The Affair

For a few years during my marriage, I had an on again, off again relationship to another man. I got involved with him because my marriage was doomed from the start, in part because of the abuse I had endured as a child, and my husband wanted to send me therapy to get fixed, like a malfunctioning car.

From what I have read, that's common. Women are more inclined to say "We'll get through this together." Men are more inclined to tell their wives to get it together.

I did ultimately get divorced, under non disastrous circumstances, so I think the affair succeeded in its goal of "saving my marriage" as much as my marriage could be saved.

I'm innately wired to be loyal to a fault and felt terrible about being unfaithful. I spent years reading articles, studies and books about infidelity, trying to figure out how to fix whatever was so broken in me that an affair made sense.

One article said that unlike what you see in so many movies, most affairs are a whole lot of phone calls and very little sex. I managed to take that to some kind of extreme.

In the years we were involved, I managed to have sex with him four times.

I stopped having trouble reaching orgasm after the first time because he was warmer than my husband.

That was in Germany. Like my husband, he was in the military and the military is a fairly small world. You can travel all over the world and keep running into some of the same people.

Our next duty station was Kansas and he was there though I didn't know it. I never saw him.

Our time there overlapped by maybe a few months. His adolescent son told him one day he saw me in a store or something.

At some point, he flew back for something for a few days. My husband was gone half the time in Kansas and he managed to come see me and we slept together.

I think this is probably why he left the army shortly thereafter: He was an officer and he was risking career suicide and jail time and clearly wasn't going to stop seeing me.

Somewhere along the way, he also changed denominations so it would be possible to get divorced without being defrocked, which is the entire reason I know the word defrocked.

He spoke of wanting us both to get divorced and marry each other. After he left the army and got a job in the middle of nowhere, I spent time trying to figure out how to get with him.

There were three colleges an hour from where he was. None of them had a major I wanted.

Somewhere in there, I had an epiphany that following my husband's career wherever it took us worked largely because he was, in fact, my husband. He not only financially supported me and our kids, I got to attend social functions related to his work and be introduced as his wife and none of that applied here.

I would need to somehow support myself and two kids while meeting a pilar of the community in secret to be his dirty little secret.

He and his wife had been hippies and drug addicts before he made an extremely radical conversion to Christianity. One month, he was getting high and clubbing. The next, he was trying to get sober and passing out Christian literature.

I don't drink, smoke or do drugs and she has about ten times as many lovers as me before our respective marriages started. I began to think about how a former drug addict and current alcoholic who was far looser than me would be characterized as a saintly minister's WIFE being wronged -- all due to his career accomplishments, but let's not confuse people with the facts -- and how I would end being a whore in the headlines. 

My enthusiasm for this plan to get divorced and marry him began to chill. I eventually concluded no man who actually loved me would do such a thing to me, so I didn't know what this was, but probably not love.

While I tried to research how to live on my own and attend college an hour from him as a divorced single mom, he talked about how -- unlike my rat bastard husband -- he would be supportive of my desire to return to school if we both got divorced and then married each other. He could pursue his master's while I got my bachelor's.

At our next duty station, at the age of thirty-two, twenty years after being raped at age twelve, I made my peace with those events and immediately felt like a completely different person. Within seventy-two hours, I met a man who became a friend for the next few years.

He was something of a mentor and I suspect he was saying what he somehow knew I needed to hear to be free of my baggage because he was likely Catholic and faithfully married, so while he did find me attractive, he wasn't actually hitting on me.

Rather than making empty promises that were fundamentally emotionally manipulative about how he would be supportive of my education goals conditional upon X, he was just enthusiastic about a woman wanting an education.

He would say things like "You should go, girl!" And "A beautiful woman who WANTS an education. What could be sexier than that!"

And for the first time in my life, I didn't feel I needed to choose between having a brain and a sexuality. That feeling that the entire world wanted me to chop one of my arms off and insisted I pick one dissipated. I could have both and not only have a man at all, but a better educated, sexier, better looking man. I could marry up.

With his enthusiastic emotional support and encouragement, I was soon back in college to try to lock in my old credits with an associates degree because if you have a DEGREE, you can go back to school anytime and get that counted, but if you only have CLASSES but no degree, they eventually stop accepting them as transfer credits.

The man I had been having an affair with looked second rate in comparison to this friend of mine who was better educated and faithful to his wife while encouraging me in the here and now to go to school. With my return to school, the other man in my life seemed to pick fights with me, as if threatened by me "closing the education gap" between us.

I didn't hear from him for a time which wasn't weird, so I didn't think it meant anything. Then one day I got snail mail from him.

He had mailed me back the phone card I had sent him to be able to call me without it going on his phone bill. I was being dumped.

I desperately tried to call him. No reply. 

I cried! Boo hoo hoo.

And after several years of imagining I could not live without him and it would destroy me etc, my crisis lasted an entire two hours.

I was surprised and decided I should think about whether or not I wanted him back. A few months later, I decided I deserved better and didn't want him anymore.

That night, I had a bad dream about him being very angry with me.

To my mind, THAT is when it ended and I dumped him.

Because I believe he wasn't really dumping me, he was just trying to exercise power and get me to come crawling back.

Having had an affair and spent substantial time trying in earnest to figure out how to get with him and make it into a real relationship only to have it slowly die instead, I've established deep convictions about having zero interest in shacking up with a man or moving somewhere to follow his career without marrying him.

I've never figured out how to make the points I want to make about that. I think a lot of women will never want to listen to me, women happy to imagine I'm a fool and a harlot and they are liberated women and it's completely different.

I write this hoping I will eventually find my voice and figure out how to effectively make the points I wish to make.