Twenty-six years is a long time to look back on a single decision, but some choices cast shadows that stretch across decades. When I first joined that writing group, my motivations were a blend of artistic aspiration and personal desperation—a combination that should have raised red flags but felt entirely reasonable at twenty-something. The publishing industry appeared as a glittering castle on a hill, and I genuinely believed that with enough dedication, those gates would swing open for anyone who showed up with a decent manuscript. This wasn’t entirely my fault; the only success stories that circulated in those pre-internet days were the mythical rags-to-riches tales, the one-in-a-million debut novels that somehow broke through the noise. We didn’t have access to the thousands of quiet failures, the writers who worked for decades without recognition, the reality that talent alone rarely guarantees anything.
My other reason for joining was more personal, more vulnerable. As a young woman who always carried extra weight no matter how carefully I watched my diet or how many hours I spent at the gym, I had internalized the message that my body made me inherently less desirable. The dating scene felt like a brutal marketplace where I was damaged goods, and I thought perhaps among creative types—people who supposedly valued soul over surface—I might find someone who could see past the physical.
The group contained exactly two men who seemed to glow with that special combination of intelligence, kindness, and competence that made my heart ache with want. They were both brilliant writers, both emotionally available in that way that makes you feel truly seen, both possessed of that effortless social grace that always eluded me. Of course, they were both married.
For years, we all listened to one of them complain about his marriage. The stories were detailed, painful, and frequent—he spoke of emotional distance, of unmet needs, of living like roommates rather than partners. He assured everyone that once the children were older, he would leave. The other man rarely spoke of his home life, but carried a quiet sadness that seemed to deepen with each passing month. Then his wife died suddenly of a heart attack, and two months later, he asked me out.
Even then, part of me knew better. The age difference—twenty-one years—seemed significant, but not insurmountable. The timing felt questionable—was this grief or genuine connection? But loneliness has a way of silencing reasonable doubts, and four years later we married. Five years after that, he received a brain tumor diagnosis, and two years later I was a widow at forty-five.
Before he died, my husband mentioned casually that the other man—the one still married—had confessed years earlier that he was attracted to me. That single sentence, offered as a dying man’s recollection, became the seed that grew into a decade of poor choices. The knowledge that someone I had found so compelling might feel the same about me felt like finding water after years in the desert—I didn’t stop to question whether it was poisoned.
What followed was a masterclass in self-deception, a years-long dance around the obvious truth that married men who want to leave their marriages actually leave them. The writing group that once represented artistic community became the backdrop for an emotional affair that slowly consumed my attention, my energy, and ultimately my hope for a different future. Those early meetings where we discussed character arcs and plot structure gradually shifted to coffee shop conversations about unhappy marriages and impossible situations, always circling the same painful truth: some doors remain closed no matter how long you knock.
The tragedy isn’t just in the wasted time—though God knows that’s tragedy enough—but in the way we convince ourselves that our situation is special, that the statistics don’t apply to us, that love (or something like it) can overcome practical realities. We build entire imaginary futures on the foundation of “as soon as”—as soon as the kids are older, as soon as the finances stabilize, as soon as the timing is better—never realizing that “as soon as” is just another way of saying “never.”
The Seeds of Trauma: How Childhood Shapes Our Emotional Patterns
I grew up with a mother whose mind was a labyrinth of untreated mental illness, each turn revealing new uncertainties. Her illness meant our home was never a place of predictable comfort, but rather a landscape of emotional volatility where the rules changed without warning. My father’s sudden death in a plane crash when I was twelve shattered whatever fragile stability remained. The financial settlement that should have provided security instead disappeared through the hands of relatives who saw opportunity in our tragedy, leaving me to navigate college and professional school buried under debt that never should have been mine to carry.
School became another kind of battlefield. I was that child with the invisible ‘kick me’ sign, the target of relentless bullying that left me spending formative years in isolation. Lunch hours spent alone in library corners, weekends without invitations, birthdays without friends—these weren’t just childhood disappointments but foundational experiences that shaped how I would later seek connection. The message internalized was simple yet devastating: there was something fundamentally unlovable about me.
When we emerge from such childhoods, we don’t arrive at adulthood as blank slates. We carry blueprints of relationship patterns etched by early experiences. The template established was one where love felt conditional, connection seemed precarious, and self-worth remained something to be earned rather than inherent. This isn’t about assigning blame to parents or circumstances—it’s about recognizing how these early experiences create neural pathways that gravitate toward familiar emotional territories, even when those territories are fundamentally unhealthy.
What makes this dynamic particularly insidious is how it operates beneath conscious awareness. We don’t deliberately seek out relationships that mirror childhood wounds. Instead, we find ourselves inexplicably drawn to people who feel familiar in ways we can’t quite articulate. The man who complains about his marriage? He feels familiar because his emotional unavailability echoes childhood experiences of never quite being able to reach a parent emotionally. The promise of being the one who finally makes him happy? That taps directly into the childhood yearning to finally be good enough to fix the broken parent.
This repetition compulsion isn’t a character flaw—it’s a psychological survival mechanism gone awry. The child who grew up trying to stabilize a volatile parent becomes the adult who believes she can fix a troubled marriage. The child who learned to anticipate mood shifts becomes the adult hyper-attuned to a married man’s emotional state. We become experts in navigating exactly the kinds of relationships that hurt us most, because they’re the territories we know best.
The particular tragedy unfolds when these patterns intersect with infidelity. The married man who complains about his wife isn’t just sharing marital problems—he’s offering the exact validation the wounded self desperately needs. His attention feels like healing because it seems to answer childhood’s unanswered question: ‘Maybe if I try hard enough, I can finally be enough for someone.’ What feels like connection is often just trauma resonating at the same frequency.
Understanding this psychological underpinning is crucial because it moves the conversation beyond moral judgment into meaningful change. Recognizing that these patterns stem from childhood adaptation rather than moral failure allows for compassion alongside accountability. It creates space to ask: ‘What am I truly seeking in this dynamic? And is this relationship actually healing old wounds, or just repeating them with different characters?’
This awareness also helps explain why logical arguments against affairs often fail to penetrate. When someone tells you ‘he’ll never leave his wife,’ the rational mind might understand, but the wounded child within hears something entirely different: ‘You’re not good enough to make him leave.’ The emotional pull isn’t about the reality of the relationship—it’s about healing childhood’s deepest insecurities.
The path forward begins with this uncomfortable truth: we cannot fix childhood wounds through adult relationships. The validation we seek must eventually come from within, through recognizing that our worth isn’t contingent on being chosen by someone already committed elsewhere. The married man’s attention feels like a solution because it temporarily quietens the childhood voice that whispers we’re unlovable. But temporary quiet isn’t healing—it’s just another form of emotional avoidance.
Healing requires sitting with the discomfort of those childhood messages without seeking external validation to silence them. It means building self-worth that isn’t contingent on being someone’s secret exception to the rule. Most importantly, it involves recognizing that the patterns drawing us toward unavailable partners aren’t fate—they’re psychological roadmaps that can be redrawn with awareness and effort.
This isn’t about blaming childhood for adult choices, but about understanding the invisible currents that shape our relational navigation. When we recognize these patterns, we gain something precious: choice. The choice to step out of familiar pain and toward unfamiliar health. The choice to build self-worth from within rather than seeking it in the eyes of someone who can’t truly see us. The choice to believe that different patterns are possible, even if they feel foreign at first.
That beginning of choice—that moment of recognizing the pattern without judgment—is where real change becomes possible. It’s the foundation upon which all other lessons about affairs must be built, because without understanding why we’re drawn to these dynamics, we’ll keep repeating them while wondering why we never learn.
The Psychological Truth of Affairs: Beyond Moral Judgment
When we talk about infidelity, the conversation typically defaults to moral outrage and simplistic villain narratives. The other woman becomes a caricature—a homewrecker, a seductress, someone who knowingly destroys families for selfish pleasure. Having lived through this experience and counseled hundreds of women in similar situations, I can tell you this cartoonish portrayal misses the profound human tragedy at play.
The Real Face of the Other Woman
She isn’t the confident vixen society imagines. More often, she’s a collection of fractured pieces—a woman who never felt whole, never believed she was enough, never experienced unconditional love. Her childhood was likely marked by absence: emotionally unavailable parents, critical caregivers, or outright abuse. She learned early that love was conditional, that she had to earn affection through performance or compliance.
In my case, it was a mentally ill mother who couldn’t provide stability and a father who died suddenly when I needed him most. School became a daily exercise in humiliation, with classmates who sensed my vulnerability like sharks scenting blood. By adulthood, I carried this invisible sign that read “kick me”—an unshakable sense of being fundamentally flawed.
These women don’t enter affairs because they’re heartless. They enter because they’re heartsick—starving for validation, desperate to feel chosen. When a successful, seemingly put-together married man shows interest, it feels like finally being seen. His attention becomes proof that maybe, just maybe, she’s worthy of love after all.
When Pain Overrides Reason
Here’s what outsiders never understand: childhood trauma doesn’t just live in your memories—it lives in your nervous system. It creates neural pathways that equate love with pain, attention with anxiety, connection with danger. When you’ve grown up this way, your threat detection system is fundamentally broken.
Normal people hear a married man complain about his wife and think “troubled marriage.” Women like us hear the same words and think “rescue mission.” Our damaged wiring interprets his unhappiness as an invitation to finally be the hero in our own story—to save him, to save ourselves, to create the happy ending we never had.
This isn’t rational decision-making. This is survival-mode emotional reasoning. The fear of being alone forever, the pain of never feeling truly loved—these sensations become so overwhelming they drown out logic. You know intellectually it’s a bad idea, but emotionally, it feels like your only chance at happiness.
The Intelligence Paradox
Some of the most brilliant women I’ve known—doctors, lawyers, professors, CEOs—have fallen into this trap. Intelligence doesn’t immunize you against emotional neediness; sometimes it makes you more vulnerable because you can construct elaborate justifications for terrible choices.
We tell ourselves we’re different. Our situation is special. His marriage is uniquely terrible. What we share is transcendent. These intellectualizations become a cage of our own making, each rationalization another bar keeping us trapped in the fantasy.
Meanwhile, the married man—often equally intelligent—engages in his own form of self-deception. He convinces himself he deserves happiness, that he’s not really hurting anyone, that he’ll eventually fix everything. Two smart people collectively building a house of cards, each ignoring how easily it could all collapse.
The terrible truth is that emotional hunger operates on a different frequency than cognitive reasoning. You can have a PhD and still feel like that abandoned twelve-year-old inside. When that wounded child takes the wheel, even the most sophisticated adult mind becomes a passenger in its own destruction.
What makes this dynamic so devastatingly effective is how perfectly the pieces fit together. The married man gets admiration without expectation, emotional support without responsibility. The other woman gets temporary relief from her loneliness, moments of feeling cherished without addressing why she doesn’t feel worthy of proper commitment.
They become mutual enablers in a shared fantasy—one that ultimately serves neither of them, but feels desperately necessary in the moment. The tragedy isn’t that they’re bad people; it’s that they’re wounded people using each other as human bandages when what they really need is surgery.
This isn’t to excuse the behavior, but to explain its tenacity. When you understand the psychological machinery driving these relationships, you stop seeing monsters and start seeing human beings—flawed, hurting, and making choices that compound their pain while pretending to alleviate it.
The way out begins with recognizing these patterns not as moral failures but as psychological symptoms—symptoms that can be treated, once we’re brave enough to acknowledge they exist.
Understanding this psychological foundation changes everything. It moves the conversation from “what’s wrong with you” to “what happened to you”—and more importantly, “what needs to heal within you.” That shift makes change possible in ways that shame and judgment never will.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Married Men
Let’s talk about the numbers because they don’t lie, even when people do. After running a support community for women in affairs for five years and hearing hundreds of stories, I can tell you with certainty: approximately 90% of married men involved in extramarital relationships do not leave their wives. This statistic isn’t meant to crush your hope but to ground you in reality before you invest years of your life in something that statistically ends in heartbreak.
The exceptions prove this painful rule. In the rare cases where affairs transition into legitimate relationships, you’ll almost always find extreme circumstances: documented domestic abuse, active addiction issues, or severe diagnosed mental illness that makes cohabitation unsafe. These aren’t the typical “my wife doesn’t understand me” scenarios but situations where leaving becomes a matter of physical or emotional survival. Even then, the transition from affair to stable marriage remains exceptionally rare and fraught with challenges that most couples never fully overcome.
What makes this reality so difficult to accept is the contradictory nature of the married man’s psychology. These men often genuinely love their wives and children while simultaneously harboring deep resentment toward their marital situation. They feel completely responsible for their family’s happiness and wellbeing, creating an internal conflict that rarely resolves in the mistress’s favor. The anger toward their wives might be justified—perhaps there’s emotional neglect, intimacy issues, or fundamental incompatibility—but this anger rarely translates into action.
This dual mentality creates what I call the “affair limbo,” where the married man gets to experience the excitement of a new relationship without the consequences of abandoning his existing life. He can complain about his marriage to someone who sympathizes, enjoy the emotional and physical benefits of an affair, and still return home to the stability of family life. It’s the perfect arrangement for him and an emotional torture chamber for the other woman.
The financial realities further complicate matters. Divorce often means splitting assets, paying alimony, child support, and potentially downgrading lifestyles. Many men calculate these costs and decide that whatever’s missing in their marriage isn’t worth the financial devastation of divorce. They’ll choose financial stability over emotional fulfillment every time, especially when children are involved.
Social pressure plays another significant role. The shame and judgment from family, friends, and community organizations like churches can be overwhelming. Many men would rather stay in an unhappy marriage than face the social consequences of divorce, particularly if they hold positions of respect in their communities.
Then there’s the comfort of familiarity. Even troubled marriages represent known territory—familiar routines, shared history, and established patterns. Starting over with someone new means navigating the unknown, which feels riskier than enduring the discomfort of the familiar.
What the other woman often misses is that the married man’s complaints about his marriage don’t necessarily mean he wants to end it. Sometimes venting is just venting—a way to relieve pressure without making actual changes. The mistress becomes his emotional pressure valve, allowing him to release enough steam to continue functioning in a marriage he might otherwise leave.
This isn’t to say these men are deliberately malicious. Many are genuinely conflicted and unhappy. But conflict and unhappiness don’t automatically lead to action. Human beings have an incredible capacity to tolerate discomfort when the alternative seems too daunting or expensive, emotionally or financially.
The painful truth is that most married men in affairs are looking for supplements to their marriage, not replacements. They want to add what’s missing without subtracting what they already have. Understanding this fundamental reality can save years of heartache and false hope.
If you’re involved with a married man, pay attention to his actions rather than his words. Does he file for divorce? Does he move out? Does he introduce you to friends and family as his partner? Or does he make excuses about timing, finances, or not wanting to hurt people? Action always speaks louder than promises, especially when those promises begin with “as soon as…”
Recognizing these patterns early can help you make informed decisions about whether to continue investing emotionally in a relationship that statistically leads nowhere. Your time and emotional energy are precious resources—invest them where they have the greatest chance of yielding returns in happiness and fulfillment.
The Red Flags You Can’t Afford to Ignore
That phrase—”as soon as”—should trigger alarm bells so loud they drown out every sweet nothing whispered in the dark. I heard it years before I even married my husband, and yet when I found myself widowed and vulnerable, those words somehow transformed from warning into promise.
When a married person starts a sentence with “as soon as,” they’re not making plans. They’re building fantasies. “As soon as the kids are older,” “as soon as we’re financially stable,” “as soon as she’s better”—these aren’t timelines; they’re excuses wrapped in hope. The married man who complains publicly about his wife while doing nothing to change his situation isn’t advertising his availability. He’s seeking validation without risk, comfort without cost.
I’ve observed this pattern through hundreds of stories in the infidelity support community I’ve run for five years. The man who details his marital dissatisfactions to sympathetic ears isn’t preparing to leave. He’s managing his discomfort, using the attention and affection of another woman to make his unsatisfactory marriage bearable. The more he complains, the less likely he is to actually do anything about it. The verbal venting becomes his pressure release valve, and the mistress becomes the emotional maintenance crew keeping his marriage functional.
These men often present as successful, put-together individuals—the kind who appear to have life figured out. That very competence makes their complaints seem more legitimate. If someone this capable is unhappy, the reasoning goes, surely the situation must be truly unbearable. What we miss is that their competence often extends to managing multiple relationships simultaneously, not to fixing the broken one.
Then there’s the intimacy of it all—the whispered secrets, the stolen moments, the emotional and physical connection that feels so authentic. In these affairs, sex becomes both weapon and reward, punishment and comfort. It’s not just physical; it’s psychological warfare where the mistress is both soldier and casualty. The power dynamics tilt perilously, with the married person holding all the cards: the family, the social standing, the legal protection, the home.
The third party clings to every scrap of affection, every promise, every late-night text, building a future on shifting sand. I remember believing so completely in the fantasy we built together—the morning wake-ups, the shared life, the deep understanding we seemed to have. When someone tells you you’re their “total package” while they’re still sharing a bed with someone else, your critical thinking doesn’t just fail—it voluntarily checks out.
What makes these situations particularly cruel is how the end inevitably comes. After years of waiting, hoping, and sacrificing, the discard isn’t just painful—it’s degrading. The same man who typed out his fantasy of waking up next to you will suddenly become a stranger who claims he never really felt that way, or worse, that you misunderstood his intentions. The relationship that felt so profound to you becomes, in his retelling, a momentary weakness, a temporary distraction.
The three-way phone call with the wife after a decade of devotion isn’t just humiliation—it’s erasure. Your years of emotional investment become a embarrassing secret he wants to forget, and you become the embarrassing reminder he needs to eliminate. The longer the affair continues, the more contempt the married person typically develops for both the mistress and themselves for being in the situation.
If you hear “as soon as” in any context regarding leaving a marriage, understand this: people who are ready to leave file for divorce. They don’t make promises about future conditions. They take action in the present. The absence of action tells you everything you need to know about their actual intentions.
These relationships thrive on ambiguity and die on specificity. The moment you start asking for concrete plans—timetables, logistics, actual steps toward divorce—is when the excuses multiply and the distancing begins. The married person wants the emotional benefits of an affair without the practical consequences of ending their marriage. When pressed to choose, they will virtually always choose the security of what they have over the uncertainty of what you offer.
Your brain knows this truth even when your heart refuses to listen. That cognitive dissonance—the gap between what you know and what you feel—is where affairs live and where they do their deepest damage. The longer you stay in that gap, the harder it becomes to extract yourself, until one day you look up and realize you’ve spent ten years waiting for someone who was never coming.
There’s a particular cruelty to how these relationships exploit the very vulnerabilities that make someone susceptible to an affair in the first place. The childhood need for validation, the fear of abandonment, the desperate desire to feel chosen—all these are weaponized against you by someone who recognizes these needs because they share them, but lacks the courage to address them honestly.
The tragedy isn’t just the wasted time, though that is tragic enough. It’s the reinforcement of every negative belief you carried into the relationship: that you’re not worth choosing, that you don’t deserve happiness, that love must be earned through suffering and sacrifice. The affair doesn’t heal your wounds—it salt them, then convinces you the stinging means it’s working.
When you find yourself making excuses for someone who won’t make changes for you, when you’re hiding relationships from friends who would tell you hard truths, when you’re spending more energy deciphering mixed signals than building your own life—these aren’t signs of epic love. They’re symptoms of emotional self-harm.
The truth is simple, however painful: if they wanted to leave, they would. If they valued you more than their comfort, they’d choose you. Every day they don’t is a choice they’re making, regardless of what they say. Their actions aren’t contradicting their words—their actions are their truth.
You deserve more than being someone’s secret, their consolation prize, their emotional support animal. You deserve more than promises that always begin with “as soon as.” You deserve a love that doesn’t require you to stand in the shadows waiting for scraps of attention. You deserve someone who chooses you openly, proudly, without hesitation or conditions—not eventually, but now.
The Three Players: Everyone’s Role in the Affair Drama
We like to believe in clear villains and victims when it comes to infidelity. The cheating husband, the homewrecking mistress, the betrayed wife—these roles seem neatly defined in our cultural imagination. But after years of listening to hundreds of stories and living through my own painful experience, I’ve learned that the truth is far more complicated. Everyone in this painful triangle plays a part, and until we acknowledge that, we can’t begin to understand why these situations happen or how to prevent them.
The man who cheats isn’t typically some mustache-twirling villain. He’s usually a decent person who has found himself trapped in a situation he doesn’t know how to handle differently. These men often come from backgrounds where emotional expression was discouraged, where problems were swept under the rug rather than addressed directly. They’ve learned to avoid confrontation at all costs, and an affair becomes the path of least resistance—a way to meet emotional needs without having to face the difficult work of either fixing their marriage or ending it cleanly.
What I’ve observed is that these men aren’t actually looking to replace their wives. They’re looking for an escape hatch from the parts of their marriage that feel unbearable while maintaining the parts that still work. They want the comfort of family life, the shared history, the social standing of being a married man, while also having the excitement, validation, and emotional connection they feel is missing. It’s not so much about the other woman as it is about creating a parallel reality where they can experience what they feel is missing without giving up what they already have.
The fantasy they sell—both to themselves and to the affair partner—is that they’re victims of circumstance. They’ll tell you about the dead bedroom, the constant criticism, the emotional distance. And some of this may even be true. But what they won’t tell you is that they’ve likely contributed to this dynamic through their own avoidance, their own unwillingness to be vulnerable, their own fear of rocking the boat. The affair becomes yet another way to avoid doing the hard work of either improving the marriage or ending it with integrity.
Then there’s the other woman—the role I played. We’re not the seductive sirens of popular imagination. More often, we’re women with our own histories of emotional deprivation, looking for someone to make us feel chosen, special, finally good enough. We see this unhappy married man and we think we can rescue him. We believe our love is so powerful, so transformative, that it will give him the courage to leave his unhappy situation. It’s the ultimate fantasy: that we can heal our own wounds by healing someone else’s.
This rescue fantasy is particularly seductive for those of us who grew up feeling powerless. If we couldn’t fix our childhood families, maybe we can fix this grown man’s life. We pour all our energy into being understanding, patient, supportive—the perfect woman he describes his wife as not being. We think if we’re just good enough, loving enough, undemanding enough, he’ll eventually choose us.
What we fail to understand is that we’re not actually helping him. We’re enabling his avoidance. By providing an alternative source of emotional and physical comfort, we’re allowing him to avoid dealing with the problems in his marriage. We’re helping him maintain the status quo rather than forcing him to make a real choice. And in doing so, we’re ultimately betraying ourselves, setting aside our own needs and boundaries in service of a fantasy that will never materialize.
And what about the wife? This is the part that always gets me the most criticism, but it needs to be said: the betrayed spouse is rarely completely innocent in the dynamics that led to the affair. This doesn’t mean she deserves to be cheated on—nobody deserves that. But marriages don’t arrive at the point of infidelity overnight, and it usually takes two people to create an environment where one feels seeking connection outside the marriage is preferable to addressing problems within it.
I’ve heard from so many wives who saw the signs but chose to look away. The emotional distance that grew over years. The repeated complaints that were dismissed as nagging. The requests for marriage counseling that were refused. The gradual settling into parallel lives under the same roof. These women often knew, on some level, that something was wrong, but fear, comfort, or denial kept them from addressing it directly until it was too late.
Some wives contribute to the dynamic through their own emotional unavailability, their own criticism, their own refusal to work on the marriage. Others enable it by accepting breadcrumbs of connection rather than demanding a full partnership. And many, like the cheating husband, come from backgrounds that taught them to avoid conflict rather than address problems directly.
The painful truth is that all three players are usually acting out of their own wounds, their own fears, their own patterns learned in childhood. The cheating husband afraid of confrontation. The other woman trying to heal childhood abandonment by being the perfect rescuer. The wife avoiding the scary truth that her marriage might need serious work.
Until each person in this triangle takes responsibility for their part in creating and maintaining these unhealthy dynamics, the pattern will simply repeat itself. The husband might end one affair only to start another. The other woman might find another married man to try to rescue. The wife might stay in the marriage but build even higher walls to protect herself from future hurt.
The way out—for everyone—is to stop focusing on who’s to blame and start looking at what needs to be healed within ourselves. What fears are driving our choices? What childhood wounds are we trying to bandage with adult relationships? What difficult conversations are we avoiding because we’re afraid of the outcome?
It’s only when we’re willing to ask these hard questions that we can break free from these painful patterns. For the married person, that might mean finally having the courage to either work on the marriage or end it. For the affair partner, it might mean recognizing that no amount of external validation can heal internal wounds. For the spouse, it might mean acknowledging the ways she’s contributed to the marital dynamic and deciding whether she’s willing to do the work to change it.
Nobody gets into these situations because they’re evil or malicious. We get into them because we’re human—flawed, scared, and often repeating patterns we learned before we were old enough to understand what we were learning. The way forward isn’t through blame and shame, but through compassion, accountability, and the courage to do things differently.
The Price of Ten Years
At forty-five, I believed I had time. The body still responded to discipline—thirty pounds melted away with focused effort, the gym near work allowed daily sessions, and hope felt like a tangible force. The mind was sharp, fueled by grief perhaps, but capable of believing in second acts and publishing dreams. There was an energy then, a conviction that life could be rebuilt, that love might be found again, that professional aspirations weren’t completely foolish.
Ten years vanish more quickly than you’d think when you’re staring at the wrong horizon.
At almost sixty, the body tells a different story. It’s not just about weight or appearance—it’s the fundamental mechanics of existence. That shoulder that now aches for days after lifting a grocery bag. The knee that protests going down stairs. The energy that drains by mid-afternoon, requiring strategic conservation for basic tasks. Youth isn’t just about looking young; it’s about having a body that doesn’t constantly remind you of its limitations, that doesn’t negotiate with you over every physical decision.
The publishing dream—that bright fantasy that first drew me to that writing group twenty-six years ago—now looks different through sixty-year-old eyes. The industry reveals itself not as a meritocracy but as a closed ecosystem of celebrity and connections. For writers of mediocre talent (a painful but necessary self-assessment), the landscape has become increasingly brutal. The rise of AI-generated content, the algorithm-driven platforms, the endless sea of E. L. James imitators—it all creates a noise level that drowns out quieter, more thoughtful voices.
I’ve watched writers who once crowed about five-figure monthly earnings on Medium eventually crash, their incomes evaporating as platforms changed algorithms and reader habits shifted. Some nearly threw themselves off bridges, their entire sense of self-worth tied to metrics that ultimately betrayed them. This isn’t a hopeful scenario for anyone, but particularly not for someone who started late and now faces the industry with diminished energy and declining years.
The social fabric frays over a decade. That writing group where I found acceptance and community? Gone. Disbanded years ago, like so many adult social structures that seem permanent until they’re not. Friends have moved away, drawn by jobs or grandchildren or cheaper living. Some became Trumpists, their worldviews shifting so dramatically that conversation became impossible. Others have died—not just elderly relatives but contemporaries, reminders that mortality isn’t just theoretical anymore.
You can’t go back to those happiest times—the gatherings where ideas flowed, the shared excitement over publishing successes (however minor), the sense of belonging to something larger than yourself. Those moments become photographs in the mind, increasingly distant and untouchable.
The financial picture shifts too. While I’m finally in a job that pays well and am retiring debt, there’s the chilling realization that retirement age approaches with inadequate savings. Those years spent emotionally preoccupied with a married man? They were also years not spent building financial security, not investing in career advancement, not creating the safety net that becomes increasingly crucial with each passing year.
What makes the time loss particularly painful is the understanding that this was the last good window. Forty-five to fifty-five—those are potentially vibrant years for a woman. The children are grown (if you had them), the professional self is mature, the emotional intelligence is peaked. They’re years for building a rich life with a partner, for traveling, for diving deep into creative projects, for enjoying the fruits of earlier labor.
Instead, I spent those years waiting. Waiting for a man who was never coming. Waiting for a relationship that existed primarily in my own imagination. Waiting for a resolution that was never going to unfold the way I dreamed.
The cruelest realization isn’t just about the relationship itself—it’s about what the obsession with it prevented. It prevented me from dating other available men. It prevented me from pouring that emotional energy into building stronger friendships. It prevented me from taking professional risks that might have paid off. It even prevented me from properly grieving my husband, because I transferred all that emotional need onto a new impossible relationship.
Now at sixty, the dating market looks different. The body no longer responds easily to diet and exercise. Injuries come more frequently and heal more slowly. The pool of available men has shrunk, and those who remain often carry their own baggage of failed marriages and disappointed dreams. The easy camaraderie of middle age gives way to the more complicated negotiations of later life.
There’s a particular loneliness to realizing that the best times are likely behind you. That the adventures you imagined—the book publications, the romantic travels, the professional satisfactions—probably won’t happen now. That what lies ahead is more about managing decline than about achieving dreams.
This isn’t to say that life after sixty lacks value or joy—it can be rich in different ways. But there’s a stark difference between entering these years with a partner built over decades, with shared memories and financial security, and entering them alone, having wasted the last good building years on a fantasy.
The publishing dream serves as a perfect metaphor for the larger disappointment. We’re sold the myth that talent and perseverance will eventually be recognized. But the reality is that timing, connections, and pure luck play enormous roles. Starting late in the game, without connections, without extraordinary talent, and without the energy to hustle relentlessly—it’s a recipe for quiet obscurity.
I write this not to wallow in self-pity but to create a stark contrast for anyone contemplating wasting their own precious years. That man who says he’ll leave his wife? Look at him carefully. Is he worth your last good years? Is any man worth sacrificing the final window of opportunity to build a meaningful life?
The body keeps score in ways the heart refuses to acknowledge. Every year spent waiting is a year of physical capital spent. Every moment of emotional turmoil takes a toll that accumulates. The stress hormones, the lost sleep, the neglected health appointments—they all add up to a physical price that will eventually come due.
Meanwhile, the world moves on without you. Friends build lives. Colleagues advance careers. Potential partners find other people. Opportunities arise and vanish while you’re staring at your phone, waiting for a text that rarely comes or never says what you hope it will say.
Ten years from now, you’ll be exactly where I am—looking back at the choices that brought you here. The question is: what will you see when you look back? A decade spent building something real, or a decade spent waiting for something that was never real to begin with?
The clock ticks for everyone. But for women in midlife, it ticks with a particular urgency that we often ignore until it’s too late. Don’t let the fantasy blind you to the reality of time’s passage. Don’t let the desperation for love make you sacrifice the years when you could have been building a life that didn’t require rescue.
Those years between forty-five and sixty—they’re the last ones where you have enough youth to build and enough wisdom to build well. Don’t waste them on someone who’s already built his life with someone else.
The Road Not Taken
Looking back from the precipice of sixty, the alternate paths shimmer like mirages in the desert of what actually happened. The year following my husband’s death presented a fork in the road I didn’t recognize at the time—one way led toward healing and new beginnings, the other deeper into the labyrinth of someone else’s marriage.
Had I given myself the proper year to grieve—truly grieve, not just go through the motions while secretly waiting for another man’s attention—I would have emerged at forty-six with clearer eyes. The fog of loss might have lifted enough to see the situation for what it was: a married man’s midlife crisis meeting a widow’s desperation. Not exactly the stuff of epic romance, no matter how my lonely heart tried to dress it up.
That first year of widowhood, despite the aching loneliness, held unexpected gifts. I discovered reservoirs of strength I never knew I possessed. Caring for dying relatives and a terminally ill spouse while maintaining a demanding career had forged something resilient in me. I was proud of that person—the one who could function on three hours of sleep, handle medical crises with calm competence, and still find the emotional bandwidth to help her husband complete his final book.
That woman deserved better than clandestine lunches and stolen moments. She deserved someone who could claim her proudly in the light of day, who didn’t need to check his watch constantly or make excuses about why he couldn’t stay the night.
Instead of dating, I poured all that hard-won resilience into a fantasy. The energy I could have used to rebuild my social life after years of caregiving went into analyzing every text message. The mental space that might have nurtured new friendships became occupied with decoding his mixed signals. The emotional vulnerability that could have been offered to someone available was spent on a man who kept one foot firmly planted in his marriage.
Here’s what that diversion cost me: the last years of my physical prime. At forty-five, I still had the metabolism to lose thirty pounds with disciplined effort. I had the joint health to take up yoga without worrying about injury. I had the energy to work full days and still have something left for social activities in the evening. Most importantly, I had hope—that fragile, precious commodity that diminishes with each passing year of disappointment.
The cruel irony? The affair partner became the catalyst for my best physical self. Knowing he might see me motivated my fitness routine in ways no personal goal ever could. I became the version of myself I thought he wanted: thinner, more put-together, carefully curated. I invested in better clothes, learned new makeup techniques, even changed my hair—all for a man who saw me in fragments between family obligations.
This is the tragedy of the other woman’s makeover: she becomes her most attractive self for someone who can never fully appreciate it. The glow-up happens in the shadows, witnessed only in stolen moments. There are no vacation photos together, no family holidays, no proud introductions to friends. Just the secret knowledge that you look good for someone who can’t claim you.
The dating market realities would have been harsh at forty-five—I’m not naive about that. The double standards around age and appearance hit women with particular cruelty. But I’d survived worse. The childhood bullying, the financial struggles, the medical crises—all had taught me how to withstand discomfort. What I hadn’t learned was how to stop conflating male attention with self-worth.
There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from being chosen—really chosen, not secretly slotted into someone’s life around the edges. That confidence changes how you carry yourself, how you interact with potential partners, how you set boundaries. I never developed that confidence because I was always someone’s dirty secret.
The writing career I thought would blossom never did. Those years I spent waiting for him could have been spent building my craft, developing my voice, connecting with other writers. Instead, I poured my creative energy into crafting the perfect response to his messages, analyzing his horoscope for signs of commitment, and building elaborate fantasies about our future together.
Now at sixty, the publishing industry has shifted in ways that make midlist authors like me virtually obsolete. The window when I might have built an audience has closed. The body that might have enjoyed dating adventures now creaks with the beginnings of arthritis. The social confidence that comes from regular interaction with available partners never developed.
The married man? He’s still married. Still in the same house, with the same wife, probably having the same arguments. The only difference is that he’s older too, and presumably wiser about not getting caught again. The drama I thought was so epic was just a chapter in his life—one he’s likely edited out of his personal narrative.
We tell ourselves we have time. That we’ll focus on our own lives after this situation resolves itself. That we’re young enough to start over when this plays out. But time is the one resource we can’t renew, and middle age disappears faster than we imagine.
The road not taken glitters with possibility because we never have to face its disappointments. Maybe I wouldn’t have found love. Maybe my writing career would have failed anyway. But I would have failed on my own terms, not someone else’s schedule. There’s dignity in that failure—the kind that allows you to look yourself in the mirror without flinching.
When you’re the secret, you’re always compromising your integrity in small ways: lying to friends about your weekend plans, pretending you’re busy when you’re just waiting for his call, crafting elaborate cover stories for trips that should be simple joys. These small erosions of self add up until you barely recognize the person you’ve become.
The woman who handled brain tumor crises with grace deserved better than to become someone who jumped at phone notifications. The professional who managed complex cases deserved better than to become an expert in decoding married men’s mixed signals. The writer who helped her husband complete his final book deserved better than to waste her creative energy on fantasy relationships.
Time is the great truth-teller. It reveals what mattered and what was merely distraction. It shows us which investments yielded returns and which were sunk costs. The affair was a sinkhole—it absorbed everything I put into it and gave back only lessons I could have learned less painfully elsewhere.
Now I understand why they call it middle age—not because it’s necessarily the midpoint of your life, but because it’s the last age where you still have meaningful choices. The road not taken disappears into the undergrowth of aging, and you’re left with the path you actually chose, overgrown with regrets and what-ifs.
The particular tragedy of affair time is that it feels suspended outside normal reality—like you’ve pressed pause on your actual life while this drama plays out. But the clock keeps ticking elsewhere. Friends move away or become strangers through ideological divides. Parents age and need care. Career opportunities arise and pass. Your body changes regardless of whether you’re paying attention.
I thought I was preserving my options by waiting for him. In reality, I was letting all my other options expire while waiting for one that was never truly available. The married man gets to keep his family, his social standing, his financial security—he just adds some secret excitement on the side. The other woman gets fragments of time and the erosion of her self-respect.
There’s no undo button for the decade I spent in this limbo. But there might be for you, if you’re earlier in the process. The road not taken might still be accessible if you’re willing to turn around now and look for the path that leads toward your own life, not someone else’s fantasy version of it.
Rebuilding Your Life: A Practical Guide to Escaping the Affair Trap
The moment you hear those two words—”as soon as”—something in your gut should clench. It’s not a promise; it’s a postponement. It’s the sound of someone who wants to have their cake and eat it too, while you’re left holding the empty plate. I learned this lesson the hard way, after years of listening to variations of “as soon as the kids are older” and “as soon as things settle down at work.”
When a married person says “as soon as,” what they’re really saying is “never.” They’re buying time, maintaining the status quo while keeping you on the hook. The timing is never right because they don’t actually want the timing to be right. They want both worlds—the stability of home and the excitement of the affair—and they’ll string you along indefinitely to maintain that balance.
I remember the exact moment I should have walked away. He said, “As soon as I get through this project at work, we can really focus on us.” At the time, it sounded reasonable. Now I understand it was just another delay tactic in a long series of delay tactics. The project ended, another began. There was always something.
If you’re hearing these words, here’s what you need to do: Stop. Breathe. And recognize that you’re being managed, not loved. The person saying these things isn’t necessarily malicious—they might genuinely believe their own promises—but they’re deeply conflicted and ultimately unreliable.
The immediate action is simple but difficult: You must disengage. This doesn’t mean having one more conversation to “make them understand.” It means creating distance. Stop taking their calls. Stop responding to texts. Delete their number if you have to. The withdrawal will be painful, like quitting any addiction, but it’s necessary.
Seeking Professional Support
You can’t do this alone. The emotional pull of these relationships is too strong, rooted in childhood patterns and deep-seated needs that no amount of willpower can overcome. This is where professional help becomes essential.
Finding a therapist who specializes in attachment issues and relationship patterns can be life-changing. Look for someone who understands that you’re not a “homewrecker” but someone repeating childhood patterns. A good therapist won’t shame you but will help you understand why you chose this unavailable person and how to choose differently next time.
In my case, therapy helped me see that I was trying to recreate and fix my childhood relationship with my emotionally unavailable mother. Every time I tried to “earn” love from someone who couldn’t fully give it, I was replaying that old dynamic. Understanding this pattern didn’t make the pain go away, but it gave me a framework for making different choices.
Support groups can be equally valuable. There’s something powerful about sitting in a room (or on a Zoom call) with other women who understand exactly what you’re going through. The shame melts away when you realize you’re not alone, not a monster, but someone who took a wrong turn while searching for love.
I eventually started my own support community for women in similar situations. The stories were heartbreakingly similar—intelligent, capable women who found themselves waiting years for someone who would never truly be available. In that shared space, we began the slow work of rebuilding our self-worth.
The Inner Work: Healing Childhood Wounds
This is the most challenging but most rewarding part of the journey. The affair wasn’t the problem; it was a symptom. The real issue is why you found this dynamic appealing in the first place.
For many of us, it traces back to childhood. Maybe you had to work extra hard for parental affection. Maybe love felt conditional, based on your achievements or good behavior. Perhaps you were the caregiver in your family, learning that your value came from what you could do for others rather than who you were.
These patterns become invisible scripts that run our adult relationships. We find people who feel familiar—emotionally unavailable, needing “fixing,” just out of reach—because that’s what love felt like growing up.
Healing begins with recognizing these patterns. Journaling helped me immensely. I started writing about my childhood, my parents’ marriage, my earliest memories of love and belonging. Patterns emerged that I’d never noticed before.
Then came the harder work: learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings instead of rushing to another person to soothe them. When I felt lonely, instead of texting him, I’d sit with the loneliness and investigate it. Where did I feel it in my body? What memories did it trigger? Slowly, I learned that I could tolerate these feelings without immediately seeking external validation.
Building self-worth outside of relationships was crucial. I started setting small goals unrelated to dating or romance—learning a new skill, improving my health, advancing in my career. Each accomplishment, however minor, reinforced that I was valuable on my own, not just as someone’s partner or potential partner.
Creating New Patterns
Recovery isn’t just about ending the affair; it’s about building a life where you don’t need this kind of relationship anymore. This means developing new standards for how you want to be treated and learning to enforce those boundaries.
I created a list of non-negotiable requirements for any future relationship: full transparency, emotional availability, and most importantly, actual availability—no more married men, no more “complicated situations.” At first, it felt like I was ruling out everyone. But that was the point—I needed to break the pattern, even if it meant being alone for a while.
Slowly, I learned to identify red flags earlier. That charming but recently separated man? Probably not ready. The guy who talks endlessly about his terrible marriage? Definitely not available. These were variations of the same unavailable man I’d always been drawn to, just in different packaging.
The work is ongoing, even now. Some days are better than others. But the intense pull toward unavailable people has diminished significantly. I can now recognize that feeling of “chemistry” with someone unavailable for what it often is—not true connection, but familiar dysfunction.
Rebuilding after an affair isn’t just about moving on from one person; it’s about rebuilding your entire relationship with yourself. It’s learning that you’re worthy of love that doesn’t require waiting, hiding, or compromising your values. And that might be the most important lesson of all.
The Final Warning: No Second Chances in Life
At sixty, perspective arrives with brutal clarity. The body that once carried me through sixteen-hour workdays while caring for dying loved ones now protests at the slightest overexertion. The mind that believed in romantic destiny now recognizes patterns with clinical detachment. The heart that once swelled with hope now measures time in irreversible losses.
This is what they don’t tell you about long-term affairs—not the moral implications, not the emotional rollercoaster, but the sheer arithmetic of time. Ten years spent waiting for someone else’s life to change represents approximately 3,650 days of emotional investment, countless hours of mental energy, and the entire decade between forty-five and fifty-five—precisely when many women rebuild their lives after loss or redirect their careers toward something more meaningful.
I watch friends who left unhappy marriages at forty-five now enjoying retirement with new partners. I see women who invested in themselves rather than married men now running successful businesses or enjoying grandchildren. Meanwhile, I’m calculating how many working years I have left before age真正 becomes a barrier to employment, wondering if I’ll ever recoup the financial stability that emotional distractions cost me.
The publishing dreams that once seemed within reach? The industry has transformed into something barely recognizable—a landscape where algorithms trump talent and personal connections outweigh merit. Those five-figure Medium successes I envied have mostly evaporated, their authors now scrambling for stable income like everyone else. The book I helped my late husband finish represents not a legacy but a reminder of how quickly opportunities fade when we’re not fully present in our own lives.
Yet even now, at sixty, there’s limited hope—not for romantic rescue, but for incremental improvement. The job that finally pays well, the debts slowly retiring, the hard-won understanding that no person can complete you—these small victories matter. They’re the foundation upon which whatever remains of life must be built.
If you’re reading this while entangled with someone else’s spouse, understand this: your current emotional state feels permanent but isn’t. The desperation, the conviction that this person is your only chance at happiness—these are symptoms of the attachment, not evidence of its rightness. The married man who seems like your soulmate today may well be the source of your deepest regrets a decade from now.
Leave now. Not because it’s morally right (though it is), not because you’ll definitely find someone better (though you might), but because every day you spend waiting for someone else’s life to change is a day you’re not investing in your own. That investment compounds over time—in career advancement, in friendships deepened, in personal growth achieved—while emotional limbo only drains your resources.
Perhaps most importantly: recognize that the person you’re risking your future for is likely not who you imagine them to be. The married man who complains about his wife but won’t leave isn’t a victim—he’s a participant in his own unhappiness. The man who promises change “as soon as” certain conditions are met is showing you his priority structure, and you’re not at the top.
My greatest regret isn’t the moral failure or even the heartbreak—it’s the time. Time I could have spent building something lasting instead of waiting for something temporary. Time I could have invested in friendships that might have sustained me through aging instead of isolating myself for a secret relationship. Time I could have used to build professional skills instead of analyzing someone else’s marriage.
If this article reaches just one woman at the beginning of this journey rather than the end, it will have served its purpose. Your life is happening now, not after someone else’s circumstances change. Your happiness is your responsibility, not someone else’s project. Your time is your most valuable asset—don’t let anyone convince you to invest it in their emotional holding pattern.
The crossroads affair relationships represent is real, but the path rarely leads where participants hope. Take the other road—the one where you value yourself enough to demand a complete relationship rather than settling for fragments of someone else’s. It won’t guarantee happiness, but it will guarantee you won’t reach sixty wondering what might have been if you’d chosen yourself first.
Looking Back at Sixty
At sixty, life looks different. The body that once bounced back from sleepless nights now protests at the slightest overexertion. The youthful optimism that fueled dreams of literary fame has been replaced by the sober understanding that publishing is a game largely reserved for the already famous. The writing life I once romanticized reveals itself as a harsh landscape where mediocre talent drowns in a sea of AI-generated content and E. L. James imitators.
I’ve watched writers who once crowed about five-figure monthly earnings on Medium eventually crash so hard they nearly threw themselves off bridges. This isn’t a hopeful scenario, especially when you can’t even get arrested for speeding through your writing career, much less attract a livable following online. The industry operates on a simple principle: of the famous, by the famous, for the famous. The rest of us simply don’t have much chance of making a living at it.
My social circle has shrunk considerably over the decades. That group where I met so many accepting people? Long gone. Friends have moved away, become Trumpists, or died. The happiest times of my life exist only in memory now. You can’t go back in time, no matter how much you might want to.
If This Helps Even One Person
All I have left is this hard-won wisdom and the ability to share it. If this piece reaches even one woman standing where I stood twenty-six years ago, if it makes her reconsider throwing her life away on a married man, then perhaps my experience will have served some purpose beyond my own education.
Maybe she’ll recognize herself in these words—the sad, lonely, painfully needy little girl inside who never felt loved or good enough. Perhaps she’ll see that going after someone else who doesn’t feel loved or good enough won’t salve either of their wounds. That two broken people don’t make a whole—they usually just make a bigger mess.
If just one person reads this and decides to work on their marriage instead of escaping into an affair, or chooses to leave and build a proper life with someone actually available, then these lost years won’t have been completely wasted. That’s about all my life has had to offer the world: a cautionary tale that might save others from similar heartache.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here’s the final, difficult truth about infidelity that nobody wants to hear: an affair represents a crossroads that gives three people the chance to change their lives. The husband, the wife, and the third party all stand at a moment where they could choose radical honesty, professional help, and genuine transformation.
The husband could finally address whatever made him seek comfort outside his marriage. The wife could confront whatever role she played in creating distance in the relationship. The third party could examine why she’s attracted to unavailable men and work on building her self-worth independently.
Sadly, most of them never will. Most will take the easier path of denial, blame, and eventual resignation. The husband will return to his marriage but never fully engage. The wife will accept the surface reconciliation without demanding deeper change. The third party will nurse her wounds and likely repeat the pattern with another unavailable man.
It’s heartbreaking to watch, and even more heartbreaking to live. But understanding this pattern might just give someone the courage to choose differently. To be among the few who actually use the crisis as an opportunity for genuine growth rather than just another chapter in a long story of avoidance and regret.
The choice remains yours. Always has been.
