She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look,
When it is over he places her,
Like a phone, back on the hook.
—Anne Sexton, “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman”
Vera checks her hair in the mirror and glances out the window. The table is elegantly set, the champagne is on ice, and the tomato salad, fresh from the garden, glistens invitingly. He said he’d be here an hour ago, but she won’t let herself call. She paces the small but elegantly appointed one-bedroom, returning to the pane to watch for his car. Even after three decades, she still anticipates the rush when she first sees him step out onto the street below. Glowing, excited, and a little nervous, she looks like any other woman in love.
But she’s not any other woman. She’s the other woman. Also known as home wrecker. Man snatcher. Mistress. Secretary. Whore. These are the cultural labels that have been bestowed upon women like her since Lilith. Vera hates those labels, which is why she and Ivan, the love of her life, go to elaborate lengths to conceal their thirty-year relationship. Ultimately she will take their secret to the grave. The only one who knows is her daughter, Beth. And at the age of fifty-five, having buried the two protagonists and packed away the evidence, Beth will reach out to me to tell her mother’s story.
“My mother’s long-standing lover, Ivan, was a rich and powerful married man. They had an apartment in a working-class part of town where they would meet three times a week, with a little garden they liked to work in. When she died unexpectedly at seventy-seven, I had the responsibility of closing up their love nest and helping Ivan, then eighty-five, reconcile his grief. There was no one else to dry his tears, because no one else even knew. Several years later, I attended his memorial service, though none of his family had any idea who I was.”
Beth describes her mother as a great beauty—dynamic and adventurous. Abandoned by her first husband when she was pregnant, she had married again, but left when he became abusive. “She was tough and independent, buying houses when they weren’t giving women loans. She got us out of that bad marriage.”
“A big and beautiful love” is the way Beth describes her mother’s relationship with Ivan. “I was happy she had that after all her bad luck with men. Ivan had already been married for decades when they met, and he knew he wasn’t going to leave. He had just lost his eldest daughter and could not imagine inflicting another loss on his wife.” Vera believed Ivan’s wife knew about the relationship, but it was never acknowledged. A responsible and generous man, Ivan ensured her financial security.
“In many ways, their arrangement worked for her, because she had a lot of freedom,” Beth concludes. “She could go to the love nest, be all sexy, have him think she was wonderful, make a delicious lunch and drink a bottle of wine, and then go home alone.” But her only daughter and confidante sometimes wishes she hadn’t been so intimate with their setup. “I’ve absorbed all the details of how an affair of this nature evolves and is maintained: the lies told to the wife; the excuses made to steal time together; the sexual dysfunction claimed in the marriage; the sexual exploration enjoyed with the lover. How my mother could never wear perfume in case it would leave a trace on him. How they paid the rent in cash and signed the lease under a false name.
“I had way too much information. Like the story of how Ivan went for his annual physical with his wife and the doctor asked them about sex. When Ivan said they didn’t have sex, the doctor offered a prescription for Viagra, and his wife turned to him and said, ‘Oh dear, you don’t want to start that up again, do you?’ When the appointment was over, Ivan pulled the doctor aside to tell him that actually he was having plenty of sex and he would like that prescription. I didn’t really need all these details, but they are now mine to keep.”
As Vera got older, Beth says, it became much more difficult for her “to be on the outside of his life, looking in.” She was ethically conflicted—not about her relationship with Ivan, but about being complicit in his deception of his wife. Sometimes she felt she had sacrificed her best years for him. She had to show up at every family Christmas alone, take vacations alone, and present herself in the world as a woman alone.
I venture a few questions. “And where has this left you? Did it make you believe in the power of love? Did it make you realize the power of deception? Did it make you aware of the astuteness of lies?”
She smiles wryly. “Check. Check. Check. On one hand, I was very aware of my mother’s pain, but also of her sense that the grass was greener on her side. Ivan’s wife had all the trappings of success, but she was living with a husband who was emotionally absent and didn’t want to touch her. He brought his best self to my mother, who reciprocated in kind. So yes, it has made me believe in the power of love. What I hadn’t realized, until recently, was how this history has leached into my own twenty-six-year marriage.” I’m reminded once again that infidelity casts its shadows far beyond the triangle of lovers.
“During periods of marital stress, I’m quick to suspect and distrust to an extent that’s not necessarily fair or justified. I can hear the lies Ivan fed his wife, my mother’s whispers of a sudden change in plans, the stories they would tell in order to be together. I have my mother’s sensuality and I want the kind of love she had, but I fear ending up in the position of Ivan’s wife.”
“How do you feel about Ivan?” I ask her.
“It was very hard for me, sitting at his funeral with five hundred people and hearing him being praised as a great family man. The worst moment was when someone got up and shared a memory of how he used to point to his wife and say, ‘Isn’t she gorgeous? Isn’t she wonderful?’ He used to say exactly the same thing to my mother. She gave him her love for thirty years, and she paid a high price. He never had to pay, beyond the money he gave her. I want her story told. She deserves that!”
Beth’s mother did not tell me her story directly, but many others have. When word got out that I was writing a book on infidelity, I started receiving messages that began, “I am the lover of a married man . . .” “I am the proverbial other woman . . .” “I am the third person in the triangle . . .” They shared their stories, their hopes, their fears and their guilt pangs. They invited me into their dilemmas.
All of these questions came with a request: Don’t leave us out of the story. In message after message, the lovers have asserted their relevance to this inquiry—after all, it is a topic that would not exist without them.
Most of the clinical literature on affairs is dyadic, even though affairs are de facto triangular. The lover is barely mentioned, and in therapy, is either ignored or disparaged. Most therapists aim to close the loop around the couple as quickly as possible, and the mistress is treated more as pathogen than person. Her feelings are irrelevant to the recovery. Because it’s rare for couples therapists to meet the unfaithful partner alone, there is also no place to talk about matters like how to end the affair with care or how much the lover is missed or grieved. “Cut her out” is the common refrain. “Break off all contact immediately.”
As for the general public, we tend to judge the “other woman” far more harshly than the cheating husband. When Beyoncé dropped her infidelity-themed album Lemonade, the volume of online outrage directed toward identifying and shaming the mysterious “Becky with the good hair” far exceeded that toward her errant husband, Jay Z.
I use the pronoun “her” because it is almost exclusively women in this position who reach out to me. These are not the short-term flings, the one-night stands, or the casual extramarital friends with benefits. They are long-term lovers who have spent years, sometimes decades, single and involved with married men. Lest your immediate association be the stereotypical femme fatale, the young seductress barely older than his daughter, let me introduce the “other” other woman—often divorced or widowed, in her fifties, sixties, or seventies, smart, accomplished, and realistic. These are not simply naive, lonely, desperate women who’ll take love in whatever form they can get it. In fact, they are pragmatic about their reasons for choosing to not only live with a secret but be a secret. This seems to be more typically a female variety of suffering, and it’s no accident that the epithets applied to them do not have masculine equivalents. We do not refer to “woman snatchers” or “the other man.” And besides, until recently, very few women had enough money of their own to be able to pay the rent on a nid d’amour (love nest) as well as the family home!
I have met plenty of men who were the lovers of married women (or married men, for that matter). But I have yet to meet a man who was single and gave his love to another man’s wife for thirty years, hoping that she would leave and come and make a family with him. If a single man enters a triangle, it’s more likely because he doesn’t want a more involved commitment. I’m thinking of Greg, who had been happily seeing his married lover once a week for two years, but was horrified when one day she showed up at his door with a suitcase. “I never wanted her to get a divorce. Sure, we talked about it, but I thought that was just pillow talk.” It suited him just fine to have a part-time relationship.
This business of the long-term lover intrigues me—why she makes the choices she makes, what she gets out of these, what price she pays, how she rationalizes her position. Whatever we may think about the ethics of her actions, she plays a central role in the drama and she too deserves compassion.
The narrative of the affair is worthy of attention, for it isn’t always clear which of the two relationships, if any, will have a future. Was the affair meant to be just that—an affair? Or is it a love story waiting to live in broad daylight? What are the multiple entanglements? Are there children involved? What promises have been made, time invested, hopes deferred? In therapy, some questions are asked in front of the couple, like “How do you refer to him or her? Do you use a name? An epithet? Or is it simply ‘that woman’ or ‘that guy’?” But others are reserved for discussion with the involved partner, alone.
“Do you meet with the lover?” people often ask. If the couple is intent on reconciliation, then no. But many lovers have come to me alone to share their woes. Some were strung along by false promises—led to believe the marriage was sexless, emotionless, or headed for divorce. Others were made unwitting adulterers by men who claimed not to be married at all. Still others found out they were not the only one. On occasion, the couple having the affair will come to me. Their questions include: “What if we were always meant to be together? What if both of our marriages were mistakes? Can we turn our backs on a chance to be with the loves of our lives? Can we ever be at peace knowing that our coming together will hurt so many people?” I have no simple answers to their questions. What I can do is hold space for their aching dilemmas and acknowledge that their marriages are not the only relationships that deserve empathic therapy.
“I’ve never been loved so deeply, with such affection, in such an emotionally and sexually honest relationship. Nor have I ever been treated so well.”
This is how Andrea, a fifty-nine-year-old divorced architect from Vancouver, describes her seven-year romance with Michael, a real estate developer. And, she adds, he’s married, and has been for thirty years. “I’m looking for guidance,” she writes, “but the literature seems trite and simplistic. I’m being used, it tells me, men can’t be trusted, and I should leave him. Some friends say the same thing—as if I’m some naive woman who can’t stand up for herself. It’s an insult to my intelligence and self-awareness.”
So begins a long and interesting conversation by email. This is a woman who conducts much of her relationship online—she and Michael exchange as many as fifty messages a night, she tells me. She welcomes an opportunity for written introspection.
Andrea is pragmatic about her lover’s marriage, perhaps because she herself spent twenty-five years in an unhappy union with a man who withheld from her, both sexually and emotionally. “Do I wish he wasn’t married? Absolutely. So does he. But he loves and respects his wife, and doesn’t want to cause her pain, even if their connection is now flatlined. Thirty years makes even a listless relationship feel like home. I can relate. The comfort of an old shoe, the fear of making huge life changes. I had similar rationalizations.”
“Surely it must be difficult for you to bear?” I respond. “What about your feelings?”
Andrea knows her insecurities. The sense of being inconsequential, subordinate to the wife. The judgment of others. The isolation of being a secret. But she says that she finds comfort in being able to talk to Michael about it all, as well as in his daily declarations of love. “How can I squander all that good love because he also respects and loves the mother of his children?”
For many women in her situation, even mentioning the marriage is tantamount to pressure, which could upset the delicate balance of the triangle. Then they reach the point where they are so damned tired of having to tiptoe around the topic. Finally they deliver the ultimatums, the deadlines, the threats: “If you don’t make up your mind, I’ll make it up for you.”
Andrea knows that neither coercion nor manipulation nor anger will get her very far. “The fact is, I don’t want him if he feels obliged or pressured; I only want him if it was his choice. So I don’t ask him to leave her; I assume he won’t, because he told me so from the beginning. And I don’t ask him if he has sex with her—I just assume that he does, at least occasionally. I can choose to stay or leave, but I have to accept what is. There is strength in making a choice, with eyes wide open.” When she thinks of it like that, she feels less helpless.
I wonder if she always manages to be so philosophical. Deep inside, does she think that if he truly loved her, he would overcome any obstacles to be with her? An hour later, another email is waiting.
“Of course, I do have fantasies about him ending his marriage and coming to join me,” she writes. “I often wonder if I am undervaluing my own needs, and my answer is yes. Almost every day I go through an inner dialogue of what am I getting, what am I not getting?” Her answers wax and wane depending on how insecure she is feeling, but ultimately she concludes that it’s worth it.
She also asks herself, would she even want to be with him full-time? She feels no need to be married. Furthermore, she confesses, “I wonder if I could maintain his interest or if I’d get bored with him or if he’d be faithful. I think we both worry that we could suffer the sad fate of many marriages. So seen from this angle, I may not be minimizing my own needs after all.”
I ask her what helps her cope. She keeps herself busy with work and friends, and she particularly enjoys spending time with her male friends, especially if they have expressed romantic interest. The fact that Michael has introduced her to some of his close buddies helps her feel more legitimate.
Andrea’s triangle is one type of configuration—she is a single woman, while her lover is married. It’s different when both partners have their respective “official” relationships. I ask her if she would ever consider getting involved with another man. She admits that she’s often thought it would be easier if she were married or had a boyfriend: “It would level the playing field. One way I have coped and boosted my self-esteem is to stay open to other possibilities. I have an online dating profile.” Ultimately, though, her heart is with Michael. “Compromising our wonderful connection in order to feel a balance of power doesn’t feel worth it somehow.”
“Would anything change if you were an acknowledged mistress in his life, rather than a secret?” is my next query. She replies that she’s never pondered that question because she didn’t think it was possible. “Early in our relationship, after the first admissions of love, he said he was considering telling her, and I said, ‘Don’t do that! She’ll make you choose.’ I know he feels strong loyalty to her, even if important needs are unmet. And he’s pretty sure that she would not be willing to share him. I’ve decided that as long as I’m confident that I alone have his romantic and sexual feelings, I can share his time and attention with her, albeit with a struggle.”
Every woman in this situation ends up doing a mental allocation of resources—negotiating what the wife and family get versus what she gets. Many lovers go so far as to demand sexual exclusivity from their married partners: “He lives with her, eats breakfast with her, shares a bank account with her, and goes out in public with her. Since sex is basically the main thing he does with me, at least this should be ours only.” Others delineate certain places or times when he is theirs alone. “Every summer his wife goes to Canada for a month to see her family. That’s our time.”
Andrea’s balance sheet looks like this: “She gets his loyalty, family, financial support, daily companionship, holidays, shared friends. I get everything that was denied to me in my own marriage—a deep emotional, sexual, and intellectual connection, romance, mutual respect, trust, and joy. I value these things more than all the stuff he gives his wife, so I believe I get the best of him. She may well feel she has the best of him.” Of course Michael’s wife hasn’t been offered the opportunity to weigh in on these economics. “But nor do I have any control over the distribution of resources,” Andrea is quick to retort.
Every lover tallies up justifications—it’s an unhappy marriage, they don’t have sex, they’re going to divorce soon anyway, there’s one more year till the kids all leave home.
Of course, there’s the wife’s side of the story, too. She has negotiated her own deal, and it didn’t include a mistress. Maybe her sex drive has tanked in response to her husband’s emotional absence. She was willing to tolerate the void of intimacy in return for his loyalty. To then find out that even his loyalty was divided makes her apoplectic. It’s painful enough to learn that he’d had other romantic partners, but when it’s a long-term parallel relationship, with its own commitments, rituals, and routines, it stings all the more.
Andrea thinks about Michael’s wife occasionally. “I never feel hostility toward her. I have compassion for her situation. I almost bumped into her one time at the grocery store, and I felt a crisis of conscience. But I don’t generally feel guilt.” As for the question, Does she know? “She’s never said anything to him. But how could she not sense it after all this time? So I believe it must be a deliberate blind spot. If I thought she knew and was suffering, I would feel terrible, and I would probably end it.” Andrea has just voiced one of the most common—and convenient—justifications.
When she compares herself to her friends, it confirms her conclusion that she has the better half of the deal. Many of them live behind a “mask of marital satisfaction”—seemingly contented in public, but sleeping in separate beds. “I don’t think they are any better off than I am,” she says. “We’re all just stumbling around in search of happiness. We all compromise, and we all rely, to some extent, on rationalizations for staying in our relationships.”
Clearly Andrea prefers to be the adored other woman than the avoided wife. Yes, there are trade-offs, but there are also benefits. In this, she reminds me of my patient Rose, whose mother suffered a sexless marriage and made her daughter vow never to be with a man who did not desire her. A married lover fit the bill perfectly—Rose and Tad have been meeting once or twice a week for three years, and his desire has never flagged. Being a mistress suited Rose—in the words of novelist Susan Cheever, “I had my freedom and I was someone else’s fantasy.”1 The lack of security and public commitment has been a price worth paying in her mind—until now.
Rose has tried to untangle herself from Tad several times, but he’s always roped her back. She wants me to help her cut loose, but first she must understand what she has been getting out of the arrangement. To avoid being the rejected wife, she became the pursued mistress. “There are better ways to avoid your mother’s sad fate,” I tell her.
Despite the benefits, I’ve seen over and over the heavy toll these covert liaisons take on the one who is the secret. Yes, the lover gets the lust without the laundry, but she lives without legitimacy—a position that inevitably erodes self-esteem and confidence. She feels special because he goes to such lengths to see her, but devalued by remaining unseen by others. She vacillates between feeling adored and feeling ignored. Oftentimes, psychological issues of self-worth, childhood abandonment, and insecure attachment keep her entangled. Her sense of herself as “not enough” is matched by her willingness to accept crumbs as more than enough.
In Sweden, I meet Ingrid, who captures these dichotomies perfectly. For years, she has struggled to end a long-standing on-and-off affair. Last year she thought she’d walked away for good, but then he won her back. For the past six months, they have been seeing each other daily, before and after he goes to work. She describes their love as “an almost religious communion,” but she also covets the mundane bond of chopping veggies for dinner. Lately he has been whispering sweet nothings about them getting married and living together, which has cranked up her hopes but also her anxieties. “When it was clear that we were lovers, and only that, I still had my own life, free of false hope and free to date other people. But now, I have become addicted to his dream and made it mine as well.”
Ingrid feels ashamed and angry at herself for getting sucked in, but is afraid that if she breaks it off, she’ll never experience this type of love or erotic bliss again. “I simply do not understand why he does not leave his wife!” she declares, listing the many unflattering ways her lover has characterized his marriage. “In our country, we are experts in ‘friendly divorce,’ and money and custody are not an issue. So why does he stay with her? But he does. And I’m sure he’ll still be with her at seventy-five, and still be saying he does not love her and he loves me.”
“What is it you need?” I ask her.
“Some type of revenge for my pain and the pain that my pain has inflicted on people that depend on me,” she answers honestly. “Irrationally, I want to shout out to the world that he has betrayed his family for ten years. But I also long for some restoration of my dignity in the eyes of all the people in my life who have questioned his love for me, his intentions, his sincerity. I long to feel chosen by him and for the world to know it.”
The illegitimacy of her relationship is unbearable for Ingrid. “I have this image of being at his funeral and not having the right to mourn or receive other people’s affection for my loss. What will happen when he dies and nobody is a witness to our intense love? Our story will just dissolve to nothingness the moment he is gone and I will be left alone.”
It’s a poignant and all-too-accurate image. I think of Beth, quietly attending the funeral of her mother’s thirty-year secret partner. I think of Andrea, who is grateful that just a few of Michael’s friends know her name. I think of Roxana, who disguised herself as a nurse so that she could visit her lover in the ER after he had a heart attack. And I think of Kathy, who wrote to me that she found out that her long-term married boyfriend had died only when she read it in the local paper. Each of these women lives with the pain of being disenfranchised. However we judge their actions, we can also acknowledge their suffering.
In Ingrid’s case, I hope to help her extricate herself. I sense the direct resonance between the plot of her illicit relationship and the lack of recognition she experienced as a child. She has told me that she was very close to her father as a young girl, but that as she grew older he grew distant, physically and emotionally, which made her feel ashamed. “The only time I hugged him as an adult was when he was in a coma on his deathbed,” she says. “I longed for his expression of love but his only language was money.” Ingrid was left not believing that she was worthy of love.
“Did that ever change?” I ask.
“Just before he died my father completed an autobiography, in which he made it clear to the entire world how important I was to him.” Ingrid stops, tears filling her eyes. She too sees the connection: Now she would like her lover to do the same—to tell the world he loves her, but without dying.
“In many ways, my lover heals the wounds of the past by giving me the love I have always longed for,” she reflects. “But he also reignites my need for acknowledgment. I guess this relationship is both repair and replay.” Ingrid is shaken and thankful. Maybe now she can finally break this destructive pattern.
Ingrid had the maturity to sever her compromised relationship. But many others find themselves caught in a holding pattern for decades, watching their hopes (and often their fertility) fade. A term used by Terry Real is quite apt for such affairs: stable ambiguity. These are relationships of undefined status but well-established patterns, hard to break out of but just as hard to depend on. By remaining in a diffuse state, people avoid both loneliness and commitment. This strange mix of comforting consistency and uncertainty is increasingly common to relationships in the age of Tinder, but it’s long been characteristic of extramarital liaisons.
Lia, a single mother of two young children, twice divorced, recently moved to New York from Tennessee and struck up a romance with the young married man who does occupational therapy for her youngest son. She doesn’t beat herself up too much for their involvement—“I was lonely, I had no friends, and he wore me down with his attentions”—but she feels bad about her inability to end it. For a year she’s been caught in a loop: “He’s so sweet to me, and the kids love him. I’m afraid to end up alone. But I deserve better—a full relationship, not scraps. But how do I know I’ll meet somebody else? Maybe I won’t. Maybe he’s the one. And yet I’m not just going to sit and wait for him to leave his wife.” Her chronic ruminations accompany her as she halfheartedly peruses profiles on Match.com.
There is no easy answer to Lia’s conundrum. Although her current situation feels fraught with uncertainty, one thing is certain: Her lover will never give her what she longs for. Ending the relationship will propel her into a real uncertainty, but also into choice and potential. She needs to break out of the sense of helplessness and reclaim her personal power and agency. There will be pain, but there will also be pride and the possibility of a better future.
Sometimes I am working with the married partner, but all the while I am thinking of the trapped woman and hoping that through him, I can liberate her. Jim, fifty-three, married with three kids, has been seeing Lauren, twenty-eight, for almost seven years. When their affair began, she was a college intern at his firm; now she’s a young artist struggling to build a reputation. She longs for her future to include a family, and Jim. Meeting him, however, I see clearly that he has no incentive to make big changes. He has it all: a functional marriage and a comfortable life, with a lover and a steamy sex life on the side. More important, he’s had his turn at fatherhood and is not eager for a replay. He has exactly the equilibrium he wants, and he’s learned how to keep it that way.
Whenever she voices her unhappiness, he lures her back with extravagant romantic gestures. Time goes by. She starts to feel used and puts pressure on him to leave his wife. He makes promises to placate her, but she knows they are hollow, so she pulls back and starts seeing other men. Scared he’ll lose her, he casts his hook once again. He knows exactly how to reel her in—renting her a new studio, paying for her next exhibition. Selfishly, he’s buying time—time that her fertility clock will never get back.
“You have to set her free,” I tell him. He insists that he’s not stopping her and never made any promises to leave his family. I’m sure technically that’s true—he’s said he won’t leave. But does he also tell her he loves her?
“Of course,” he says. “I do love her!” I believe him. But that’s why he needs to end it. Those sweet words that he whispers to her in the postcoital glow translate into hope in her mind. The lover’s dreams and longings almost never exist in a vacuum—they are fueled by declarations of love and complaints of marital unhappiness. It’s up to Jim to loosen the triangle so that she can remove herself. I will help him do so with care and mourn her loss. It’s easy to write off men like Jim as selfish and entitled, but often, they too are deeply in love, and they too need a witness to their grief.
Whether the ending is done in person or in writing, it must be responsible, mature, caring, and clear. I coach Jim in great detail on what to say, working through several iterations. He needs to acknowledge the reciprocity of their feelings, appreciate the depth of what they shared, apologize for the false promises, set clear boundaries, and give her closure. These are the essential elements of a goodbye. It is not that he doesn’t love her, but rather, that because he loves her he is leaving her. And once it is done, it needs to be definitive; he can’t leave her any threads of hope to grab on to. There is no way for this not to be painful, but it makes a world of difference if Lauren knows that she’s not the only one feeling heartbroken.
This approach is different from that of many therapists, who counsel a more abrupt ending. Typically, the advice is to cease all communication, delete her contact details, unfriend her on Facebook, and not mention her name. But seeing the fallout of this practice has made me seek more humane interventions. I’ve comforted many women who were “ghosted,” to use the contemporary term, by men whose therapists (or wives) insisted that they walk away from long-standing love stories with not so much as a goodbye.
“He never said anything except how he adored me and how amazing I was, and then suddenly—silence,” Jill recalls. “I searched online to see if he or his family had been in an accident or something. It was much more damaging than if he had just come out and said: It’s over.”
Casey’s affair with Reid suffered a slower death—the variety of breakup known as “simmering.” “He began to feel guilty, then started to withdraw. He didn’t text as often. He was late for our assignations. He talked about his wife in more admiring tones.” In the end, Casey called it quits when she heard his wife was pregnant. “I knew that eventually he’d just disappear.”
Kat is furious that Joel thinks he can just walk away and go back to life as normal. “What a coward! If only he’d had the decency to tell me himself.” She knew her lover’s routines all too well, so she made a point of showing up at his favorite restaurant when he was having dinner with his wife, at his kid’s baseball game, at the coffee shop before work. “Did he think I was just going to quietly disappear?” she fumes.
Darby at least got one text from her married lover of ten years, but it wasn’t much comfort. “I have to go dark for a bit,” he said, and so he did. Two years later, the darkness inside her is still heavy. “I’ve been depressed, even suicidal,” she says. “My friends tell me I have to move on, but it’s hard when he gave me no closure. My mama tells me, ‘What do you expect from a man who cheated on his wife?’ Maybe she’s right, but I at least expected to be treated like a human being.”
If the painful disclosure of a parallel love is to lead to a more honest future—for either one of the relationships involved—the other woman needs to be treated as a human being. She needs a voice and a place to dignify her experience. If the affair needs to be ended so the marriage can survive, it should be done with care and respect. If the lover needs to break it off to regain her own self-esteem and integrity, she needs support, not judgment. If the marriage is to end and the hidden love is to come out of the shadows, it will need help to go through the awkward transition to legitimacy. Without the perspective of the third, we can never have more than a partial understanding of the way that love carves its twisting course through the landscape of our lives.