An Open Letter to the Wife of My Lover
By: Anonymous – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
I’ve wondered what it would be like to meet you and if we did I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you the things I’m about to. So many things I’ve wanted to say to you.
I’ve wanted to tell you I think of you more often than I want to admit. I think about telling you. I think about protecting you. I think about a woman I do not know who plays a very big role in my life. You stand between me and my dreams and you don’t even know it.
You see, while I get him in the shadows, you get him in the light. He has walked out on me when I’d spent days looking forward to seeing him for days when you called because you needed a tire changed or a kid was sick. He’s left me for you over and over again. I’m pretending I believe he’ll leave you for me once. That’s what I have to tell myself to look myself in the mirror. He’ll leave you for me one day. I won’t be a mistress forever.
You are the one he chose and he chooses you every time he gets up out of my bed to go home to you. I want to believe him when he tells me someday and sometimes I do. It’s believable, right? Because why would a happily married man spend so much time in my bed? But now that I think about it, it’s not that much time.
Yes, I have an advantage. He never sees me without my makeup because we have to make plans days in advance to see each other. I don’t have to ask him to take the garbage out because we don’t share a household. I do all of that myself. We don’t fight about money, because we don’t share any. The time I share with him is uncomplicated and unfettered by the daily complications of life because we don’t really share one. Occasionally, we share a bed, but sharing a bed is not the same.
Would you believe me if I tell you I didn’t set out to take someone’s husband? I’m not going to lie. I knew he was married and at first, that was the very reason it felt safe to flirt with him. It wasn’t going to go anywhere because I’m not that kind of woman. And I’m not really, or I wasn’t, but now I guess I am.
No little girl dreams of growing up and stealing someone else’s husband. That’s just not the way anyone sees it going. But one day I woke up and that’s exactly who I saw in the mirror, a woman who wants a man who belongs to another woman.
I’m not going to ask you to feel sorry for me for falling in love with your husband. That’s ridiculous and it’s unfair. Besides, I feel sorry for myself enough for both of us. And I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry that you’re living a life that isn’t the life you signed up for or even the life you think you have. I feel sorry for him too. I don’t think he ever thought he’d be a man who’d have a mistress, putting everything he’s built with you at risk.
I tell myself if you gave him more attention this wouldn’t be happening.
I tell myself if you gave it up more often this wouldn’t be happening.
I tell myself if you hadn’t let yourself go this wouldn’t be happening. But here’s the thing. I actually know you haven’t let yourself go, and you wish he’d give you more attention, and your sex life with the man I love would be much better if I weren’t having sex with him too.
I tell myself a lot of lies and he tells me lies too.
The truth is a part of me knows I don’t want to be with a man who will do what he’s doing to you. And the truth is, I pray every night I’m alone I can be with that man, that one day he won’t go up and go home to you.
You are the wife of my lover and while I might sleep with your husband, you hold all the cards and you don’t even know it. Someday you might throw all those cards on the table and walk away from the game we’re playing behind your back. You might walk away because of the betrayal. You might walk away from the life you’ve built because of me.
Someday – maybe.
But if that day comes I will never be a woman who can look herself in the mirror and see the woman I was before I met him. I know that because I haven’t seen that woman in the mirror for a very long time. Even if I get my happily-ever-after part of me will always be in the shadows with the man you married in the light.
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