for a drink, a walk or shopping at lunchtime; talking, laughing, "just friends" for all intents and purposes. Or so we kidded ourselves anyway.
Our colleagues in both companies obviously just "knew" we were having an affair many months before we actually did.
The evening when I crossed the line from "friend" to "mistress" will be etched in my mind forever, along with the emotional turmoil it threw both of us into.
The day had started innocently enough. It was just before Christmas and we had somewhat reluctantly agreed to cancel our lunchtime trip to the pub in order to catch up with some Christmas shopping. One of us, and I can not for the life of me remember which one it was, suggested a drink after work instead.
It was the first time we were to meet in the evening, and the first time we did not have the usual restriction of having to be back in the office within an hour, give or take a few minutes. When I drove into Newbury to meet him I clearly remember a faint sense of anticipation as I parked the car, checked my reflection in the rear view mirror one last time and slowly made my way into the pub.
Things were different right from the beginning, as if we both knew that things would probably never be quite the same between us after that evening, whichever way it might end.
I had categorically not planned to start an affair with Carl that day. I don't think I had any intention to start an affair full stop, even though with the 20/20 clarity of hindsight I do have to admit that what was obvious to seemingly everyone around us should really have been at least vaguely visible to us.
We had a glass of wine or two, we chatted, we looked into each others' eyes just that little bit longer than strictly necessary, and then there was the one moment when the line was crossed and there was no turning back: We had been chatting away in our usual animated manner, and a strand of hair had fallen across my cheek. Carl quite subconsciously (or so he claimed when we dissected that moment at a much later stage) reached across and stroked it gently out of my face.
At just about any time up to that moment I may have had the will to turn back, stop what was happening, return our friendship to what it had started as, and avoided having an affair with a married man.
After that moment there was no way I was going to put a stop to it all. I can not say that I could not have stopped it had I really wanted to - but there was no way I could make myself want to stop it so I didn't and by the time I got home many hours later I had become a married man's mistress, had cheated on my husband, and to my considerable surprise I did not even feel guilty about it all.
That bit actually came as a bit of a shock to me. I had always thought that I would have to be eaten up by guilt, or remorse, or at the very least experience some stirring of a queasy feeling somewhere deep inside where I suspect my conscience to reside.
But all I felt was elation and excitement. I guess the only thing I felt guilty about was the fact that I was not actually really feeling guilty at all. In some of my more self-critical moments I wondered if there was something badly wrong with me because I did not feel guilty, but these thoughts were fairly easily buried under the mass of other emotions and when they did raise their heads I closed the lid on them pretty swiftly until, a few weeks later, they gave up their fight and vanished altogether.
The next few months were a rollercoaster like nothing I have ever experienced. I carried on my busy and full life like before, plus a pretty intensive affair, the practicalities and logistics of which showed I possessed both more organizational talent and a considerably greater capacity for deceit than I had ever thought possible.
They also showed that one can drive from the sleepy edges of Berksire to the center of Bath in under an hour - given an absence of visible police-cars on the M4 and a will to get there before midnight.
I also learned how little sleep a woman needs if her adrenaline level, supported by copious amounts of caffeine, is kept high enough.
I would not want to miss the time that followed for anything. Carl and I had the most perfect "Non-Relationship" imaginable. He was, in my heart at least, my soulmate, my best friend, my lover and the center of my universe.
It all ended in tears of course, mine and his, and those of his wife. Their marriage may have been dead in the water for a while, as his friends confirmed to me years later, but I can't dodge the responsibility of having been a major part of something that caused her great pain, and that (and that part alone) I am sorry for.
The storm crept up on us just as we were beginning to relax a little, and had became somewhat complacent. There's a lesson in this: Do not allow yourself, or your man, to become complacent as that's the first step to being found out.)
In the end it was an innocent snapshot of me playing with my brother's dog which started an avalanche of events that would change the course of not just one, but four lives forever. I had spent some time with my family in Germany and, as one does, brought back photos. One particular picture was Carl's favorite and he asked if he could have it. That in itself was not quite so bad (he lived away from home during the week and all he had to do was not take it with him to the happy home at the weekends), but he was stupid enough to show it to his best friend, who told his own wife, who told her friend, who just happened to be friends with Carl's wife and BOOM - shit hit fan big time.
All hell broke loose in Carl's life and we decided to stop seeing each other for the time being to work out what should happen next. The moment when I heard that "D-Day" (Discovery Day) had descended upon us, and that we should cut all contact for the time being, felled me like a tree. I was in the office, and was actually first shell-shocked, then physically sick. I spent the next few days mustering a steely strength I never thought I had in me just to carry on functioning.
Surprisingly I managed. No one at work or home noticed the state I was actually in.
This break lasted a few weeks and was probably the most emotionally turbulent time I can imagine I will ever have to endure. During this time Carl and his wife tried to make a go of things but really they both knew that their relationship was kaput even before I happened (I would probably not have happened in the first place otherwise anyway).
So they split up, and we were suddenly in a situation where we COULD have been together had we wanted to, but this wasn't the way it was supposed to come about. We carried on seeing each other on and off for a year or so, but the balance was gone from the relationship, he was freshly divorced and I was married.
We both decided that we needed to tidy up our own lives first, he went traveling around the world and I ended my own marriage in an orderly and amicable fashion before going my own way for a while.
I can't help but wonder if that was not a horrible mistake, but at the time we both saw that the situation as it had developed was not a healthy basis for a new, lasting relationship, however strongly we felt about each other.
We wanted to see if we could make a go of things as two free people who could make that commitment, not out of a crazy situation where basically all our hands had been forced.
I was torn at the time but had to admit that I would never really get full peace of mind with the niggling question of whether I had eventually "got him" simply because his marriage had imploded, rather than because of his conscious choice to be with me.
Sadly Carl died in a tragic accident before we got the chance to see if we could have made the transition from having an affair to being a couple.
Whilst I had never wanted to be anyone's mistress, and whilst the concept is still not one I am truly comfortable with, that relationship is one that I will always think back upon with deep affection, with love, and with what a romantic would call "sweet sorrow." I have my memories of an incredible time with a truly wonderful man and I believe I learned a lot from my mistakes.
Would I do things differently if I could turn back the time? The honest answer is that I probably would have changed details, and I would have tried to make sure that we weren't found out the way we were. God knows how things would have turned out then.
But even with the 20/20 clarity of hindsight I would almost certainly still have ended up becoming Carl's mistress because at the time whatever happened to and between us was just too strong.
Will I ever be someone's mistress again? Well, a few months ago I would have answered this question with a loud, resounding "NO" - like most women with a normal, healthy attitude to relationships, marriage and life in general. Especially one who has "been there, done it, worn the T-Shirt."
However, sometimes things happen when we least expect them to, and whilst it is not a role I have ever craved or even really accepted as something I would deliberately seek out for myself, the fact is that whilst I am sitting here finishing this book there is another tall, dark, handsome and unfortunately very married man in my life yet again.
It wasn't planned this way, I did not mean this to happen, and it is having a profound effect on this book because it was almost finished when I met "him."
Meeting him stopped me in my tracks and I did not as much as look at the book for months. When I dug it out again several months into the course of this affair (what a nasty word for something that feels so "right") I had an overwhelming urge to re-write a lot of the chapters, add a bit here, delete some parts there, and basically include what I had learned in this new situation.
One thing I am quite sure of is that I will never "go there" again - regardless of how this current "relationship" (if you will allow me to call it that?) pans out in the medium- and long-term. Famous last words? Maybe, but even I will eventually learn from what I can barely bring myself to call "My Mistakes."
Even I will eventually crave (and hopefully get) a relationship that isn't hidden away, and get to be with someone I can call when I feel like just hearing his voice, and hug when I feel like I need a hug, rather than when it's my turn to be fitted into his schedule.
Hope springs eternal so I can't quite prevent myself thinking that this may just be "it" Time will tell and I guess people buy lottery tickets on a daily basis at much smaller odds of hitting the jackpot, so we will just have to wait and see.
In some respects having an affair (or, frankly, any relationship to a greater or lesser extent-) is a bit like childbirth (although I have to confess that I haven't tried the "childbirth" part) in that you remember the good bits and forget about the pain, or rather: You remember that it hurts but not quite how much!
So one ventures forth and does it again, carefully, yet whole-heartedly.
One tries again with in the hope that this time it will be ok, this time things will not end the way they did the first time, the time one got so badly hurt through no fault but one's own.
I too hope against hope that this will preferably not end. I dream the dream that millions of Other Women around the world have dreamed across all cultures and centuries. The dream that one day we will have our own personal happy end complete with "and then they lived happily (and preferably together) ever after."
Experience and logic tells me that this is not a very likely outcome, and that it's more likely to end in tears all round yet again.
However, the fact that it happened to me again has shown me that this book wants to be finished, because I keep having to make myself take my own advice....
If I did not know before learning that Carl, wonderful, vivacious Carl, with all his plans, hopes and dreams, had died, I certainly know it now: Life is much too short and far too precious to be making bad memories, so please, whatever you do, and however you decide at each junction of your very own journey, make sure that you make memories that count. They could, one day, be all you are left with.
No matter how your own relationship with a married man pans out in the end, I wish you, with all my heart, that one day you look back at it with the same love and affection that I look back on Carl and myself, and that you can say with absolute conviction:
" Yes, it was worth it!"
In one word:
DON' T
Or in five:
Don't even think about it!
Unfortunately chances are that you are not reading this book for the hell of it, or have bought it to be prominently displayed on the shelf between "Knitting for Those with Two Left Hands" and "Korean Art of the 17th Century" because you have a peculiar foible for weird non-fiction books.
If you are reading this book you are probably already past the stage where a simple "Don't do it" will be of any use to you, because you're already right in the middle of a journey that will probably end in tears (mostly and mainly yours).
So rather than waving a warning finger let us see how we can make sure that when you reach your destination (wherever that may be) you and all those that are, and will become, embroiled in it along the route remain relatively unscathed, if at all possible.
Still, there is really no such thing as "The Perfect Other Woman." We can and obviously should try and make the best out of the situation, and we should certainly try and enjoy it while it lasts.
But let us never forget that when we peel away the layers of attraction and emotion and whatever else we bestow upon this relationship, it is, by definition, "wrong" to have an affair with a married man.
Most of us justify what we are doing, by telling ourselves that we are not the ones married to his wife, that it wasn't us who pledged to forsake all others or love her until death do them part.
But when all is said and done we have to accept that no matter how we twist and turn it all in our own minds, we should not have done it.
This does not mean we should walk around beating ourselves up over it, or waste precious time and emotional resources wallowing in pointless puddles of guilt.
It just means we should accept the fact and live with it.
1. You shall guard your heart!
2. You shall not make or rely on too many promises!
3. You shall make no demands!
4. You must not get caught!
5. You shall not get pregnant!
6. You shall know the difference between an affair and a relationship!
7. You shall stay away from his home and family!
8. You shall not whinge, whine, bicker or complain!
9. You shall not force the issue!
10. You shall enjoy it while it lasts!
Once we have worked out, accepted and finally digested the fundamental truth that what we are engaged in is not a normal relationship, we have to accept the fact that it follows different rules. This means that there are things we should try to refrain from saying and asking if at all possible. It is not easy, but, to be honest, if we had wanted "easy" we would have stayed away from having an affair with a married man in the first place.
So, let's have a look at the main words and sentences that should be left unsaid if we want to keep our affair running smoothly:
1) " I love you"
...unless he has said it first in some at least half-credible manner at a time that did not involve any physical activities with one's clothes being partly or fully removed. Unless you want to see just how fast he will turn into the invisible man who has lost your telephone number and drives a 12 mile detour to work every day to avoid coming past your house this is something to keep to yourself if you could not avoid making it a reality in the first place (unwise move).
If he said it and you think he might mean it you need to use your common sense to work out if it is a wise thing to say at that particular time. Chances are it may not be.
By definition two people who really truly love each other should not be having an affair with each other, and once said it can never be un-said. These three words take on a life of their own, they can do damage, they can become threatening and dangerous, and are often the first step on the road to your very own personal Waterloo, one way or the other.
2) "Do you love me?"
That's the dangerous little brother of No 1 (above).
Why ask it? The man is married, or at least seriously attached to someone he is supposed to love already. If he does fall in love with you he'll be sure to let you know when the time is right (which could, of course, be "never"). Depending on how and when you ask chances are you won't believe the answer anyway, especially when answered in an affirmative fashion right in the throws of passion.
When asking a question which can be answered with either a lie or something that will cause hassle and/or arguments one should be aware that the answer is going to be at best unreliable, and at worst something we don't want to hear.
3) The "leaving wife "question
ANY sentence combining the words "your wife" and "leaving" in any way other than "What time is your wife leaving for work?" is "out." No, I am absolutely serious. Do not ever, under any circumstances ask, tell or beg him to leave his wife.
Your doing so won't actually make him leave his wife, nor will it make him want to leave his wife any more than before you uttered the words. It will most likely scare him, irritate him, put him under some amount of pressure (the extent of which will depend on how hardened an adulterer he is) and will do you no good at all. If he brings up the subject then be very careful.
Few married men ever leave their wives for their Other Women, and the small number that actually do are in reverse proportion to the ones that mention the possibility.
Work on the premise that he won't and you'll be quite safe (until the day he suddenly stands in your lounge having done just that, or arrives on your doorstep after she has turfed him out). The whole subject matter of his wife and family is actually best avoided altogether for everyone's peace of mind (such as there is). If you intend to keep having the affair you must try and stay away from any subject that might cause him to run back to the happy home for good if at all possible, and this one is a classic deal-breaker.
4) "But you promised...."
Whatever he promised, and whether he meant it when he did so or not: This man was in no position to pledge anything more meaningful to you than not forgetting to put the rubbish out on his way to the car.
We'll look at promises and what they mean in a later chapter, but really and truthfully you knew what his promises are worth when you worked out that he is married (hopefully before he started having an affair with you). His promises to you may well hold as much water as the ones made to his wife. You know; the ones that contained the words "forsaking all others" and "until death do us part...." Simple, really, isn't it?
5) "threats and ultimatums"
Never say "Unless you___ (insert whatever you are trying to get him to do or say) I won't see you any more."
Unless you mean it. If you mean it, well, fine, but in that case you have to follow through. Nothing turns any person, male or female, into a complete doormat more effectively than repeatedly uttering hollow threats.
It's bad enough to be "The Other Woman" - being an "Other Woman" who has "Doormat" written across the forehead is worse. Ultimatums, if you do use them, should only be used for setting a target to yourself. In other words an ultimatum is a tool you can use to give yourself some framework of what is and is not acceptable, with consequences acted upon by yourself if certain targets are not met. But you should not give him an ultimatum if you can avoid doing so, and you should absolutely stick to your ultimatum if you set one.
A complete and utter "No Go" threat is one which ends with the words " ...or I will tell your wife about us!" Frankly I really never thought anyone would possibly consider issuing such a threat, until I came across some (thankfully very few) Other Women who actually do or have done so.
That's pure and simple blackmail, and as such it has no place in any relationship, however dysfunctional, ever.
6) "Honey, guess what, I'm pregnant!"
Obviously! Uttered when not actually true this is a boomerang that will gather force and quite rightly slap you right in the face very hard.
And you will hopefully not have been careless / stupid / cunning enough to have managed to get pregnant if you have any last shred of sense or decency, so these words are to be absolutely deleted from your vocabulary forthwith!
7) "Why didn't you call me?"
Why ask such a question (other than to spoil what little time you get to spend together in the first place)? Do you really want to hear the answer? Do you really want to know that his wife was around him more or less non stop the past few days?
Or that he plain and simply didn't want to call you badly enough to find an excuse to get somewhere where he could? Would either of those answers make you feel any better? And if not, why ask the question? In fact ANY question which you just know you won't like the answer to is best left unasked; I mean - what is the point?
8) "I would love to meet your kids!"
Urm... why? Even if for some obscure reason you would really want to complicate matters that far - chances are they would not love to meet you, or at least not meet you knowing who you are and what role you are playing in the fate of their family.
Whilst a certain amount of curiosity is only natural, and none of us are completely immune to at least the fleeting fantasy of such a meeting; in real life you should stay away from his family. This is for their protection and for your sanity, and an important enough aspect of having an affair for me to have devoted an entire chapter to it.
Never even contemplate satisfying your curiosity by stalking his children outside school, the playground or via the Internet. Leave them be! Absolutely leave them be!
9) "Can't you stay a bit longer?"
If he could and wanted to he probably would.
If he doesn't then either he can't or does not want to badly enough, or both. So again, what is the point of asking? In general any question to which there is an obvious answer that might be either untrue or which we would rather not hear is a dumb one to ask.
Don't waste what precious little time you have with him on pointless exercises!
10) "Do you still sleep with your wife?"
Do you really want to know the answer to that question? And if so; why? They are married (or, in the case of a long term partner, "as good as" married.) They may or may not share a room, a bed and exchange bodily fluids. Whether they do or not is really quite frankly none of your business.
If you get an answer at all it may or may not be the truth, you may or may not believe it, and the question itself will not make the rest of your conversation any more cheerful. So don't ask it. In fact put the question out of your mind completely, anything else comes close to mental masochism.
The happiest "Other Woman" has an ability to blank certain thoughts from her mind, such as whether or not he still sleeps with his wife. This ability also comes in most handy at times such as Christmas, when the image of her beloved, surrounded by his wife and family, singing carols under the Christmas tree, tries to creep up on her conscious mind.
If she can stop these thoughts, or at least push them to the very edge of her consciousness, she will cope much better.
And it is something you can learn, I know you can learn it because I myself have managed to do so.
11) "I want more than this affair!"
Oh dear. If you are planning on saying this you had better be fully aware of the consequences.
Once said your "relationship" (such as it is) will probably never be quite the same again. When you got involved with him you knew he was not free. You should have known that what was on offer was "an affair." Reality check: Had anything else been on offer then this would have involved an end of the "primary relationship" before or a shortish while after entering into the relationship with you.
Of course almost every mistress at least occasionally daydreams about making the transition from "mistress" to "wife / partner," but I'm afraid this is not your call, it is his.
He is the one who is already committed elsewhere. Once you utter those words you will either get lied to, scare him away completely, be given a rather flexible timeline in which such a transition might be possible or not get any meaningful answer at all.
Another problem caused by such a demand is that he may actually suggest that at some point in the future he might contemplate upgrading your status, by means of separation or divorce.
He may even mean it at the time he says it, but in your mind such a conversation plants the seed for expectations, which later grow into demands, and frankly even if you were quite happy with the status quo previously, you will get increasingly less happy as time goes by without anything happening.
12) "Am I prettier / more intelligent / better in bed / whatever / than your wife?"
Another No-Brainer. What do you want to hear? Or rather: What do expect him to reply? You will probably get a "Yes, dear, of course you are..." which will be muttered with a greater or lesser degree of conviction.
And if he has a shred of sensitivity he will wonder why you are so insecure. His wife is nothing to do with you, and it should have no bearing on your well-being or self-esteem whether she is an Angelina Jolie clone or has a PHD in Astrophysics. He is there with you now and that'll have to do you (for now or for as long as it lasts).
13) "Where is this relationship going?"
Yes, everyone appreciates that the Other Woman has an urge to find out the answer to that question at some point. Unfortunately it is such a loaded question, and there really isn't a definite answer to it, the man is married, and unless he has stated otherwise in a halfway credible manner he probably intends to stay married for the time being.
So asking a question which you know will make him uncomfortable, because he either doesn't actually even know the answer, or doesn't think you'll like the answer, or which you know the answer to already if you are honest to yourself, is yet another way to spoil a precious and potentially nice evening, and will really and truthfully do no good at all.
At best you'll get some non-committal line that isn't going to help, at worst you'll be lied to and probably know it too.
14) "We have to talk about "us"!"
That is one of the sentences most likely to make almost any man in any type of relationship, from friendship, over fling, to full blown affair, and in a "proper" relationship, head for the hills until your urge to "talk about us" has passed.
Basically what it means is: "I am going to complain and/or ask you uncomfortable questions." Don't bother - if there is something you want to and need to discuss, and it's not one of the above, just tell him in a perfectly normal way.
Announcing your intention of having an "about us" talk will put him in the defensive if he is already there, and bring up urgent reasons why he can't make that date / meeting if he's not.
The problem is that we usually tend to enter an affair with quite a level head and a healthy degree of realism. Then we find ourselves sucked deeper and deeper into things emotionally, until we realize that what we bought into with our eyes wide open isn't actually what we are involved in now.
That is the point when we start to want to know "where this is going" and "what we really mean to him."
Unfortunately men hate "let's talk about us" conversations at the best of times, and men who are actually committed elsewhere can't really contribute too meaningfully to such a conversation without lying or feeling under pressure or both.
If we absolutely have to have such chats they should at least be wrapped into "normal" conversations if at all possible, and not allowed to ruin what precious little time we have together anyway.
The most meaningful conversations of this sort are initiated by him. Waiting for him to bring up the subject matter is therefore a wise move!
Time to look at a few home-truths I'm afraid.
Let us assume that you are reading this book because it affects you rather than out of a sense of purely academic curiosity.
So... You are, or have been, or are seriously contemplating doing something that is plain wrong. There is no way to skirt around that particular fact - getting involved with a man who is married or committed to another woman is a pretty damn shabby thing to do whatever the circumstances.
I hope for your sake that you have not complicated the issue even further and maximized the moral indefensibility of the whole mess by picking a man who rightfully belongs to a friend or family member; if you have, well, good luck to you because you're seriously going to need it.
Once you have accepted that what you are doing is basically wrong, and is, to a degree, shabby, and will end in tears (most likely, but probably not exclusively: YOURS) it actually gets easier and you are more likely to come out of it with not much worse than a broken heart (which is, lets face it, rarely if ever fatal).
And whilst we are on the subject of facing facts we might as well look at some of the other facts that you will have to learn to accept. When I say "accept" then this means that you face them, you think about them and you make yourself accept them without starting any defense with the word "but" or the old chestnut "But this is different." There is no such thing as "different" when it comes to affairs, or at least none that could really be (ab)used as a credible excuse, or even carries sufficient weight to serve as an explanation.
Trust me on this one - it may make you feel temporarily better to con yourself into thinking that what you are doing is in some peculiar, miraculous way "different" and therefore somehow more acceptable or less morally indefensible - it's complete nonsense.
An Affair is an Affair is an Affair. And an Affair is, by definition, each and every time, and under all possibly conceivable circumstances, wrong.
That's the way it is and no amount of romantic "soft-focus" or lyrical waxing about it will, in any way, shape or form, alter this fundamental truth.
But, we are doing it anyway and the sooner we come to terms with accepting the fact that we are voluntarily doing something wrong, the sooner we can enjoy it while it lasts. And we might as well enjoy it because the price we are paying is high.
There is a price to pay for everything in life; the price for this episode in ours is likely to be high and pay-day will catch up with us at some stage.
We had better be prepared for it because otherwise it will hit us firmly between the eyes when we least expect it.
Once we have practiced accepting that we are doing something that almost everyone, probably including ourselves, considers to be wrong, we can swiftly move on to the next bit of unpalatable truth.
This is the bit where I have to tell you (not that you don't already know it somewhere deep down) that statistically he is probably most unlikely to leave his wife or partner for you.
Please don't gasp, cringe or throw this book into the nearest corner, I promise we'll get on to the more enjoyable aspects of the whole issue soon, but there are a few things that have to be said, digested and accepted before we can move on.
Only a relatively small percentage of unfaithful men leave their wife for their Other Woman, and whilst we're on that subject I can't spare you the old saying "When a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy." Think about that one too.
If your sole or main reason for being and staying involved with this man is the hope that one day he will leave his wife, get a divorce, and become your full-time partner, you should seriously consider getting out while you still can.
You would do well to work on the premise that you are the Other Woman, she is the wife (or long term partner), and that this is how it will stay for the foreseeable future.
Then look the most likely long term outcome squarely in the eye: His wife will still be his wife and you will still be The Other Woman in years to come; or you will no longer be his Other Woman, replaced by either A.N.Other or a period of monogamous behavior on his part.
One of the things that surprised me most when I researched this book was just how many women were involved with married men for very long periods of time. I had originally, naively, assumed that after a year, maybe two at most, these things resolve themselves or end. The fact that so many women are still hiding in the shadows of a man's life after 5, 10 and even over 20 years with no end in sight honestly amazed me.
When we do something we KNOW to be wrong we appear to have an illogical but nevertheless deep-rooted desire to find "explanations" (I will be brutal and honest enough to call them by their real name: Excuses) to somehow justify what we do.
This is, to an extent, understandable when we speak to 3rd parties as it does not tend to feel particularly good to say "Well, I am a morally degenerate person and I am having an affair with this man because I don't give a damn about who gets hurt and what havoc it will wreak with whoever's lives" - even if this were, to a greater or lesser extent, actually not as far from the truth as we like to believe.
We all feel a need to like ourselves, and whilst we will expect and partly even tolerate the fact that the above (worded similarly or worse depending on who says or thinks it in which company) is expressed by others, we do tend to try and manipulate the naked truth by decorating it with feelings, emotions, explanations and even downright lies. Not just towards others, but towards ourselves as well.
But to truly cope with having an affair we have to be honest, at least with ourselves, and once again I will feed you a few home-truths.
So, let's look at some of the most common attempts to justify, explain and excuse what we are doing:
• "I could not help it" (accompanied by batting of eyelashes, moist eyes, and followed or preceded by either a deep sigh or a sob for added effect)
Well, sorry, BUT: Pull the other one. There are very few things in life where "I could not help it" is a valid explanation for allowing something to happen. Being struck by lightning comes closer (although even then it could be argued that one could have stayed out of harm's way) - getting hit by a bus may qualify, or catching a cold.
But no way on God's earth does this wash in connection with having an affair with a married / attached man. Don't say "but..." - You know it, I know it, and everyone else with an IQ in excess of their shoe-size knows it too.
You COULD have helped it, just as I could have helped it, had we WANTED to.
What, for some reason or the other, and these reasons will vary from situation to situation, we appear to be unable to do is WANT to "help it." Think about it. There is a difference....
Do yourself a favor and don't use that one any more. Casting yourself in the role of the helpless victim of some all-encompassing force beyond your control may dull the feelings of guilt to an extent but one can only lie to oneself for so long before one ends up seeing the liar as well as the cheater staring back in the mirror.
• "But I fell in LOVE" (same moist eyes and sob / sigh routine as before, or both for good measure.)
Yes. OK. So maybe you did. I did, too. But do you know what? It doesn't actually matter, it is no excuse, and it's a poor explanation. If you are quite honest you probably went "that step too far" before you fell in love anyway. In many ways it makes it worse, especially for you. You may or may not know how right I am in that particular respect at this point; if you don't (yet), you will in due course.
Now we move on swiftly to my personal favorite
• "It just HAPPENED!" (Depending on one's individual make-up accompanied by the "sob/s sigh/moist eye" thing, or a simple shrug from a more hardened individual.)
Oh PLEASE! These things absolutely, categorically and truly do not "just happen." We either positively, actively make them happen, or we passively let them happen, or, usually, a combination of the two.
But people do not start an affair by some miraculous process of molecular osmosis which transported them into each other's arms without any prior warning and entirely without their knowledge or consent.
Usually there is a point of no return, a line which is crossed and after which things actually do tend to take on a life of their own.
But we see this line quite clearly. Whether we cross it or not is a matter of choice, not something that "just happens." As we approach "the line" we may kid ourselves that we won't cross it, that we are just going to the edge to take a look and indulge in a little game of "What if....?" However, the fact of the matter is that deep down we have probably, if not almost certainly, decided to cross the line should the opportunity present itself by the time we recognize it, and long before we actually reach it.
• "But it's DIFFERENT with us...." No, dear, sorry. It isn't, actually.
Or at least it is no more or no less different than any other affair ever started, conducted or ending in tears throughout the rather long history of mankind. Believe it, ignore it, cope with it - whatever.
Having an affair is wrong. Call it "different" if it makes you feel any better (why?), but don't kid yourself into using it as an excuse.
In fact you'd do well to just quit the excuses and explanations altogether. Just do what you have to do and accept that you're doing so.
Your excuses and explanations won't wash with those that are wronged in all this, and whilst you may well find one or the other well-meaning friend who may sit and nod semi-sympathetically as you tell them, it won't really truly wash with them either.
What I am trying to get across with those examples (and they are just a few), is that we may lie to others as to why we are having an affair with a man we should not be touching with a bargepole, but we should at least be honest with ourselves.
So now I have reminded you why you did NOT start your affair, let's have a look at some of the reasons why normally perfectly "nice" girls cross the line and DO become "The Other Woman."
Why do women REALLY have affairs with married / attached / otherwise unavailable men? And why do they find it so hard to admit the real reasons to anyone, including or even especially to themselves?
To be brutally honest the most common situations that lead down the slippery path from an innocent look that lasts just a little longer than strictly necessary to finding oneself in the starring role of one's very own sordid affair are, more often than not, disappointingly mundane.
We spin a web of deceit and try to justify it by wrapping it into notions of great romance and endless love, spiced up with a hefty dose of irresistible passion. We wrap the affair into imaginative tales of star struck lovers akin to Romeo and Juliet in our own heads whilst pressing the replay button of "meaningful songs." I admit, with some trepidation, to having literally worn out CDs from Celine Dion to Sting and back via Bill Withers, Coldplay and anything that contained a shred of lyrics I could apply to my situation.
We daydream, and those little private movies that run riot in our minds cast us in the role of the tragic heroine, not the wicked witch that steals a man and single-handedly destroys a happy family.
The truth, of course, as always, tends to lie somewhere in between, but it is human nature not to want to view one's own actions in the coldest light of realism. And frankly that's OK, as long as we don't completely lose touch with the facts and drift away on a pink cloud of romantic drivel.
Affairs happen for a variety of reasons, but most tend to be born out of a fairly simple constellation which involves a man, a woman, a dose of boredom, a sprinkling of curiosity, a pinch (or a shovel) of sexual attraction and a sense of adventure.
Add to that the discovery of common grounds, shared views, interests, and a connection of minds.
Set this potentially explosive recipe in the right place at the right time in two people's lives, and watch the birth of yet another affair.
Feelings usually come into it - of course they do, but more often than not they just complicate the issue at a later date, when the whole drama has already moved into the "full blow affair" mode, rather than being the actual cause of it. Couples tend to think the feelings were the root cause and only see in hindsight that this is only partly correct.
This is something that women find particularly hard to admit, we do not enjoy seeing ourselves as people who recklessly risk causing hurt and wreaking havoc for no "good reason."
So by subconsciously inventing "good reasons" why we are having an affair we move away from the mental image of a bunny-boiling Glen Close in "Fatal Attraction" towards one that is much kinder on the conscience. To a degree this is fine. We all have to live with what we do in some way or the other. Just always try and keep a grip on these notions; they serve their purpose as a coping mechanism, but must not be allowed to take on a life of their own.
Another aspect is firmly anchored in the old belief that women don't have sex for the sake of having sex. Society accepts (more or less cheerfully) that this is something men do, but the idea of a woman doing the same elicits a minimum of raised eyebrows.
So women tend to wrap sexual desire into feelings (real or imagined) and emotional fairy-tales to be able to allow themselves to enter a sexual relationship, even without the added "shock-horror" scenario of the object of their desire being otherwise attached.
Lastly women frequently have affairs because consciously or subconsciously they do not actually want a relationship that follows the more conventional rules. They pick a man they can't have fully so they don't actually HAVE to have him full time. Again this is not the thing that nice little girls are brought up to have on their agenda, so it is not admitted to readily.
A very good friend of mine fairly recently confessed that whilst she "sort of" wanted a relationship, someone to hold her, someone to make love with, laugh with, have fun with, she did not actually have the time for a "proper" relationship with all the bells and whistles attached.
We idly discussed that dilemma over a glass of wine or two without really coming to any satisfactory conclusion for a while before moving on to more interesting subjects.
And low and behold, not two weeks later she had met a man who fitted into her life perfectly, because he was married, intended to stay that way, and lived a safe 50-odd mile away.
The proof of this particular pudding is the considerable percentage of mistresses who, after weeks / months or even years of allegedly wanting to have the man all for themselves, run screaming the other way when he actually stands on their doorstep (complete with a week's worth of dirty washing) with the immortal words "I have left her" on his lips.
Having an affair with a married man can actually be a very convenient (sorry, I know that sounds quite dreadfully callous but it's no less true for it) way for a woman to have her cake and eat it too. All too many married man are accused of being "cake-eaters" when they have an affair, yet few Other Women look in the mirror and see a "cake-eater" there too.
For the woman who, deep down, does not want a full-time committed conventional relationship at a specific stage of her life, yet does not want to be completely without some of the more positive aspects of having a man around some of the time, an affair can be just what suits her.
As more and more women have successful careers and do not have to rely on a man to provide a roof over her head and food on the table this particular scenario will be on the increase.
Adultery comes in many forms. And just as varied are people's definitions as to what constitutes "cheating." Whilst some people call a close friendship between a married man and a female more than questionable, others define "being unfaithful" only as having actual sexual intercourse with a third party.
Then there are variations on the theme. Some class a kiss on the lips as unacceptable behavior for a married person, others define unfaithfulness less in physical, and more in emotional terms and include the sharing of confidences in the overall category of "being unfaithful."
In this day and age there are various forms of relationships that never get physically consummated, but are, by some definition, classed as affairs or adultery, such as what happens on countless forums and via e-mail and chat all over the world.
People have left their spouse and moved across the world for someone they have never even met in real life. The Internet has become a platform for emotionally charged relationships that are no less consuming than those acted out in real life.
I have one very close friend who built up an online friendship with a married man over several months, and within a week of actually meeting up for the first time in real life they had both left their wife and husband respectively, and were moving in together.
They have now been married for a number of years and have the happiest marriage of all the people I know except for maybe my former parents-in-law.
The main forms of real life, nitty gritty adultery however are divided into three main categories, or four if you include the non-sexual overly close emotional attachment that some married people have with a special friend (which, perhaps oddly, many find more threatening and/or potentially upsetting than a less intense, yet sexual encounter).
1) The One-Night Stand
2) The Fling
3) The Affair
The One Night Stand
The One Night Stand is, contrary to popular belief, not necessarily a one-time-only event. It is entirely possible for a married man to have multiple one night stands with the same person without it actually being classified as an affair.
One Night Stands are defined by their lack of a lasting (!) emotional attachment. There is usually no real promise to carry on past dawn (and if there is one it's generally not kept) and realistically do little or no real harm to a marriage if they remain secret.
Frankly men who admit to having had a One Night Stand to their wife without any pressing need (such as the lady in question turning out to be a deranged Bunny-Boiler seriously threatening to blow the whistle on him, or him being stupid enough to have got her pregnant or having caught some STD) are idiots, or men who wanted to destroy their marriage for some reason quite unconnected to the One Night Stand anyway.
One Night Stands are by far the least dangerous form of infidelity. In fact they are less of a threat to a marriage than a close, yet entirely platonic, friendship with a member of the opposite sex. They are just sex, and have no lasting effect on either participant than being another memory to recall in old age when thinking back upon "the wild years." One Night Stands only become a problem or a threat if either participant changes the goalpost, if due caution was not exercised or when they are discovered. Sometimes the conscience plays tricks on the married man, which can cause some anguish or even lead to the very unwise decision to confess all, but generally a One Night Stand is, in the overall scheme of adultery, a fairly harmless interlude.
The Fling
A fling may or may not turn into an affair, but in itself, and during its duration (i.e. before it either ends or turns into an affair) it is defined by the fact that it is not meant to last. There may be a degree of emotional attachment, but the main difference between a fling and an affair is that it has an anticipated, and agreed to, end, and that it does not try to be or copy a relationship.
Flings are like exotic holidays. They are to be enjoyed for what they are, an escape from normal life, something wonderful and something that will be terminated at a vaguely or definately defined point with a sense of regret that it's over, but no bitter feelings.
Just as we return to normal life after a holiday, with great memories, and a bit of sadness that it didn't go on longer, we can return to "life as we know it" after a fling relatively or entirely unscathed, with nothing more than a set of fabulous memories and no emotional wounds to turn into scars.
Just like people tend to wonder fleetingly what it would be like to give up their normal life and emigrate to their holiday destination, you and the married man you are having a fling with may idly let their imagination run riot with thoughts of "what if....?" but just like holiday makers get onto the plane after their stay and return home your fling will reach its (almost inevitable) conclusion with little or no ill-effect on all concerned.
If you are having a fling, enjoy it. Make happy memories to revisit in your mind like a favorite beach, and move on after it has reached its end. It was a fling. It was great. It is over. Get it?
The Affair
The main difference between an affair and either a friendship, a Fling or a One Night Stand is that it is defined by a greater or lesser degree of emotional attachment and the fact that it does not have an anticipated and agreed end.
Whilst the anticipated and agreed to end of a One Night Stand is the hastily consumed cup of coffee before returning to life as we know it, and the Fling is accepted to last a few days, sometimes weeks; an affair does not have an anticipated or agreed upon end.
At least it does not have a defined end that is worked into the equation at the time of it becoming clear that there is an affair happening.
An affair is closest in its nature to a committed relationship, with many of the dynamics being the same or similar. The fact that there are no generally acknowledged rules to speak of means that relationship rules are usually applied.
Obviously we seldom really know quite what we are getting ourselves into at the start, and the borderline between where a friendship ends and an affair begins can be fluid and open to interpretation.
Some affairs are born out of friendships, some developed from a One Night Stand. Sometimes an emotionally charged attachment leads to a fully fledged affair, and sometimes a sexual attraction eventually grows into a deep love.
There is no such thing as "a typical affair" when we look at each situation more closely.
Having an affair is not for everyone.... Now obviously we all know that we should not be having an affair anyway. It's wrong, ok?
But certain types of people are more likely to have an affair without making themselves (and others) deeply unhappy, and without it affecting their lives too negatively.
Most women who have an affair with a married man will actually be deeply unhappy at times, and will cry many a tear they could have avoided shedding had they not got involved with a married man. But some types are more likely than others to come out the other end relatively unscathed, and more likely to find some real happiness with their married partner than others.
The woman most likely to have a successful affair (for want of a better turn of phrase) is basically happy, both with herself and her life as a whole, of an independent nature, with a full life, hobbies of her own, and, very importantly, a really good supportive set of friends, preferably friends who don't know her lover at all, or at least not too well.
She may have fallen into her affair more or less by accident, while she was not actively seeking a relationship. She is most likely quite busy with work, her hobbies, her friends and one or two time- and energy-consuming pursuits.
This means she will find the unavoidable restrictions and disadvantages that having an affair inflicts upon her quite bearable most of the time. She will not have too much spare time or emotional energy to dwell on the downsides of being a mistress, and if her lover cancels an eagerly anticipated evening with her at the last minute it will not throw her into turmoil.
In other words: Her lover will be a part of her life. Maybe the most important part, maybe the part she is most passionate about, but the gap he would leave if he was suddenly gone would not mean that there was very little left in her life because he and the affair had filled almost her entire existence.
A woman like that, hopefully blessed with a varied set of friends both male and female, will be upset at times when things don't go her way, will miss him when she can't see him as much as she would like to (as will be the case in most affairs), but it won't cause her to slide into any form of near-terminal decline.
Friends are a vital factor in successfully surviving an affair anyway. Friends to go out with, friends to talk to, friends to inject a dose of much needed realism from time to time. Friends to hug, friends to fix the dripping tap, pick her up when the car breaks down, friends to be a shoulder to cry on and friends to just be, well, friends.
In some ways friends will have to take on many of the functions a full time, "conventional" partner normally would. Having an affair means the one person we probably most want to have by our side, in our arms or on the other end of the phone during life's little and large disasters will not be available to us at the times we want and need them most.
Personally I find my male friends invaluable, to the extent that one of them, only half jokingly, accused me of having dismembered a "normal" relationship and having dished out the various roles that usually a partner takes on amongst a few carefully selected male friends. I laughed at that notion at first, then had to admit that subconsciously (yet rather effectively if I may say so myself), I may have done just that.
Girlfriends are, as always, incredibly important, and the happiest Other Women have a selected and small number of female friends who know about their affair and are, if not precisely thrilled or approving, at least reasonably or wholly supportive. Obviously we have to be both careful and selective in whom we tell, and female friends who know the married lover's wife must not be told, however trustworthy they may seem at the time of being confided in.
Unhappily married friends are best spared details of one's affair, as are women who have found out that their own husbands (ex or current) have been unfaithful, especially if their own marriage was destroyed by that and if they are still cut up about that.
They are most unlikely to lend a sympathetic ear to a woman who is doing to a wife what was done to them. (And no, those women are absolutely not the ones to have the "But his wife is not my responsibility" conversation with, however tempting that may be at times!)
Women who should avoid having an affair at all cost, and who should, for the sake of their sanity and long term happiness, seriously consider getting out of the one they have if they are already involved with a married man, are those who are basically lonely and who have little else to concentrate on in their life than the man they are seeing.
Tragically there are all too many women who entered into an affair as strong capable and busy ladies with a large circle of friends, a great career, and a number of hobbies, and who have, as a result of the affair, let many of these important aspects of their lives slide. So they started out as the kind of woman most likely to survive having an affair relatively unscathed, even enjoying it, and turned into the kind of woman who really should not be in an affair as it is doing them far more harm than it brings enjoyment.
The problem is that, as women, we tend to want to accommodate. Unfortunately too many women try to be available at all times in case their married lover could possibly want to see them. They avoid making arrangements to see friends, don't plan regular evenings out any longer, let their hobbies and interests slide and neglect to keep in touch with their friends and acquaintances. The result of that sort of behavior is an increasing isolation which leads to the married man taking on an even greater part of the woman's life, and so the vicious circle continues to spiral downwards.
This can cause the Other Woman to get clingy, start pushing him to leave his wife, or to begin behaving in a manner that will not make him want to spend significant amounts of time with her fairly swiftly.
It is vitally important to always remember that the man we are involved with is married, and that he is cheating on his wife with us because there is something (or hopefully "many things") about us that makes him want to be with us. That is the pleasant part of the equation.
The other bit is that he is with us because there are aspects about his marriage and the way he and his wife interact with each other, that are far from perfect.
The easiest way to make him run a mile, either back to the happy home or straight into the arms of another, new, mistress, is to replicate one too many of the negative aspects of his marriage or main relationship.
We need to be quite clear about it in our own heads: A mistress is more easily replaced or terminated than a wife. So by behaving in such a way that he does not want to be with us any more we are heading with breakneck speed for the status of "ex-mistress."
Another character trait that is likely to lead to a very unhappy (and probably short-lived) affair is excessive jealousy. In fact the less jealous a mistress is by nature the more likely she is to have an affair that gives her joy.
Jealousy is (in my humble opinion, speaking as someone whose is very luckily not afflicted by the green eyed monster at all) an unpleasant and destructive state of mind at the best of times, and in an affair it is probably fatal. Fatal either to the affair itself, or the sanity of the jealous mistress, or, most likely, sooner or later, both.
It's a No-Brainer, really.... The man you are having an affair with is having another relationship. He is married. He has a wife. He is probably (whatever he may or may not be telling you) still sleeping with his wife at least occasionally. I personally do not ask, do not want to know, and immediately stop any conversation heading for the subject dead in its tracks.
He is almost certainly hugging her, kissing her, discussing things of importance with her. He is waking up next to her, having his coffee with her in the morning and is going back to her sooner or later in the evening.
And the worst thing is, we have no right to be jealous of her. She is his wife for crying out loud, so everything he does with her is as it should be, and it is us who are the intruders in the whole setup, so nothing is quite as displaced as jealousy. Unfortunately in my experience jealous people may be able to control how they act on their jealous feelings, but they rarely manage to actually control the jealousy itself. So they will, sooner or later, either make themselves exceptionally unhappy, or cause him infinite hassle, or both.
The mental picture of "him" in bed with his wife, his arm wrapped around her waist, her face turned to him, whilst we are tossing and turning in our beds trying to find some sleep, is not going to be a pleasant one at the best of time. It takes a great deal of self control to ward off images like that, and if you tend to be consumed by jealousy at much lesser thoughts you're in for a pretty rough ride.
Jealousy is also a very bad emotion to be afflicted with when serious decisions need to be taken, or when the inevitable thoughts of doing something crassly stupid such as forcing the issue or, god forbid, the temptation to let the wife know once and for all what's going on, raise their ugly heads.
So if you are the jealous type - control yourself, (yes you can) or leave having affairs to those who can handle it.
Remember that a jealous mistress is a troublesome mistress. A jealous mistress is hassle. Hassle is not what a man has an affair for; hassle is what his affair is supposed to take him away from! An overly jealous mistress is also a dangerous one, and he will see displays of excessive jealousy as a warning sign if he has any sense at all.
Personally I am glad that I am not the jealous type, and yet, even as a non-jealous person I very carefully avoid the subject, and do not allow myself to think of him with his wife. Thoughts of the possibility of him sharing intimate moments (of an emotional, intellectual or, obviously, sexual nature) with a third person are even worse. After all, his wife is his wife and we knew this before we got involved, but a secondary mistress would be taking things a step too far even for un-jealous me.
To be happy in a relationship with a married man we have to be absolutely clear about the fact that we are, for all intents and purposes, leading the life of a single woman, but with some of the benefits and restrictions of being in a relationship.
This means we are responsible for our day-to-day life, and our happiness, largely ourselves.
It therefore follows that we should, right at the outset, get used to the idea that we can not rely on a man to be there for us the same way a husband (well, a husband married to us rather than someone else) would.
Once we get that bit of reality firmly embedded into our brain we can move on building the kind of life that allows "real life" and "the affair" to exist happily side by side.
By having a happy and joyful life outside the affair we will be a happier and more "fun to be with" affair partner, and having a happy affair will benefit us in the other aspects of our lives, so if we can manage the admittedly difficult balancing act of weaving everything into the fabric of our life without letting the affair take it over, we should, in theory, be equipped to handle things.
It is absolutely fatal (sooner or later) to allow ourselves to become a needy, clingy, whining Other Woman who picks an argument or complains or cries about the state of the affair almost every time she sees her married partner.
There is no more surefire method to make him want to see less of us or even finish the affair completely than to behave in a way that makes us no fun to be with more often than not.
He is having an affair because things aren't going well in his marriage. So when things are going just as badly in his affair there is really and truthfully very little reason to carry on the affair.
One of the worst things that can ever be said to an Other Woman is "You are behaving just like my wife!" Think about it, what in heaven's name would make a half-reasonable man want to be with (let alone leave his wife for) a woman who is displaying the very characteristics which, displayed at the home front, caused him to have an affair in the first place.
I am not advocating that we turn into doormats who let our married lovcers walk all over us. Not at all and I am the very last person to suggest we should turn ourselves inside out to make things happy for him at our own expense.
But we really must not lose sight of the cold hard reality of the nature of the beast. If we like being with the married man we are involved with it pays to remember why he is with us.
The greatest favour we can do ourselves and our married lover is to be as happy and contented with our own lives, because that sets the scene for a happy and contented (for the most part) affair.
There are as many real reasons why a married man may end up having an affair with you as there are married men having affairs.
However, these highly individual reasons tend to fall into one of a rather more restricted number of categories, and it is these basic categories that we will have a closer look at in this chapter.
Obviously you will want to believe that he is with you because you are so irresistible, because he fell head over heels in love with you, because you and him are true soul mates, are the reinvention of Romeo and Juliet and whatever else we all tend to try and kid ourselves into believing.
To a degree these things may even be the case.
But the truth of the matter, unpalatable as it may be, is that the real reasons why this man is cheating on his wife with you are generally far more mundane, and not always what we would like to hear at all.
Even if your affair has turned a corner and become something "much more" (whatever that may be), the way it started out was probably still according to one of the main categories of adultery.
Generally men cheat on their wives for a reason that falls into one of three main categories.
They may either still love their wife but there is something seriously missing from their relationship, they may no longer love their wife sufficiently to stay faithful so cheat on her, or they may cheat because they can and will do so whether they love their wife or not.
Men who fall into the last category are best avoided completely, but sadly you don't tend to find out until it's too late unless they are exceedingly honest as well as habitually and/or naturally unfaithful. These men will not be any more faithful to you than they are to their current wife, and if they cheat purely for sport and for the sake of cheating then they may very well lie for the sake of lying and treat you badly for the sake of it as well.
However, men that fall into that third category usually tend to concentrate on quick conquests and short flings, rather than letting themselves in for affairs, so we need not look at them too closely anyway.
Men who love their wives and yet cheat on them are difficult to deal with simply because they tend to feel far guiltier about what they are doing than those who no longer love their wife enough to stay faithful, which does not make them the most entertaining company.
The obvious question in their case is "So if you love your wife, what on earth are you doing sleeping with me?" Try not to actually ask that question, he will probably be unable to offer you (or, for that matter, himself) a really satisfactory answer anyway.
So why do men who love their wife have affairs?
Well, for the same reasons any man has an affair, and the really flippant answers tends to be:
"Because they can."
or
"Few men need a reason, most just need an opportunity. "
It is nowhere near as simple as (just) that of course.
Humans in general do things because of a mixture of need and opportunity.
If I am hungry and there is food I will eat it. Now I may be on a diet or follow some specific eating plan, so I may stick to the food I am allowed at the times I am allowed it, but basically if I am hungry enough, have not had the chance to eat what I wanted or needed for long enough, have no overwhelmingly compelling reason not to eat, and there is a piece of Black Forest cake throwing itself at my mouth at just the right moment I may well eat it.
To spin that analogy further - if at home I have all the food I could possibly want, and the ability and opportunity to eat it when and how I like, I am much more likely to not even notice a piece of Black Forest cake, however tempting. Alternatively I may notice it, and appreciate it for the fine piece of German bakery art that it is, but I won't eat it or even really want to eat it.
A truly happily married man who is in a fulfilling relationship with his wife will not usually have an affair. He may, if several factors play together, have a One Night Stand or even a fling, but rarely an affair. Frankly why should he?
Basically a man will have an affair when some other woman offers, or appears to offer, things he is not getting in or from his marriage. These "things" are as varied as the men who need them, they could include sex, or intimacy, or closeness. All three more often than not, actually.
Someone who listens to him, someone who takes him seriously. Admires him, thinks he is funny, great looking, intelligent and generally wonderful (never underestimate the male ego and its needs).
It could also be argued, and is, in fact, argued by as many scientists as it is refuted by others, that the human male is simply not designed to be monogamous.
It is argued that he is genetically and by evolution designed to "go forth and multiply." The argument whether this is the case or not has been raging for a long time and I have no idea if it is true or just a lame excuse, so won't go on about it without any real evidence to support it validity one way or the other.
Also, whilst being true would explain why humans change their partner during their lifetime, it does not really go a long way to bring us any closer to telling us why they have affairs rather than ending their current relationship first.
To some men having a mistress is also at least partly a lifestyle choice. Almost along with the great home, the successful career, the membership to the right golf-course, and the expense account. It becomes part of their rewards in life for being a "success."
This theory is underpinned by the fact that statistically the more successful or rich a man is the more likely he is to have an affair.
Men who keep a mistress as a status symbol (even if it is a hidden one that only they themselves, and maybe some very close friends know) tend to choose mistresses that are likely to be younger, very attractive, and of a certain "value." Trophy mistresses so to speak, to go with the "trophy wife" they have at home in the "trophy home."
He and his wife may have been on a similar level when they first got married, then he started a successful career, rose up the ranks socially and professionally, while his wife stayed much on the same level for one of a variety of reasons. So suddenly he finds himself in a situation where he (consciously or subconsciously) believes he ought to "trade up" as far as his woman is concerned. He then picks a mistress that appears to be more befitting his actual, desired or perceived status in life.
Also a lifestyle choice, but of another kind, is the one made by the man who has a relationship with another woman to escape from a life that isn't going at all as he would wish.
Possibly trapped in a marriage he would rather not be in but can't seem to get out of, with a career that isn't really going anywhere much either, and quite possibly money problems.
That kind of man finds an escape from his worries in a relationship with a woman who probably doesn't really know the extent or even the existence of his troubles. He may even pretend to be someone quite different when he is with her. He lives the life he would actually like to live, pretends to be the man he would like to be and thinks he should have been. He tends to choose a mistress from outside his usual circle, and often keeps up the pretense for quite a while, if not for the entire duration of the affair. In his case (and probably his case only), the Other Woman is quite right when she says "He turned out to be not the man I thought he was at all" - because, when he was with her actually wasn't!
While we are on the subject of things not being what they seem to be, us "Other Women" are often, if not even usually, guilty of projecting all we ever wanted in a man and out of a relationship into our affairs as well.
Because this "relationship" of ours does not have to withstand the test of everyday life, as a general rule, we usually only get to see the best of our married lovers. We can generally be at our best behavior when we see them too. So we can build up and maintain (for a while at least, but sometimes for many years) this great structure which consists of two people showing one another their best sides, keeping the lid on our less adorable features, and living out a part time version of the relationship we would love to have if only life and our inevitable imperfections didn't get in the way.
However, back to the many varied reasons why a man may be having an affair with you - the greatest facilitator of affairs is simply opportunity.
Given the right woman at the right time, the right state of mind and a strong dose of chemistry, many a man who would, just weeks previously, have sworn that he was entirely faithful, will end up on the slippery slope to a fully blown affair, or at least have a One Night Stand.
Another often ignored path to the slippery slope is friendship. A man and a woman who have possibly been friends for years, and suddenly find their friendship changing.
A purely platonic friendship between a man and a woman is obviously entirely possible, but quite often one or the other develops feelings for the friend which are crossing the border between purely platonic and attraction of a different kind.
When close friendships turn into affairs the potential for long term hurt is almost greater than in any other affair, because one does not just risk having one's heart broken, but risks losing a great friendship as well because there is usually absolutely no way back to the friendship as it was once the line has been crossed. The road from friendship to affair is usually "one-way only", and more often than not a dead-end road as well.
It is never exactly a particularly bright idea to start an affair, but to allow or even encourage a friendship to cross the line is at best dangerous, at worst fatal to the friendship.
If you can....
It may be too late for you to follow the advice in this chapter at the moment, as you may well be already involved with a man that falls into one, or, god help you, more than one of the categories mentioned.
But even if that is the case, it may inject a little dose of reality to your consciousness. Maybe you will remember it in the future, at a time when you still have a say in the matter, just before you reach the famous point of no return.
Obviously the main type of man to avoid is the one with a ring on his finger, or a ring that should be on his finger if he were to wear it.
In other words: a married man. But as this is a book that concerns itself with affairs with married men we just have to accept that sometimes we will fall for a married man, and simply look at the types of married men that will cause us more trouble than others, and more trouble than they are worth.
For some reason women seem to apply a different set of criteria to their married lovers than they would apply in the choice of a regular partner. All too many women find themselves involved with married men that don't fit their normal partnership pattern.
However, the fact of the matter is that the coice of the man we fall in love with has an absolutely irrefutable effect on the likely outcome of the relationship.
Choosing wisely (and avoiding the ones who are no good for us and would be no good for us even if they were not married) is the be all and end all of a satisfactory affair. A bad man is a bad man, married or single or divorced or widowed. Frankly starting an affair with a man we would not usually start a relationship with is a good first step towards disaster.
A One Night Stand or a Fling, maybe, but if a man would not be good enough for us to have a relationship with then he is not good enough to have an affair with.
A very peculiar and borderline entertaining bit of food for thought is the fact that when you ask women what they are looking for in a partner, more often than not the words "faithful" and "honest" are pretty high on their list of priorities.
Yet here we are, in love or at least pretty closely involved with men who are, by definition of being with us in the first place, neither honest nor faithful.
They lie to be with us, and they are unfaithful with us. They are exactly the kind of man we would usually frown upon.
Just a thought to keep readily at the back of our minds. Not to necessarily dwell on or to make an issue out of, but to be filed away along with other little truths about that man for future reference.
Just as very significant number of conventional relationships start at work, so do a large number of affairs. Probably around half if the statistics I have seen, and the comments made to me by the people I have spoken to throughout the time I was researching this book, are anything to go by.
It is always a potential risk to date someone you work with, but if they are not your superior or married, or both, it is generally something that can be worked around, and if the relationship ends it also does not tend to necessarily, or even too often, become a career-threatening event.
If you date a married man you work with, and especially when he is your boss, it becomes a far more dangerous game, the stakes are much higher, and you could easily be gambling with your career and income as well as with your heart.
It also means that work will not provide you with a place to get your mind off things when the affair isn't going quite as swimmingly as you would have hoped. And if, or should I say "when," it ends you are in for a terribly rough ride and one of you could easily be forced to change your job.
When you have an affair with someone who is above you in the company hierarchy and especially if he is your immediate superior, the balance of your relationship is stacked against you from the word "go."
Few people manage to separate their personal life from their work as effectively as would be necessary to make an affair with your married boss a healthy relationship. It will affect both your work and your personal life negatively, and when you add the gossip of your co-workers, and the obviously to be expected repercussions should the affair end, you see why this one comes very firmly under the heading "Not a Good Idea."
In many countries companies have more or less strict rules on relationships between co-workers, and some are so strict that a discovered affair will result in instant dismissal for one or both "offenders." This means that if you do get involved with a married man at work you should be even more discrete than you must be anyway, or you could suddenly find yourself without a lover and without a job at a time when the loss of either would cause your whole life to take a serious turn for the worse.
Having an affair with someone who is your boss or significantly higher up in the company hierarchy is likely to make for an unhealthy balance in the relationship. Some people manage to separate their affair and their work life to a degree, but those who believe that one does not, in any way, affect the other are probably deluding themselves. The dynamics of the job will usually affect the affair and vice versa, and not usually in a good or healthy way.
The same actually goes for most men who have some kind of influence over you through their profession, and whose professional involvement with you can not be easily ended or transferred.
Customers may be okay provided it does not affect your job performance, or possibly colleagues from other divisions, preferably other offices.
But having an affair with your doctor, your therapist, your lawyer or your trainer is probably a bit too close for comfort; getting involved with your teacher or pupil definitely is.
If you start an affair with one of the above it is not just wise, but imperative that you should terminate their professional involvement with you as soon as you are heading for an affair, or immediately after it has started at the latest.
It is easy enough to find another doctor, lawyer or trainer, and you will stand a better chance of getting what you need out of both the professional and your lover if they are not the same person.
One group of men I feel should be most definitely and absolutely out of bounds are the husbands of close friends (any friends really) and those men married to female members of your family.
Nothing in the world is worth the disaster and heartbreak that is potentially lurking just below the surface of such an affair, and trust me, having an affair with a man who is not married to someone to whom you owe decency, friendship, loyalty and integrity, is hard enough and stretches most women's ability to cope to breaking point at times.
If you have to handle everything that naturally comes with being the Other Woman plus the knowledge that you are betraying someone who probably loves you, and trusts you with all her heart, because you are their friend, or their sister, you may well have a very hard time looking in the mirror at yourself without a degree of contempt.
To find out that one's husband is, or has been having an affair is devastating enough at "the best (?) of times." To find that a relative or close friend was the "Other Woman" will constitute a double betrayal of enormous proportions, and many betrayed wives will actually judge the friend's or relative's betrayal even more harshly than that inflicted upon them by their husbands.
On a more practical and selfish note when your affair with an outsider breaks up you can count on the support of your family and friends, and will (hopefully) know that they will be there to catch you and pick up the pieces.
When you have an affair with the husband of a close friend or family member, and the whole thing goes pearshaped, you will most likely find yourself on the receiving end of repercussions you never imagined possible, and will have to go through them quite alone because the ones you should and normally would be turning to for support are the ones you have betrayed and who are now turning their back on you.
Bridges burnt like that are usually hard (in the case of family) or impossible (in the case of close friends) to rebuild, so please do yourself and those close to you a favor and hunt elsewhere.
The "serial offender," a man who has a string of affairs to his name, is to be avoided unless you are quite all right with being one of a string of women he has affairs with. This kind of man will move on in due course to pastures new, and unless you have a pretty good grip on your own emotions you will be badly hurt when he does. It is hard enough when a man decides to end the affair because he wants to make another go of his marriage, but to find oneself replaced by another "Other Woman" is infinitely harder still.
You may, of course, not find out until it's too late to extricate yourself from the situation without any major heartache, but often the signs were there from the start and we just chose to ignore them. In that respect affairs are no different to other relationships. Hope springs eternal and women have a fatal habit of convincing themselves that, improbable as it may seem, they are the one who will save his soul and change his ways.
But leopards don't change their spots any more than men change their ways that easily once they are set in them.
Going into a relationship of any sort with the declared intention of changing the man involved is at best a futile exercise. In fact I have always thought it to be a sign of arrogance on the part of the woman: What makes us think that we will be the one to succeed where so many others have failed? And why go into a relationship with someone who would require changing into someone else to be suitable in the first place?
So if you see yourself confronted with a man you'd have to change to really want to be with: Back away gracefully or accept that he is what he is, enjoy the ride and deal with the consequences as and when they present themselves.
It is obviously possible to have a happy affair with someone who would have to be changed to be a suitable full-time partner. The very fact that he is not a full time partner means that we can live with whatever would irritate us intensely if we had him around the whole time.
It goes without saying that abusive men, and men who belittle you, or, god forbid, are physically or emotionally abusive, are an absolute "No-No." Don't go there.
And if you are already there, walk away.
Yes, you can!
You deserve better than that.
Sometimes women end up in affairs with men they would never usually choose as a partner. They may be of a very different social sector, a different nationality or culture, or in some ways actually "no go areas" for them in their usual life such as men with a criminal record or an involvement with crime or drugs or alcohol.
Affairs of this sort are usually born out of a sense of boredom in an otherwise particularly ordered and structured life. A way to escape the mundane but comfortable existence they would never really truly want to give up but at the same time feel trapped in. Affairs with "totally unsuitable" men are usually entered into by married women who potentially have a lot to lose should the affair be discovered
If you are involved or on the verge of getting involved with such a man please be very very careful. Walk away if you can. It is unlikely to work out in the long run, and no amount of excitement is worth getting involved in a world of crime or drugs, even if only on the edges.
Very often women who get involved with the kind of married man they would usually not even remotely consider are themselves married. More often than not they have a good life, but are bored and "miss something" in their life.
The case of Germany's richest woman was all over the media recently after she got involved with a criminal. He conned her out of literally millions, and when she refused to give him even more he tried to blackmail her with secretly recorded videotapes of their sexual encounters. Luckily she woke up and had the enormous strength to go to the police, at great cost to her family and reputation.
The lesson of this story is: Be very careful who you get involved with, as love makes us blind and we should not endanger our whole existence as well as our heart when we have an affair with a married man!
It is hard enough at the best of times to be "The Other Woman" in a married man's life. And it is no more possible to have a happy affair with a loser than it is to have a happy conventional relationship with him.
More often than not if you know deep down that it's not a good idea to get involved with a particular specimen then walk away while you still can. It's just not worth it.
It is actually possible to conduct an affair without directly causing hurt and wreaking havoc with the lives of those who are involuntarily affected (in other words: his wife and family.) If it messes up your life and/or his then that was your choice and by crossing "the line" you signed a contract that you do so at your own risk and accept that more likely than not you will get hurt. His wife and family did not enter into any such agreement so they must be protected at all cost.
This means you must not get caught.
It is a fascinating fact of life that women get found out far more rarely than men. Men tend to seriously underestimate the astuteness of women in general and their wives in particular, and lack the attention to detail women generally possess.
Men also have an unfortunate habit to impart details of their extra-marital excursions to their best mate after a pint or three. Best mate promptly tells his wife in a careless moment, she in turn tells her friend and before you can say "idle gossip kills" the whole thing is out in the open and it is only a matter of time before it arrives (probably suitably blown up out of all proportion) at the one set of ears it should never reach.
So our "perfect mistress" has the unenviable task of not only covering her own tracks intelligently and effectively, but also keeping an eagle eye on the man she is involved with.
At this point it is worth slipping in the little fact that out of the women who *do* get found out a shamefully large percentage cause the discovery either deliberately or recklessly. But we shall look at this particularly uunsavory way to conduct oneself elsewhere.
There are six main areas that need to be carefully watched to keep the affair where it belongs, namely between you and the man you are involved with.
* Alibis - i.e. where "she" believes him to be when he is with you
* Physical evidence - i.e. what not to leave on or around him
* Communication - i.e. how you communicate without leaving clues
* The paper trail - i.e. anything his wife might see on any 3rd party correspondence
* Witnesses - i.e. the danger of being seen at the wrong time in the wrong place by the wrong person
* Who to tell
The cardinal rule is to never, ever, under any circumstances underestimate his wife's sensitivity and intelligence. You may not want think of her as the smart, clever lady that she more than likely is (otherwise why would a man worthy of your affection have chosen to marry her of all people in the first place?) but you will underestimate her at your peril.
So cover your tracks, watch yourself and him with eagle eyes, and do not get sloppy as the affair moves along.
Remember that this is your main responsibility in all of this. Take whatever pride you can muster and fulfill this part of the bargain well. You will be able to look yourself into the eyes much more comfortably in the long run!
Alibis
By far the most fraught aspect of any affair is how he accounts for the time he spends with you. The main reason for this is that it is the one area that it almost invariably involves actual active lying (the other five main areas mainly involve avoiding leaving evidence in one form or the other). Traditionally, men are the worse liars of the sexes, and women possess the more sensitive antennae for anything that doesn't quite ring true. Women, with their inherently greater attention to detail and better memory for what was said by whom and when, also tend to notice discrepancies far more readily than a man in a similar situation would.
At a time when he has actually already forgotten that he even saw you on the 1st of March his wife may very well still be able to piece together where he said he was at that very date by a process of connecting things from her own life, such as the fact that it was Aunty Mary's birthday and she had to collect the kids on her way back from having those highlights (which were the wrong shade of blonde) put in at Mario's.
There isn't really an awful lot you can contribute here, his alibis are his job, but it won't hurt to keep an eye on how he goes about constructing them to protect him from the most obvious blunders. I know it's not the most romantic or passionate part of having an affair, but it is a necessary one unfortunately.
The more simply constructed an alibi is, the more likely it will hold. In the perfect affair alibis are largely unnecessary through a combination of personal and professional circumstances. If you are involved with a man who has always been away from home for varying lengths of time during his working day and week, especially when he has a wife with a similarly packed agenda, you may find that the need for lengthy explanations regarding his whereabouts is minimal. Count yourself lucky.
Friends make dangerous allies when in need of an alibi. The most trusted friend will probably have to "help out" in an emergency, but generally it is advisable to keep the number of people who get dragged into your personal wicked web to the absolutely necessary minimum.
A very effective "friend" with whom he allegedly spends the time he is actually with you is one that does not exist. A non-existent friend will never inadvertently bump into your lover's wife in the supermarket while he is supposed to be playing golf with your man, or innocently call to speak to him while they are supposed to be slaving over a presentation back at the office. This "Imaginary Friend" ("IF") also has the distinct advantage of being entirely unable to fall out with your lover or causing trouble by spreading gossip.
"IF" has to be introduced carefully back at the happy home, slipped into an occasional conversation casually and frequently before he actually starts assuming his job as his alibi though.
Once his wife has got used to hearing about that particular person in connection with, say, work or the golf club, she will not get suspicious if said friend gradually grows into a more and more frequent part of your man's agenda.
"IF" should even be stored in your lover's mobile phone, his stored number being that of the "pay as you go" phone which you keep for emergencies, so if you have to call him for some reason at a risky time the number popping up on the display or in the call listing will not arouse any more suspicion than the occasional carefully worded text message.
Of course "IF" also has an e-mail address.... It goes without saying that "IF" will NEVER leave a message on your lover's voice mail, mobile or, heaven forbid, at home, nor will "he" send text messages or e-mails with any clues as to the fact that he is more than a colleague or friend.
If at all possible your man should avoid providing alibis whenever possible. Have one readily prepared in case it is needed; yes, but only use it when directly questioned about his whereabouts. Surprisingly often this is the most effective solution, because a lie that was never uttered can never be uncovered.
Bad alibis are any that are all too easily found out (obviously). Friends that your lover and his wife have in common, especially when their own partners are also part of their social circle, usually make lousy alibis and should be avoided whenever possible.
Work usually provides good opportunities for alibis to be constructed, just make sure that he remembers what he said and when, and again try and explain to him that he should only use any story when it is necessary, and to try and avoid complicated stories he can't remember a week later.
Chances are his wife WILL remember and spot any inadvertent discrepancies, especially if her suspicions are already aroused anyway.
Pay attention to the details of the stories he intends to tell. If his alibi is that he is playing rugby on a damp Sunday in November it simply won't do if he comes home freshly showered but with the rugby gear in his bag still clean and smelling of fabric softener.
Physical evidence - i.e. what not to leave on or around him
This is really largely your job. You must make sure that when the man you are involved with comes home, or his wife gets into his car / phone / correspondence / office there is no hint of a suggestion that you exist.
Whilst I generally stress that it is far healthier for the mistress's sanity to think about "the wife" as little as humanly possible this is one area where, at least in an abstract manner, doing so is unavoidable. Like it or not, she shares his house, she shares his bed more likely than not, she probably washes and irons or at least handles his clothes and she will probably open or at least see his bills and statements.
As a woman she will be quite sensitive to clues, and possess an attention to detail that most probably exceeds his. So it is your responsibility to make sure that there is nothing that could cause her to stop and think about, nothing that hints at anything being unusual, and nothing that could only be explained by him having an affair.
Physical marks
NEVER! No love bites (if you are past the age of consent they are a bit childish anyway, be serious!) and no scratched backs. If you can not guarantee that you have complete control over your fingernails at all times then cut them to a safe length or develop the unfortunate habit of biting them - you'll have reason enough to do the latter while waiting by the phone at some point or the other anyway.
Make-Up and Perfume (yours)
Repeat after me: "There is no such thing as Make-Up that will not leave marks on a white shirt." Whatever the glossy ads try to make us believe, we have all spent too much time trying to remove a smudge from an own favorite item to believe it.
So either go extremely easy on the offending products, or make sure his clothes do not come into close contact with them. Waterproof mascara helps a great deal, so does taking off his white shirt before getting close and personal.
Crying on his chest / shoulder is not only bad form for any self respecting mistress, it's also a sure-fire way to leave marks that can be not only spotted, but also identified correctly by almost any wife.
Perfume as well as scented lotions and potions are another area that requires close attention. Obviously you want him to smell them on you, but you sure as hell don't want HER to smell them on him.
So don't smother yourself in your favorite scent, even if it IS the impossibly expensive latest "must have" he bought you for your birthday.... If possible, put on your scent a couple of hours before you are due to meet, and don't liberally splash it all over yourself directly but spray it in the air and walk through the mist. That will suffice, and not leave him reeking of "Eau de Evidence" when he gets home.
If he showers before he goes home (good idea always, out of a sense of decency as well as to avoid detection) make sure he uses the same products he uses at home or get a set of unscented products such as those produced for people with allergies and sensitive skin. He needs to arrive home looking and smelling as if he was where he was supposed to be.
I have come across women who deliberately left hair on his clothes, or made sure he left their rendevouz reeking of perfume. As far as tactics go it this is a dumb one, so please don't even think about it!
Scents, clothes and gifts (his)
Chances are you will occasionally buy him something, be it a particular aftershave or that set of British racing green silk boxer shorts he so liked in your favorite store. That's fine of course, but they should stay away from his home.
Women are usually quite sensitive to sudden changes in a man's behavior and habits. If his wife has been married to a man that wears the 3-pack cotton briefs his mother buys him every Christmas she will definitely view those silk boxer shorts with more than a smidgeon of suspicion.
The same goes for the sudden appearance of a bottle of "Egoiste" aftershave on his shelf in the bathroom cabinet. Not too many men buy these things for themselves as a matter of course, so either keep these clues at your place or make sure they won't arouse suspicion if they do make their way into "her" territory. (Don't cringe please, it *is* just that, like it or not.)
In fact any little or larger present you buy for him needs to pass the "If I was someone's wife, would seeing this make me go Hmmmm???" test. If the answer is "Yes" then the present should stay away from his wife's field of vision at all times.
Leaving clues in his car, his home or pockets
If you ever meet at the home he shares with his wife (dangerous and borderline bad manners in my humble opinion but not always avoidable) then you absolutely MUST make sure that you are painstakingly aware of every single item of clothing, every accessory, every bit of jewelry, every receipt and other item you could inadvertently walk out without.
In such a situation "less is more." The less little potential unexploded bombs you enter their house with the less likely you are to leave one behind to explode at some point in the near or more distant future it chokes the marital vacuum cleaner.
Exercise the same care and attention about anything you do in his car too. If you smoke you must not use the car's ashtray unless you smoke the same brand he does and are not wearing any lipstick. Keep your handbag firmly shut in case of a small item falling out and hiding under the passenger seat until detected.
Make sure he does not have anything in his pockets before he goes home that will betray you. His wife may not be the type to search through his things with a suspicious mind, but she may be quite innocently checking his jeans before sticking them into the washing machine and there are many little items that could cause quite unnecessary hassle so it pays to make sure the situation does not arise in the first place.
Communicating without arousing suspicion
One of the unfortunate side-effects of having an affair is that one can't just pick up the phone to call the object of one's desire whenever one feels like it. But of course you knew that before you started having an affair with him (yes you did, you may just not have been aware of the implications). So let's look at ways of being able to communicate without risking detection.
In general it is a good idea to keep any electronic and telephone communication to a minimum at all times when his wife could observe any of it.
Notes and letters should, if at all possible, be avoided because they can be found and read. Cards and little love-letters must not enter the marital home at any time; marriages have imploded years after an affair had already ended just because one or the other partner opened a long forgotten envelope carelessly tucked away in an old magazine in the attic!
Here we can use our trusted "IF" very effectively though. He can send a text message to your lover's mobile phone or an e-mail requesting contact without arousing suspicion should the message be inadvertently been seen by the wrong eyes. Our "IF" was called Malcolm McKenzie by the way, don't ask why - it seemed a good idea at the time....
If you are the kind of "couple" that like to whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears when not together it complicates matters further. Under no circumstances should you call him on, or let him call you from, his landline at home or a cell phone if his wife has access to the invoice. In these days of itemized billing even our dear Imaginary Friend will start to wear thin as an excuse if the invoices indicate a pattern of lengthy conversations late at night.
However, cell phones are cheap enough and can be fed with "pay as you go" prepaid cards, removing the threat of any physical evidence of the "itemized bill" kind. Caution should still be exercised even with these, train your lover to empty out his call-lists (both made and received) as a matter of course, and to delete any text messages (sent and received) immediately just in case the phone falls into the wrong hands.
Under no circumstances that I can readily think of should you ever call him at home. It is simply not worth it, even from a withheld or blocked number. Calling and hanging up when his wife answers is incredibly bad manners and will serve no purpose than arousing her suspicion and quite probably (and rightly) his anger.
If he calls you from his landline (which again he should not do if at all possible) he should get into the habit of dialing the number of his own mobile phone after speaking to you. This will mean the old "last number re-dial" trick will not work should his wife for some more or less innocent reason try it, and is easily explained by saying he could not find his mobile phone hence called the number to locate it by sound.
If they have the type of fancy set-up which lists the last 10 or whatever numbers at a push of a button then any calls from that phone to your number are out of bounds completely unless he painstakingly removes the evidence from the phone each and every time.
Unless he has a secretary that plays bridge with his wife phoning him at work can be a much safer way to talk, but again a degree of discretion is advisable.
E-mail is only ever safe if his wife will not have access to his e-mail account. Use his work e-mail address if he has one AND if his work e-mails are safe from prying eyes at home.
You may not think his wife to be computer-savvy enough to find shreds of evidence on the computer at home, but you would be surprised and possibly horrified what can be hidden in the history of a browser, so the utmost caution must be exercised if using this form of communication where his wife could conceivably have access to it.
There are now gadgets such as key loggers and Bluetooth devices which allow every typed word, every call, every text message and every e-mail to be reconstructed at the push of a button. His wife may not be totally proficient with computers and technical devices but if her suspicions are aroused you can be sure that she could find out how to use those things if she really wanted to! Or find someone else who does.
For absolute emergencies you should have agreed a code between the two of you which tells him to get in touch with you as soon as possible. Keep this for real emergencies only though, not just because you want to hear his voice or to give him an earful because he has not called you when he promised.
For this you need a trusted MALE friend who can call the marital home (preferably withholding his number) and then pass on a seemingly innocuous message. Very devious couples may have a set of "codes" agreed, each with it's own real meaning, but for most situations one fake message is enough to remember and the patience and good will of the male friend who has to make the call should not be abused by making a habit out of it either.
The paper trail - i.e. anything his wife might see on any 3rd party correspondence
Just as you need to avoid his wife finding an unusual number cropping up at unusual times on the phone bill, you should make sure that no unusual items appear on his credit card bill! Exceptional items of spending arouse a wife's suspicion in more ways than one and there is the aspect of her wondering why money is being spent at all without her knowledge, not just on whom it is being spent.
So evenings out should be paid for in cash or using your own card (this is the 21st century, you ARE allowed to pay your way) if his wife has access to the credit card account. There are also prepaid credit cards which can be applied for online and provide online statements. Larger expenditures (which should be avoided anyway as it is not fair for you to not only sleep with her husband but to deplete the household finances as well) such as expensive tickets for a play or a weekend away can be booked using this prepaid credit card without leaving any trace.
When doing, booking or buying anything which could in any way cause any correspondence to be sent you should use your address and not his. I'm quite sure you agree that no wife deserves to find a letter stating "Dear Mr. and Mrs.____, We hope you enjoyed your recent stay at the Most Excellent Hotel, Brighton, and would like to entice you back by offering you a special discount for the honeymoon suite on your next visit."
By using your address rather than that of the marital home you can quite effectively skirt around issues like these. And issues are always much better avoided than dealt with once the shit has already hit the fan.
Other items to watch out for are restaurant or hotel receipts (need to be disposed of or hidden at his office/place of work), fuel card bills or receipts if they do not support his alibis - he can not have put fuel into his car in Bath when he was supposed to be playing cricket in Cheltenham that very day. Do not rely on his wife to not make the connection, she may not but if she does there'll be hell to pay. Basically anything that contains a date or a place or both needs to be kept out of her reach. Better safe than sorry!
Witnesses - the danger of being seen at the wrong time in the wrong place by the wrong person
This is a hard one. Basically the more you get out and about together the more likely it becomes that you may be spotted by someone you'll wish had not seen you.
In an ideal world you and the illegitimate object of your desire live in different towns, have a different circle of friends and don't work at the same place.
However, this is probably not the most likely scenario as you must have met somewhere and somehow in the first place.
Going out together, be it to a restaurant or a pub, a trip to the theatre or cinema, will be a rare pleasure unless you do so at a town far enough away to minimize the danger of bumping into people who could wonder what he is doing there and who you are. They may not immediately blow the whistle on you, but few things ruin a much longed for and carefully planned special evening out as effectively as suddenly coming face to face with his next door neighbor over a cozy meal.
The problem with NOT going out (i.e. staying at your place all the time) is of course the feeling of the whole "relationship" being based on just sex.
Even if that were the case it is not something you want to be reminded of, so getting out and about doing relatively "normal" couple things is important for your own sanity if nothing else.
To minimize the danger of being seen by the wrong eyes at the wrong time you should not only pick places which are a safe distance from his home and avoid places where his wife's usual circle of friends could easily come walking round the corner, you should also make sure that you choose restaurant tables that are not visible to passers by, and go into the cinema or theatre as late as possible to avoid being sitting targets for prying eyes in the line.
Weekends away somewhere totally different from time to time are perfect to make up for a lack of going out normally, and if you are lucky he has a job that requires at least some degree of business travel, that way not only might you be able to accompany him, any trips which are of a completely NON-business nature can fairly easily be disguised as such without arousing suspicion.
Remember to book in under your name if there is any chance of his wife questioning a hotel booking, just to be on the safe side.
Obviously you will make sure that his bags contain only HIS things before checking out, and that there is no evidence on anything he takes back to the marital home that could hint at the true nature of his trip. If he was supposed to be at a sales conference in Newcastle, a piece of heart-shaped candy with "Brighton" on the wrapper, or a couple of shells carelessly picked up during a romantic evening stroll on the beach and promptly forgotten in a jacket pocket, will not require a mastermind to interpret quite correctly.
Who to tell
When we are in the middle of something really exciting, something that touches many aspects of our lives, something that causes exhilaration and pain in equal measures, we tend to want to share it with our nearest and dearest.
Sometimes we just have to talk about what affects us deeply, have a good moan about the impossible way "he" behaved, or simply cry on a good friend's shoulder.
You may find many of your female friends to be somewhat less than thrilled to lend a sympathetic ear to your tales of woe or accounts of your last exciting encounter, and frankly it's dangerous as well.
The less people know about it the less likely is one of them to cause the discovery of your affair. If you absolutely must confide in someone you would be wise to choose a person who does not know him personally (and for God's sake, never ever as much as DREAM of telling anyone who knows his wife!)
A sympathetic best friend is worth her weight in gold, but don't abuse her willingness to support you in something she may not find particularly laudable herself. For obvious reasons that "sympathetic best friend" is more likely to be found amongst your single or divorced circle of female friends, and not amongst those who are themselves more or less happily married.
Oh, as an (to me at least) amusing side-note: Watch how those who know about you having an affair start keeping a beady eye on you whenever you come within approximately 10 yards of their own men. Another reason to keep one's mouth shut whenever possible.
It is human nature, and especially "female nature" to want to discuss our relationships. The opportunities to do so are curtailed in our real life so one suitable outlet are the various forums that exist on the internet for women in our situation. There are good ones and frankly lousy ones, and you need to be very careful who you trust and what details you discuss. The internet may appear a nice and safe anonymous place to vent about our affairs, but it would not be the first time that an affair has been discovered and a situation blown up spectacularly because of a few unwise comments somewhere on the net.
In general you should bear the possibility of any action being the cause of discovery in mind at all times.
I have had endless discussions, even arguments about this (for me) very important cardinal rule. The majority of my friends seem to be adamant that by the very act of getting involved with a man who is married or attached to another woman one is breaking it.
Be that as it may, this chapter is about understanding that we must not inflict any additional harm onto anyone involved, especially and most importantly those who could be affected without having any choice in the matter.
We may feel an overwhelming urge to kid ourselves into thinking that we quite accidentally ended up in the situation we find ourselves in, but that's nonsense.
Every Other Woman in every married man's life did, at some point, make a conscious decision to sleep with a man she shouldn't. Her lover made a conscious decision to stray. Frankly provided neither of you was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs at the time there was a choice made to do what is being done.
But I need not labor that point, we looked at the matter of excuses and explanations already so let's move swiftly on.
His wife, and his children if they have any, made no such choice. So to inflict pain on them deliberately, recklessly or carelessly in any way shape or form is not acceptable.
This, by definition, means that the perfect Other Woman will do everything within her power to prevent him being found out (this one is also in her own interest as nothing ends more affairs and ends them both rapidly and comprehensively as the wife getting wind of it - whatever he may whisper into your ears between the sheets).
It also means you need to accept that the main part of his spare time will be spent with them, not you. It means accepting that his money will be spent on them, not on you or on doing things with you.
It means living with the fact that not seeing him when he is on holiday and on birthdays, at Christmas, family days of any kind really, is how it is, and how it should be.
Having suffered a long three weeks in August while the object of my desire was sunning himself on some Italian beach with his family, and then staying carefully away from images of them all under the tree at Christmas, I certainly know how hard this can all be.
Make sure you have a wonderful set of understanding friends, as there are days when you will most definitely need them.
You should make a deal with yourself (and inform your lover accordingly) that whilst you are having an affair and want to keep having that affair you will not act in any way that will bring harm and heartbreak to those who are wronged by your decision and actions.
You hope that one day he will leave his wife to be with you? Well, this is something every Other Woman probably considers at least in a purely hypothetical way, even if it is not her deep and overwhelming wish or aim. He may even mention the possibility as a more or less likely future development but you should neither count on it, believe in it (to avoid the bitter disappointment that will follow more likely than not) or live your life waiting for that day to come.
Most cheating men never leave their wives for their Other Woman and if that is your declared aim or the only reason why you are staying in this affair then the statistics say you have no business having an affair in the first place.
What you must never ever do is actively try to make him leave his wife. Quite apart from the fact that he is having an affair with you because it's more fun and less hassle than being at home (and that making his time with you less fun and more hassle is MOST unlikely to make him want to swap hasslesome place No. 1 for hasslesome place No. 2...) it is not your job to put pressure on him in any way shape or form.
And never ever even think about forcing the issue by either risking his wife finding out, or committing the ultimate "Other Woman Crime" by actually telling her. The pain you would cause by doing so is something that nothing in this world is worth, not even that man. Probably especially not that man.
So depending on how you feel about the whole subject matter please try and bear one cardinal rule in mind: "Do no harm" or "Do no more harm than you are inflicting anyway by doing what you are doing already."
"What about the harm it is all doing to me?????" I hear you ask. Well, frankly, that's just tough luck.
First of all it is doing as much harm to you as you are choosing to let it. And secondly you presumably entered into that potentially harmful situation with your eyes wide open and at least a portion of your brain in working order.
If you cough because you're a smoker don't complain about it.
If you play with fire chances are you'll get burnt.
Have an affair and you could quite possibly get hurt. It's hardly rocket science, is it?
Just remember that all this was our choice. And we have the choice to walk away from it at any time (Oh YES you could). Those who had no choice in the matter (in other words his wife and family) deserve to be protected from what we are doing.
When we choose to have an affair or to stay in an affair we walk a daily tightrope between the feelings we have and the potential harm our actions and decisions might inflict on the victims of it all.
Walk this tightrope carefully. For everyone's sake.
We all know that being involved with a married man has some serious disadvantages. There is absolutely no point in listing them to cry over, or dwelling on them because none of them will really come as a surprise to you.
Let us instead look at the bright side for a change, the advantages of being "The Other Woman" rather than "the wife."
We play this little game of "Count your Blessings" because there are many aspects to having an affair with a wonderful man (if he wasn't a wonderful man surely we would not be having an affair with him in the first place now, would we!?) which beat having him around us all the time.
How many long term married women think back wistfully to those heady days when their love was young and fresh and exciting, when everyday life had not yet taken over? How many wish back the excitement of waiting for him to call, getting ready to go on a date, trying on 3 different outfits to make sure they're looking their best, racing around the house with butterflies in their stomachs checking if everything is in the right place and the candles within reach to be lit much later?
Almost invariably this giddy excitement wanes in the face of life, work, mortgage, the school run, the cooking, and all the rest that clutters up our lives.
But when we are the Other Woman chances are we still experience most or even all of that (in between the bad bits). Some of the "best affairs" are almost stuck in a perpetual time warp which closely resembles the early days of dating someone in a really good way.
What is rare and difficult to attain is always all the more desirable for it. Snatched moments can be sweeter than whole weeks, a stolen kiss more passionate and spiced up further by danger, promise and regret. Not for us the perfunctory peck on the cheek that's become the routine in many long term relationships.
Sex (we will, at this point, simply assume you do have sex with him) again can be exceptional if you manage not to let guilt or anger ruin the fun for you (if you do - bad move, why bother if you don't enjoy it!?).
Never underestimate what a powerful aphrodisiac adrenaline is, nor how even the "nicest" woman can be turned on by that heady mixture of desire and guilt.
The excitement of never knowing for sure how things will turn out does grate on one's nerves at times (more or less depending on your individual nature) but it also undoubtedly adds to the attraction.
Chances are he will be at his best behavior too when he sees you! He might be a couch potato and a bit of a bore at home if he has long since run out of exciting topics of conversation with his wife (or she's heard them all and won't listen anymore) - but he will be at his sparkling best when he is with you.
Men have affairs because something is missing in their lives (incidentally this is something wives would do well to remember), and often they miss that "something" within and about themselves as much as in their marriage.
They miss the smart, funny, cute guy they think they once were, they miss the intelligent conversations they remember (rightly or wrongly) being able to impress the ladies with, they miss the adoration in a woman's eyes when they've done something adorable or the happy laughter they used to be able to magic on her face when saying something particularly witty.
So when a man starts an affair he tries harder than he has tried at home for years. Chances are you're getting the best of him, and seeing a side his wife hasn't seen in quite a while, if ever.
And he'll keep on trying provided you keep things alive between the two of you. When either or both quit trying to make it special it's time to call it quits altogether.
The absence of the disadvantages is as much of an advantage as all of the above.
You don't (I hope) have to tidy up after him, someone else picks up his socks from the bathroom floor, washes his clothes, irons his shirts, handles the shopping, supervises the cleaner, books his car in for a service, prepares the Sunday roast, buys the Christmas presents for his extended family and remembers his secretary's birthday. If you are doing more than a couple of the above regularly you are in danger of assuming the role of a second wife; with the disadvantages of a being a mistress and none of the advantages of being the wife - take a long hard look at the situation and change it.... It's a bad deal!
Contrary to popular belief the average mistress is not a sad moppet who sits at home waiting for the phone to ring as a sign that the man she is involved with may have found a gap in his busy schedule and wants to see her.
She is a smart woman with a life of her own, quite possibly a demanding job, a good social life that does not involve him, friends to see, places to go, hobbies.
Basically she has a life!
If that does not sound like you, or, even worse, if this sounds like you before you met him, pull the emergency brakes immediately and either get "a life" back, or build one up for yourself.
It is absolutely not acceptable for any woman to sit around wasting her life (or even just her precious free evenings) waiting for any man to fit her into whatever other commitments he has.
Being lonely and needy is also not particularly attractive - so bear that in mind too. It's obviously perfectly understandable that you might generally want to see a bit more of him than you can due to the circumstances, but frankly that is par for the course and part of the excitement, and most men will either get bored with, or irritated by (or both if she's unlucky), a mistress that is just moping about unless she can see him.
It also puts them under a subtle (or not so subtle) type of pressure and if he is only borderline sensitive then he will feel it. We all know how men react to pressure, especially emotional pressure, so we may be shooting ourselves an own goal.
So looking at it that way the mistress is really getting a pretty good deal. She can have her cake and eat it too if she plays things right. She can lead a near "single-girl" type of life with most of the advantages and fewer of the disadvantages. And still has him (albeit on a more or less frequent part time basis) with most the advantages of being in a "relationship" of sorts.
Is it all going to end in tears? Well yes, as it happens, it probably will. And those tears are just as likely to be mainly ours. But if that's the price we know we are going to have to pay (we DO know that, really, deep down, don't we!?) then we sure as hell should be making the most of it while it lasts, enjoy it as much as we can, and make memories worth treasuring for ever.
Live life and your affair to the fullest, and in such a way that you can look back one day and say
"Je Ne Regrette Rien"
When I first started to speak to Other Women in the course of researching this book I rather naively assumed that most of them were really quite happy with the relationship they had. Obviously there are numerous downsides to having an affair as opposed to what conventional wisdom calls a "real relationship" but I did not expect a lot of women to be fundamentally unhappily involved with a married man.
So it came as a considerable surprise to me to find that quite a few of the women I spoke to were actually really quite unhappy. They were unhappy because they were in a relationship with a man they loved with all their heart, but who was married to someone else.
I tried to understand why they stay in a situation that breaks their heart over and over again, but I have to confess that I haven't yet quite managed to get to the bottom of it.
So rather than dwelling on their unhappiness at being in a situation of their own choosing, let us try and see what the difference between the happy and the unhappy Other Woman is, and how the unhappy Other Woman could change her attitude to the affair in order to be less unhappy about the way things are going.
We may not always be able to change a situation, but we can usually at least control our attitude to it.
The main source of unhappiness is certainly the fact that the man we are involved with is married. But frankly that particular bit of information does not come as news to us, now does it?
The problem with wanting him to not be married is that the more we dwell on the fact that he is, and the more we try to get him to change the fact, the less likely he becomes to do so.
We all know the statistics which predict that only a diminishingly small number of men will ever leave their wives to be with their mistress. This bit is not exactly news to us, but what may come as a surprise is that the majority of the Other Women I met and spoke to who did end up with their married lover had neither expected it nor ever asked him to leave his wife.
They were reasonably happy in their affairs, they gave it all they could like we do in any relationship that is important to us (at least in the beginning) and they were eventually, often to their own considerable surprise, "rewarded" with him leaving his wife entirely off his own back and under his own steam.
So whilst I would not really want to suggest that "having a happy affair" is a good tactic to get your married lover to leave his wife for you, there certainly seems to be a real correlation between those happy affairs and those who ended up as "more than an affair" in due course.
And as if to prove the point: Almost invariably the women who told me about how unhappy they were in their affair because they so desperately wanted their married lovers to leave their wives were the ones that didn't end up with him in the end. The affairs ended because everyone was simply becoming too unhappy for it being worth the risk and the hassle.
So how can an Other Woman make sure she is having a "Happy Affair?"
It's fairly simple, really. We just have to accept that what we are having, at least for the time being and probably the foreseeable future, is an affair. We have to swallow the fact that we currently have the choice of being happily involved with a married man, or being unhappily involved with a married man, and then act on that choice.
I personally am not prepared to waste my precious time and my equally precious emotions on an unhappy relationship or in a waiting-loop of any description. It seems a pretty pointless exercise, if one wants to be brutally honest for a moment.
Once we have managed to let go of the notion that the here and now is in some way not the real thing, but a stepping stone, or a prison sentence to be endured until such a time when the status quo changes, we can actually enjoy the affair for all the reasons we chose to begin it in the first place.
If I may use my own story as an example: If I had spoilt what was a most wonderful affair with an absolutely wonderful man by being unhappy about the restrictions the situation applied to it I would be heartbroken now. The man I was involved with died before we could attempt "stage 2" of our relationship, and all I have left is the memories.
But - honestly: "Oh, what memories we made!"
These memories are completely unspoiled, never poisoned by any bickering, we never once argued, and when we were together it was absolute joy. Yes, I missed him when I didn't see him, but basically I was rarely "unhappy" about the affair, with the obvious exception of the horrible weeks between his wife finding out and the two of them splitting up when we were in a "No Contact" type of situation.
The reason I am bringing this story up is because it actually demonstrates why we should try making our affair as happy as we possibly can. Because this may be "it". There may well never be a "Happy Ever After" for the married men we are involved in and ourselves. That should, however, not ruin the present. In other words the affair should really be seen as a reason to be happy rather than as something to be endured until real happiness can catch up with us.
If we can see the relationship we have with these men as something to be happy about as it is (at least for the time being) we can avoid becoming an "unhappy Other Woman" who suffers an unhappy situation entirely of her own making.
Relationships of any kind are to be enjoyed first and foremost for what they are, and only secondly (if at all) for what they may or may not become one day. This concept is hard to grasp for some, who appear to be in the affair purely because of the desperate hope that one day he will leave his wife. But frankly if we allow ourselves to conduct our affair in that way we will be unhappy. And an unhappy relationship is one that isn't really worth having in the vast majority or cases.
Interestingly the majority of the Other Women who do eventually end up making the transition from Other Woman to Only Woman tend to be the ones who were in what I would class as "Happy Affairs."
Having a "Happy Affair" could therefore help to achieve the very status that those who are so unhappy about being in an affair are craving. In fact in many cases it could be argued that these unhappy Other Women are effectively preventing what they want, by ruining what they do have in the desperate quest of turning it into something else.
If you want to avoid wasting months or even years of your precious life on an unhappy relationship then you should exercise your right to choose: Just as you have chosen to be in this affair you actually do have the choice to end it.
Or you could choose to make the most of what you and your married man have now, to enjoy it while it lasts, and to make each other happy.
Anything else, any transition of the relationship into something quite different, is another matter altogether which can be addressed if and when it happens. And believe me, such a transition is more likely to occur if you don't spoil the present by being an unhappy woman who lives only for an uncertain future that may or may not ever happen. We know that the odds are stacked against what we may wish for.
The best foundation for a happy future with your married man is, in other words, a happy affair in the present! Always remember that noone holds a gun to your head and forces you to be in this relationship. The whole situation is one you entered with your eyes wide open unless he lied to you about his marital status (in which case I do believe he is not worth hanging on to anyway as a relationship based on such a fundamental lie isn't worth the tears you cry over it).
One of the most irritating and thoroughly demoralizing aspects to life as the Other Woman is the fact that so much time, and really so much of "life" is spent waiting.
Waiting for him to call, waiting for him to come and visit, waiting for him to find an hour here, an afternoon there, an evening, a night or even a weekend if the gods are smiling, and last but by no means least - waiting for something in the relationship to change. Waiting for him to leave his wife, maybe when the kids are older, the mortgage paid off, the career more established, or any number of things which appear to be, currently, obstacles in the way of what the Other Woman sees as her chance of true happiness with her married man at last.
Waiting is generally a gigantic waste of time, unless it is filled with useful or entertaining pastimes. When I hear about women who spend hours and days staring at a phone desperately willing it to ring I could literally scream.
Yes, the temptation is there of course, and "Other Women" - especially at the beginning of an affair -
are tempted to rearrange their schedule to suit his, and keep big chunks of spare time free just to be available at the drop of a hat in case he calls and wants to see her.
Not only is that a waste of time, it is also a dangerous way to behave. It is all too easy to neglect friendships or even lose them because of too many cancelled get-togethers with no real explanation. You are not likely to say "Sorry, can't make dinner as planned because I am sleeping with a married man tonight instead," to all but the very closest friends, or at least not if you are wise enough to keep the number of people who know about your affair down to a sensible minimum.
To stand a chance of a happy affair the Other Woman must adopt a realistic attitude to balance waiting for him to be in touch and carrying on with her life. The best attitude to adopt is really to carry on as if he did not exist most of the time, making a concerted effort to spend adequate time with old friends, making an effort to meet some new people, not to let hobbies and sport slide and pushing ahead with the career if that has been getting a little less attention than it deserves due to that married man in her life.
Not only will this considerably ease the irritation of waiting, it will make for a much happier, much more contented, much less impatient and irritated partner for him when he DOES get to see her.
And it has never hurt to not be too available; it is not healthy for a man's ego or his attitude towards his Other Woman to know that she will simply drop everything at every possible and impossible time to get to spend a few hours with him. It will not exactly breed respect, nor will it make him want to be a little bit clearer and more thoughtful regarding the way any meetings are planned and scheduled.
This was the one aspect of "waiting:" The aspect that affects us from one day to the next, a week at a time or a month, maybe. The other aspect is the way we wait for life as we know it to change because we live in the hope that one day we will be "more" than "just" the Other Woman, that one day we will have him to ourselves, and have a "proper" relationship with him, live with him.
In other words: The Other Woman spends days, weeks, months, years, sometimes even decades, waiting for him to leave his wife.
As far as happiness goes, the happiest Other Women are those who have either given up waiting or have never done too much waiting around in the first place.
When I was researching this book I spoke to a lot of wonderful women who, between them, have spent centuries in affairs with married men. A surprising number had been seeing their married lover for over 5 years, over 10 years, and even much longer than that. That was one of the most surprising aspects because at the time I had not even considered that women would spend that long in the shadows, that long living a lie, that long having to be careful what they say, do and where they say and do it - and still hang around.
Obviously many of those in very long relationships with married men have seen a lot of "We will be together once ..." dates come and go and the men still remain securely married, and the Other Woman still hangs on. Those women have, for the most part, accepted that he will never leave his wife, and eventually mostly no longer particularly want him to. I guess there comes a point where you arrange yourself with all kinds of circumstances, and after a number of years they have seen the benefits in the setup as it is, and either don't, or no longer wish to rock the boat by changing the status quo that dramatically.
The other set of stories, which I have to admit scared and touched me equally, were those of women who spent years waiting, years being the ever supportive Other Woman in the background, and patiently (or as patiently as they could manage) hung on while the kids grew up, the mortgage was paid off, the career reached its pinnacle. They did so just to finally then see him leave his wife at last - and them as well, either to strike out alone as a single man or straight into the arms of a new woman.
I remember very clearly watching the funeral of Francois Mitterand, one time President of France.
His funeral was attended by his wife and their children (obviously) and also by his long term mistress with their daughter. At the time the last thing that was on my mind was the matter of "affairs with married men" but I recall very clearly how two aspects of that scene struck me: First, the dignity and class with which these two women dealt with what could not have been a very easy situation, and secondly how his mistress must have felt. I wondered if she had spent the many years she was Francois Mitterand's Other Woman waiting for their relationship to change, to now stand at the grave of the man she loved for a long long time.
If she did it must have hurt twice as badly, knowing that the wait was finally over and that he had never taken that step.
The fact is that few married men leave their wives, and the longer the affair goes on the less likely they are to actually do so. It is also a fact that of the small percentage that do leave their wife and family, many go back (oh how heartbreaking that must be - worse even than if he had never made that step at all) and then there are those who leave their wife and break up with their Other Woman at or around the same time.
Yes, there are women who wait, and whose wait is rewarded when they finally, after months or years end up with the man they were having the affair with, but it is not the norm. It is not something the Other Woman should base her life on, and if it happens it would be best to come as a pleasant surprise (how pleasant it remains, and for how long is a whole other can of worms dealt with elsewhere).
But statistically these are in the minority. The reason why people keep saying, "But I know many couples where the man left the wife and is now living with or married to his former mistress," is because they don't even know about the many affairs that have been and still are going on secretly around them, where women have waited in vain, and men have not ever left their wives.
Waiting is something that comes with the territory I'm afraid, and I won't pretend otherwise. Waiting is one of the hardest aspects of having an affair with a married man, and one of the most damaging. So it is something we should deal with carefully, deal with sensibly and realistically, and keep to the absolute minimum we have to cope with.
Doing so is not only going to keep us (relatively) sane, it will also be making our life much fuller and more rewarding.
The worst thing any Other Woman can experience is that she may have wasted so much time and so much of her life waiting, not enjoying life to the full, and at some point has to look back on all that wasted time with regret.
Whilst the irritation of waiting can not really be avoided altogether it is possible to have an affair with a married man and not waste too much time waiting, by making him and the relationship with him a part of our life, not the be all and end all and center of our universe.
If we make sure our life is full of other aspects, useful aspects such as furthering our career, joyful aspects such as a great set of close friends to share our life and time with, and interesting aspects like hobbies, maybe sports and culture, we help ourselves not to become victims!
Regret is not something we should encourage and create. We should try our hardest to get on with our life and making happy memories with the men we are involved with. One day, those memories may well be all we are left with - and too much wasted time, and certainly too much wasted life, would be too high a price to pay.
Basically that means that whilst we are all afflicted by the waiting game to some degree, waiting will be as significant as we allow it to be. We can actually fill the time we spend waiting with useful, joyful, entertaining endeavors. We can wait for a phone call while spending a fun evening out with friends. We can wait for him to leave his wife while getting on with our life as if we weren't waiting.
Once again we actually do have control over just how much we let this affect us, practically and emotionally.
We "just" need to learn how to exercise that control. This, of course, is the hard bit, but we should, for our own sake, take control of the waiting we do just as we take control of the other aspects of having an affair as far as the way we deal with it ourselves is concerned.
Recognizing the aspects of the affair we have control over and exercising that control is the best way to avoid becoming one of the many Other Women who are perpetually stuck in a waiting loop. Life is too short for that sort of thing.
If you take a long hard look at your own situation and have to admit that a significant amount of your days, let alone your life, is wasted waiting then you are doing yourself a great disservice. Change the situation, and if you can't change the situation then try and change your attitude to it. It will make all the difference to the way you feel about it all in the long run!
Nothing spoils anything we could ever possibly think of doing as effectively as being constantly dragged down by our own conscience and feelings of guilt.
Obviously it would be quite unrealistic to expect those who are conducting affairs with married men to be completely free of occasional, or even frequent stirrings of a guilty conscience about what they do.
But this should not be allowed to take over or ruin the relationship. Once we have entered into the affair with both eyes wide open we have accepted that we are doing something that isn't right and at the same time has the potential to hurt those who have not chosen the situation: His wife and family, in other words.
Frankly no amount of guilty feelings will actually make the facts of the matter any "better," so those of us who can keep them to a minimum are really just doing everyone involved a favor. There is no point wallowing in puddles of guilt, unless we intend to change what we feel guilty about doing. In fact I must confess that I have always viewed overly dramatic accounts of how an Other Woman is constantly wrecked by her own feelings of guilt with a degree of suspicion.
It is one thing to feel guilty about having done something that turned out to be harmful to others with hindsight, but to indulge (if I may call it that) in too much of it while still carrying on doing the very thing one is feeling so guilty about sometimes smacks of hypocrisy .
I am not a fan of making excuses, but when we are the single Other Woman in the life of a married man we would be well advised to limit the degree of guilt we allow ourselves to wallow in.
Put bluntly, we are not the ones who are cheating on our wife, and as long as we take all reasonable precautions to avoid her finding out about us we are not directly responsible for any misery she may experience. The wife in our particular triangle is the responsibility of her husband and whilst a degree of conscience is natural, and probably healthy, there is no real point in letting it ruin what we are evidently not willing to end anyway.
Those Other Women who are very religious tend to have the hardest time with those feelings of guilt and conscience, because almost every religion views affairs with married men as something that is to be condemned.
There is no patent recipe that allows us to get rid of those feelings, but we should accept them for what they are in the context of our affairs. Feelings that should be acknowledged and then tightly controlled, unless we are fully prepared to act on them immediately by ending the affair.
Some Other Women have managed to come to some kind of truce with their own values to a degree. They can conduct their affair with the minimum of interference by guilt. They try to do as little harm as possible under the circumstances, and squelch any undue amounts of guilty feelings in the bud.
Others, such as a very good friend of mine, adopt the attitude that once we knowingly enter an affair with a married man we allow our conscience to be effectively amputated as far as the affair is concerned. Said very good friend actually compared the occasional stirrings of a guilty conscience she experiences with the phantom pains amputees feel. Memories of where there once was a conscience rather than the conscience itself.
The fact remains that unless we are prepared to stop what we are feeling guilty about we might as well stop feeling an undue degree of guilt about it. All it does is ruin what the relationship we have chosen to be in, without doing anyone any good at all.
Sometimes those feelings of guilt are encouraged by the Other Woman out of a belief that if we do something so horrible we should at least feel guilty about it. In a way this is an attempt to "pay for" what we see as our sinful behaviour.
It doesn't actually make any difference to the situation (unless the guilt makes us end it) and frankly if you are ever confronted by his wife then the fact that you felt guilty about having an affair with her husband won't earn you her forgiveness either.
Guilt and conscience are again feelings we can choose to either control or act upon. They should not be allowed to take over our affair any more than any other basically destructive emotion, however.
We will keep this short as there are more than enough books on how to have sex and enjoy it, and will simply assume that you know what you are doing in this department.
Just as there is no point telling you how to have sex with your married lover is it also not particularly useful to try and compose a list of places to meet and get close and personal; I will leave that to you and your man's imagination.
There are, however, various aspects to having a sexual relationship with a man who is married or attached to someone else that differ significantly to those that pop up within a conventional relationship.
Never underestimate what a powerful aphrodisiac adrenaline is. Or how a bit of danger and guilt can spice up what might be, under more conventional circumstances, a pretty mundane and average encounter of the physical kind.
It is easy to let oneself fall victim of the illusion that sex with "him" is the best thing since sliced bread, and so unique and mind-blowing that we can't possibly do without it.
Essentially no one can tell you what to feel or how to handle your sexual encounters, but be very careful to see the tricks that your hormones play on your senses as just what they are.
Enjoy it, have fun, make each other happy, by all means! Don't let those feelings deceive you into turning the whole subject matter into something it is not though!
Another aspect worth thinking about is how to deal with "not feeling like it today." People who have affairs tend to, by definition, be unable to spend as much time with each other as one or even both would like. This makes that little time more special and valuable (or at least it should) and women especially are reluctant to ruin those "special" hours if they can avoid it.
But there are multiple reasons why a mistress may not be feeling compelled to tear "his" clothes off before he is even fully through the door every time she sees him. One of the most common reasons for a sudden lack of sexual "frisson" can be a conscious or subconscious desire to not be a pure sex object.
The idea that an affair is based purely or mainly on sex does not fit too comfortably into the picture a woman paints of herself and her relationships. So by not having sex she may be trying to convince herself that there is more to the whole affair than "it."
Men are, in general, less burdened by the fear of being a sex-object so may not understand that line of reasoning, especially if it is not explained to them. And because most mistresses worth their salt have long understood that rare stolen hours of being together are absolutely not the time for disharmony and arguments, they find themselves in somewhat of a dilemma.
If you find yourself in such a dilemma it is worth sitting him down and explaining to him what is bothering you. He may not understand you but at least he will know where you are coming from.
While I have your attention there are three absolutely cardinal rules you must under all circumstances bear in mind unless you have a desire to press the "self destruct" button any time soon:
1. You must not, under any circumstances, get pregnant, and
2. You will not leave any evidence, and
3. If your moral dilemmas prevent you from having fun it's time to get out!
1. It is blatantly obvious to everyone that getting pregnant by a married man is a disaster of the highest order, so however careful you are usually, double your efforts and never ever, under any circumstances, take any risks. Getting pregnant by a married man by accident is reckless, careless, and will more likely than not ruin your affair, and quite possibly at least part of your life. Don't risk it.
Getting pregnant by a married man deliberately or recklessly is even worse, and an indefensibly horrid thing to do. Don't even think about it in your wildest dreams. If you actually want a child find a sperm donor or a man who shares your desire, but trying to trap a man by turning him into a father without his knowledge or consent is indefensible in any situation. When the unwitting victim is married it's as close to a hanging offence as I can think of.
2. Not leaving any evidence requires a certain amount of planning and care which can take out some of the spontaneity of a physical encounter. It is, however, important and not exactly difficult with a bit of thought. Pay attention to the amount of make-up and perfume you wear, and keep your fingernails to yourself. Certain scratches are hard to explain away with tales of having crawled through a hedge backwards for whatever obscure reason he may have to find for these marks, so just don't leave any.
3. Not every woman can handle the guilty feelings that often accompany sex with a man they should not be having sex with. As sex is usually an important part of an affair this can taint or even ruin the whole affair for those who find it particularly hard to live with the role they have assumed. If this is the case it is time to take a very long, very hard look at the situation and to ascertain if being a mistress is really what the woman in question is cut out to be.