Dear Coleen
I’m a single woman in my mid-30s and recently came out of an affair with a married man after 18 months together.
I’d known him for a while before we started the affair. He’d been telling me that his marriage was dead in the water and he wanted out.
However, during our time together he never attempted to leave her, even though he said he loved me and wanted to be with me.
In the end, his wife found out about us and threw him out of the family home – they have two kids together.
He moved in with a mate and, not long after that, told me he wanted to end our relationship.
He was really angry and seemed to blame me for the break-up of his marriage and the fact he only sees his kids at weekends.
His ex isn’t making things easy for him because she’s so angry about what happened.
I miss him, even though he’s treated me badly, and can’t believe he chucked our relationship away after everything he’d said to me.
Now I feel like he wasn’t serious about us at all and was just using me because he was miserable with his wife and missing sex.
I don’t want to move on with anyone else because I still love him, so how do I get on with my life? I get so angry.
Have you any advice?
Coleen says
The lesson is: affairs very rarely turn out the way you hope they will and a lot of people get hurt in the process.
Maybe when the dust settles between him and his ex, he might get in touch and want to give your relationship a shot, but I don’t think you should put your life on hold in the hope it’ll happen.
Of course you’re hurt, and it’ll take time for those feelings to go away.
However, you must have known you were playing with fire when you got involved with someone who was married.
I’ve been the wife in this scenario and I can tell you that his wife will be hurting too, and she’ll feel a lot of anger towards both of you.
I think if he’d genuinely wanted to leave his wife for you, it would have happened before you’d spent 18 months together.
The truth is, he was having his cake and eating it, and he didn’t want out of his marriage badly enough and he didn’t want you badly enough to do anything about it.
Would you really have wanted to continue being “the other woman” indefinitely? He’s the one responsible for breaking up his family and now he has to deal with it.
All you can do is learn from this and try to move on positively, and make the decision not to get involved with people who are married in future.
