I fancy an ex-colleague – who is recently married. Having a certain degree of morals, I found it disconcerting to admit this to myself. Lacking further morals, I continue to maintain a friendship with this man.
To do him credit, he
never makes "my wife doesn't understand me" type comments.
And he has never made a pass at me.
But.
He has a tendency to make
comments such as: "I sometimes just want a temptress to make me
do naughty things" (ok I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the
picture).
I am certainly not going
to be this temptress. A child of divorce myself, I don't fancy
running even the slightest risk of making a contribution to another
child's pain. So thankfully, we are safe – because he clearly does
not want to be the one to be in the wrong.
Absolve yourself of
any responsibility
I remember having a fling
with a man who was not married but did have a girlfriend. I remember
sexting him over a long period of time, and he would hint that he
would like our fantasies to become a reality. Like my married friend,
he was determined to be seduced, rather than be the seducer.
He said:
"I would love to
meet up with you. It would have to be an accident though, like we
just happen to bump in to each other somewhere, and one thing leads
to another..."
It is as though these men
forward think the scenario to when they are justifying themselves to
others. "She came on to me, what was I to do? I'm only a weak
man!" or "It just happened – we were drunk – it was a
mistake".
They are covering their
backs so that their lives can carry on as normal when they've decided
they've had enough of me - their throwaway plaything.
Selfish selflessness
I do have a conscience,
and the angel on my shoulder gently whispers admonitions whenever I
entertain fantasies involving my married friend. But there is another
reason for keeping my barriers up: self preservation.
By entering in to an
affair with a married (or otherwise attached) man, I am not only
opening myself up to the censure of those around me, but I am also
making myself vulnerable to heartache.
He would never leave her.
(And when my conscience is engaged I wouldn't want him to.) But he
would take my heart.
He would be able to have
all the security and stability of a family, but also drink up a
Peter-Pan-style elixir of youth by entering in to a
butterfly-inducing romance in the guise of a young, single man.
In the moments when we
are together, we would forget the other reality – the wife, the
home, the job and the family. We would be caught in our reality: the
sexy, carefree, refreshing allure of something new and exciting.
Amidst this forgetfulness, I would imagine that what we felt for each
other was true love.
It could only ever end in
tears.
As Nina Simone sings in
"The Other Woman":
The other woman is
perfect where her rival fails...
But the other woman
will always cry herself to sleep
The other woman will
never have his love to keep
And as the years go
by,
The other woman will
spend her life alone
When he goes back to his
wife and carries on with his real life, I will be left daydreaming of
when I will next see him again; the more time I have alone, the more
my fantasies will consume me. My life would become about him, and
then I would be neither free to enter in to a different relationship
with more potential, nor able to move our own pitiful excuse for a
relationship forward.
A resolve
So I must rejoice in this
man's lack of conviction; the power of my own happiness – as well
as that of others - is in my hands. Perhaps I too had been hoping to
be seduced, to be able to have the excitement but deny responsibility
for taking it. But I do have a responsibility – to walk away from
our friendship. Because this isn't friendship at all – it's
foreplay.
2 comments:
I so very nearly became the OW in a very, very VERY similar situation. Luckily for me I tried to remember the many, many times I waited and waited for him to get in touch and no matter how stupidly fantastic I felt after I'd seen him for our 'sexually charged cuddles and snogs' I also forced myself to remember the emptiness I felt when he didn't reply to my texts. It's a lose/lose situation. Please don't go any further.
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