Sandra James
Being Rational When You are the Other Woman
I have installed the Being The Other Woman forum for quite a while now and I have been reading some of the posts that people have been making. It is an interesting insight into the lives of women caught in an affair with a married man.
Reading through the problems there as well as comments on my blog for certain posts, I think women do need to be rational when caught in such a situation. Frankly, I have not come across a man who left his wife and children for the other woman he is seeing. If there is such a man, it is indeed rare. The problems in the marriage must be insurmountable and the man must be truly, deeply unhappy to give it up.
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If you think about it, if the man is really unhappy in his marriage, he would leave, whether there is another woman in his life or not. I would prefer a man who can make a decision and stick to it, rather than waiting for someone to come along to push him into doing what he should have done all along.
And if he is unhappy and doesn’t want to leave for whatever reason, then he has already made his choice to stay in the marriage. Therefore, pushing him to leave will get you nowhere. Even if he leaves under pressure from you, it will be a torture for him because the decision did not come from within himself. He will find it hard to put the past behind and start anew with you because he was not that willing to leave in the first place.
As an outsider looking in, I can only say that if you are the other woman and want to continue to be one, stop expecting a married man to leave his family. That way, if he leaves, consider it a bonus. If he doesn’t, there will be less disappointment and unhappiness because you are not expecting anything to materialize anyway.
On the other hand, if the phone conversation goes great, and you speak several times before meeting, then when you meet in person and g*d forbid either of you feel zero chemistry, you just spent double the amount of time you otherwise would have on someone that you are never going to see again. I’ll disagree with this one (shocking :) ). I see absolutely zero benefit from a phone call prior to meeting someone. What can you really tell from a 10 minute phone call with someone you have never spoken to before which is probably awkward, because you have never met before. It is forced and it is probably not going to give an accurate impression of the person on the other side of the line.
I take it as a very negative indicator if someone cancels a date with short notice. If she gives you a lot of lead time, AND a good excuse, AND makes effort to reschedule, then usually all’s forgiven. I generally won’t make the same kind of effort if a date I’ve planned has been cancelled by her.
I never really had that much a problem with cancellations (and I don’t notice any difference between paid vs. non-paid sites.) I got stood up just once, and canceled at the last minute maybe a couple of times. The fade? That’s par for the course. I think I was also good about telling someone flat out that with kids, my free time was very limited and if something came up, I’d really appreciate adequate notice so I didn’t waste that time. This played into my rule of only dating when my ex has visitation and never paying a sitter (except for known situations).