It’s Not Love, But It Is Something Far More Dangerous

I could go back and tell you all about my past — the traumas, the health struggles, the ways life carved pieces out of me over the years. But this isn’t about excuses. There are none. What I will say is this: when your mind is already stretched thin, life has a way of pushing you into places you never imagined you’d go.

My marriage had been a storm-and-sunshine cycle for a long time. We loved each other fiercely, sometimes beautifully, sometimes destructively. I spent years trying to hold everything together, smoothing out the rough parts, taking on emotional weight that was never mine to carry. Somewhere along the line, I stopped hearing my own voice. And once your voice disappears, your needs tend to follow.

I never imagined I’d be the type of person who would cross a line like this. Men flirted with me over the years, but none ever turned my head. I was committed — to a fault sometimes. When we were good, I felt cherished, adored, the center of his world. But when we weren’t good, I felt invisible, unheard, untouched. Weeks would pass with no affection, no intimacy, no sign of effort. Every conversation felt like it evaporated before it landed. I needed emotional presence; he offered grand gestures instead. Beautiful gestures, but they didn’t fix the cracks.

While I was struggling to be seen by the man I had built a life with, someone else — someone who had no business being anywhere near the center of my world — kept drifting into my orbit.

For a long time, I dismissed it. He would appear, test the waters, and retreat whenever I put up boundaries. But he was patient in a way that made it impossible to fully shut the door. He understood things about my life without me having to explain them. He carried wounds of his own, ones that mirrored mine in unsettling ways. We both kept telling ourselves that we were imagining the pull. It was easier than admitting what it actually was.

Eventually, the gravity won.

And I fell into an affair.

We told ourselves it would be brief — just enough to exhale the tension we had fought for so long. But it wasn’t brief. It opened something in both of us that neither of us had the tools to control.

It wasn’t “just about sex,” though that lie was easier to repeat than the truth.

He became my Dom in ways I didn’t even know I craved. He stepped into the space where I was exhausted from being in control of everything. With him, I could stop thinking, stop fixing, stop carrying. He took the reins in a way that felt grounding for both of us. He didn’t demand trust; he earned it by knowing how to read me without words. When life felt chaotic for him, I became his outlet too — a place where he could take control when the rest of his world was slipping.

It was rough, wild, unfiltered.

It was a dangerous kind of honesty — one that only exists when there’s nothing to lose.

And because of that, I gave him things I had never given another person. I let him dismantle the parts of me I usually guard with everything I have. He awakened desires in me that had been ignored for far too long, and I gave him power over me in ways I didn’t know were possible.

I wasn’t afraid of losing him at first. That was the problem.

That’s what made it easy to open the parts of myself I always protected.

But somewhere along the way, it shifted.

He unlocked a version of me I didn’t know how to put back.

And now I don’t know who holds who.

I’ve been separated from my husband for a while now. He knows there was someone else, though not the extent of it. I still care for him deeply, but love isn’t the only ingredient required to fix something broken. There are needs I have that he cannot meet, desires that make him uncomfortable even when we try to explore them gently. I would never force him into something that feels wrong to him — but pretending those parts of me don’t exist hasn’t worked either.

And then there is the other woman involved — the Dom’s wife. Poor choice of words considering I am the other woman. I’m not going to dissect their marriage or speculate about their dynamic. I’m not here to paint myself as a victim or him as a villain. What I can say is that their story was complicated long before mine entered it but that is not my story to tell.

None of that excuses what I’ve done. I know that.

This situation has become a kind of addiction — one I never believed I could fall into. I know the affair has to end. I’m in therapy, trying to untangle all the layers, trying to understand why the parts of me that crave stability also crave danger.

I don’t believe this is love.

But it is something.

Something intoxicating, consuming, and powerful enough to make me fear what happens when it finally burns out.

Because once it does, I know I’ll have to face the version of myself he awakened — alone.

Call it fiction. Call it confession. Call it a warning. The truth, like desire, often hides in the space between.

*** If this resonates, I may share more — about the psychology of the pull, the power dynamics, or the dangerous tenderness that lives inside a Dom/sub bond.