The Other Woman

I don't know if any woman sets out to be "the other woman" - the woman we often see in movies, in books, and on tv whom someone's boyfriend, husband, or otherwise significant other is cheating with. Did any little girl ever dream of being the other woman? I don't know. But I've known a few, and they have interesting stories to tell.

Concubines and mistresses

There are plenty of other women in history, so many that it's really only worth discussing in terms of American culture. In Great Britain, Kings have typically had one or more mistresses they would dally with. It's well-known that current ruler King Charles was involved with Camilla Parker-Bowles when they were younger. Camilla great-grandmother was herself the mistress of King Edward VII. But Camilla got married to someone else when Charles was serving in the military, and then-Prince Charles married Diana Spencer, who became the mother of current princes William and Harry. After Charles and Diana divorced, Charles and Camilla, who was also divorced by that time, were finally able to make their relationship public and official, marrying and becoming the current King and Queen consort of Great Britain.

On a more common scale, mistresses are common in France and especially in Italy, where some studies show up to 50% of marriages are experiencing infidelity, though the standard is always to keep things quiet. Everything must seem proper and normal, even when the person involved is the leader of the country.

Who is the other woman?

The first time I knew someone who was cheating on his girlfriend was toward the end of college. I was engaged, one of my friends was already married, and several other friends were also looking at the future. Were they going to stay together or split up? One friend had been with his girlfriend since the summer before college. It was assumed they would get married. However she was very, very normal, studying to be a nurse, planning on a job at a hospital, a house, and a family within the first few years after graduation. The biggest quirk she had was that she decorated her entire bedroom in clowns. Meanwhile, my friend listened to industrial and alternative music, dressed like a goth, and was heavily into role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire the Masquerade. He was studying to be a psychologist, and was a fun guy, but by no means conventional. He would sometimes shave his eyebrows just because he was stressed.

Every year he'd go to the GenCon gaming convention, saving up for it all year so he could go every day. His girlfriend refused to go, barely tolerating what she perceived as a geeky waste of time, so his brother went with him. While there one year, he encountered a female attendee in the hotel elevator, and like him, she was dressed in Dungeons and Dragons cosplay garb. They immediately started making out on the elevator, then went to her room and had sex.

It turned out that that woman was married, and her husband was also at GenCon, but the two of them had a rule that when they were at GenCon, they could do as they pleased. The rest of the year, life went on as normal. My friend told all of our friends about this encounter, assuming we wouldn't tell his girlfriend, whom he was still planning to marry, presenting her with a "promise ring" for Christmas.

The following year, as he had hoped, he saw the elevator girl again, and they had sex again. As they did the following year, at which point things got rocky with my friend and his girlfriend. She broke up with him, and he suspected she was screwing around with someone else. He didn't know who that was, and while he was jealous and a bit upset that she was able to go behind his back, he was mostly happy to be rid of her and able to do as he pleased.

That example is a far cry from being "the other woman", which, unlike the very random sex my friend was having outside of his relationship, tends to be an ongoing situation. I first met someone with experience in that area several years later.

That woman and I met through mutual acquaintances and we were briefly involved. In getting to know her, she told me that in her last relationship, she cheated on her boyfriend with a coworker. Her boyfriend was mentally and emotionally abusive, dominant to the point of being toxic. She befriended the coworker, who at some point told her he was a virgin. She took it upon herself to be his first, and assert dominance of her own. She felt bad about cheating, but also liked being in a different role. When she and her boyfriend finally split, and she changed jobs, she became involved with a married coworker because they had chemistry. She felt safe with him, and though she knew it was wrong, she was also excited by doing something bad and getting away with it. In her words, she had spent her life being good, and she liked being bad. The guilt and stress of this also led to her taking up smoking until the affair ended, something else that made her feel bad. She was, temporarily, a bad girl, letting out her dark side.

This sentiment was echoed several years after that, when I worked with a young woman who told me that for a while she was involved with a married man. She was still in college at the time and she met him at work or somewhere. He was in his 30s and clearly miserable in his marriage, and she was bored. She got involved with him and took control, which was something she usually lacked. She was always the girl who got dumped for someone else. Always the one who was dominated, whose needs were secondary to that of the guy she was dating. So with him she would show up when she wanted, or tell him to show up, they would have sex however she wanted. She would verbally humiliate him, and sometimes she would be sexually satisfied and leave him unsatisfied, and he was still grateful because, as she said, he was getting no sexual attention from his wife at all. Like the previous woman, she also took up smoking at this time, despite never smoking in high school or earlier in college. Tired of being good and having nothing, she decided to get what she wanted or needed. She admitted the entire relationship was rather twisted, and she moved to another town, took another job, to have a completely new start. That's when I met her, connecting over both of us being writers.

More recently, a friend of mine has been effectively the mistress of a local musician who has been living with his girlfriend for years. She and the musician knew each other because she was frequently at his shows, and they started talking. Then he suggested they hang out because she also was a budding musician, and it began. She didn't plan on doing anything with him, but eventually it happened, and he seems to have the Bill Clinton definition of cheating. Since they haven't had actual intercourse, by this standard they haven't had sex, and sex is cheating. This doesn't mean he wants his girlfriend or anyone else to know what he's doing. And my friend, unlike people in movies and on tv, is smart enough to know he won't leave his girlfriend to be with her. As she says, "He's not getting any at home, but he won't leave her because it would disrupt their lives. And I'm not with anyone else. If I was with someone else I wouldn't do anything with him, and if I find someone, we're done." She herself had been at these shows alone because the long-time boyfriend she had been living with kicked her out when he started cheating on her with someone else. Role reversal is one of the common themes. The person who was cheated on goes on to encouraging someone else to cheat with them, or vice versa.

In all of these examples, unlike the more romantic depiction of mistresses, there are no gifts given, no promises of anything else. The relationship is physical, and catch as catch can. It is what it is.

No one's first choice

Interestingly, all of the women told me the same thing at some point: They've never been anyone's first choice for a girlfriend, never anyone's dream girl, and it hurts. All three of these women are self-described "big girls". Not in height - the tallest of them is maybe 5'5", but they're not skinny. Some would say "apple shaped", others might say "puffy." Either way, they weren't going to be mistaken for a runway model or actress when they were in their teens or 20s. They had boyfriends, but not for long, and it was awkward. Once the boyfriends had the confidence to move on to someone else, they did, leaving these girls behind. And so it went until they graduated college and their friends started getting married, leaving these young women to do what they could.

In the case of the first woman I mentioned, the one I was involved with briefly, who had been with a boyfriend for years, she was older than me. She had been with that guy, who was older than her, for all of her 20s. All of them. As she described it, it was how he dominated her. She went from being a naïve girl to a woman while with him, and while she didn't want to marry him because their relationship was toxic, she didn't want to be alone either, and was disappointed that he didn't at least ask her. For him she was always a dumb little girl and a plaything, never an equal. Once she left him, she found herself well over 30, taking care of her mother who had health issues. While she didn't regret taking care of her mother, she did regret how many years she lost to a wasted relationship. After I broke up with her she met another guy her own age and they built a life and business together.

The second woman continued to have relationship issues, over and over again. She got engaged to a guy while we were working together, and that seemed to be fine. He was a normal, decent, guy. But she was bored by him and avoided seeing him though they still were technically together. Finally she broke things off and decided to move back to where she grew up, where she had the original doomed relationship with the married man. One of our coworkers asked her out the night before she moved and they started a long distance relationship that went well for a while until it fizzled out. He started seeing someone else (yet another coworker) until his new girlfriend broke up with him because while she was completing an advanced degree to make a better life for herself and had a new job lined up while he was 26, living with his parents rent-free, and content to be working part-time with no plan to do anything more. Distraught, this guy, who was still talking to his long-distance ex, via text and Messenger, told her he still loved her and he needed to see her. He drove the 4 hours to see her, they had dinner, had sex, and he spent the night. When they woke up the next morning he broke up with her again, saying he changed his mind. Clearly he just wanted to feel better about himself by dumping someone else. This reinforced for her that people only wanted to be with her when they couldn't be with someone else.

In the third case, my friend who has been spending time with the musician, she was a bit plump when I first met her, just before she turned 30, but she had been working to lose weight for years and had been so successful that I didn't believe her when she told me she used to be "a big girl." She had dated her boyfriend back in her teens, they broke up, she dated a bit more, then they got back together, eventually moving in together. She and her boyfriend were of the opinion that they didn't need to get married, they would be together forever and everything was fine. But it wasn't fine. Substance abuse ran deep in his family, and he had few if any role models of how one should behave in a relationship. There were no marriages in his family that didn't end in divorce, usually with infidelity and substance abuse involved. After a while, he started drinking more, and using drugs, at first when he was around his friends, but later, on his own. My friend drank now and then, but didn't use drugs, and didn't like how he acted when he was using. As she said, "All his friends do is sit around, play video games, and act stupid. I hate being around them when they're like that." Her boyfriend wanted kids, she didn't, which created a standoff. Finally they had a discussion. He wanted to get married and have kids. She actually had a wedding ring picked out for him that she would give him, if he would agree to stop using drugs, because she didn't want to have children in that environment, and it was already affecting his health. He refused, and ended up leaving her for a nurse who was a friend of a friend. She already had a grade-school age kid (so he could skip the diaper and midnight feeding stage) and also enjoyed using drugs, some of which she was able to get through work. My friend was literally out on the street, coming home to find her things out on the lawn, which her now ex-boyfriend could do because his name was on the lease, hers wasn't. Now in her mid 30s, she found herself trying to date again, finding that "all of the good guys are gone. They're either married, divorced with a whole bunch of baggage, or they're single but it's because there's something wrong with them mentally and/or emotionally." She ended up being with one really exciting, interesting guy for a year before he went back to the girlfriend he broke up with immediately before meeting my friend, the one he had been pining for all along (in short, my friend was the rebound). That ex then kicked him out - again. He felt bad about breaking up with my friend like that, and finally met someone else, whom he just married.

"I won't survive on another woman's leftovers."

These stories are similar to that of celebrity chef Paula Deen, who, in an interview, talked about the period of her life before she became famous. After she and her husband divorced in 1989, Deen found herself struggling to support herself and her teenaged sons. At some point she became involved with a married man. The relationship went against her morals and she wasn't proud of what she was doing, but it was the only outlet she had. Finally she broke the relationship off, vowing she would never again make do with with the little bits of time and attention she could get from a man when he wasn't with his wife or girlfriend. Later, she prayed to God to be sent "a neighbor" to call her own, and literally met a man who lived nearby when their dogs' leashes became tangled. They ended up getting married and are still married today.

The point of that example is the breaking point. Deen wanted the attention and affection the married man, then decided enough was enough. So did one of my friends, the one who had the terrible dating history. When I last talked about her above, she had rekindled with an ex, who dumped her after one day just to feel better about himself. She got over that, but as she hit her mid 30s, she realized she was hitting a turning point. She reached out to another former coworker of ours we were both friends with, and dated him for a bit. In finding him to be a good guy but incompatible, she tried to pull another married guy away from his wife. That didn't work, despite her best efforts, and, feeling humiliated, she asked out a quiet, introverted, single guy she knew. He was raising a special needs daughter and she ended up having a very normal, satisfying relationship with him. They're now living together and she's trying hard to forget the past.

The first woman I talked about, the one I dated when I was younger, ended up with a guy for basically 24 years right after I broke up with her. They started as friends, got together, lived together, but the flame went out. They had bought a ranch together, but he kept the house he had before. He moved back to the house, she stayed at the ranch, and he just started showing up to help out, becoming essentially business partners and friends with benefits. Except she found there was no emotional benefit from the relationship, as she described him as an emotional cripple. So just recently she cut him off entirely, only getting the courage to do so after making another run at a married man. When that failed, she decided to strike out on her own and either be alone or find someone who was just hers, giving her what she wanted.

That's the boat my final friend is in. The irony of her situation is, she has a stable job and is in the best shape of her life. She has dabbled in modeling here and there and just won a beauty pageant for the first time. But she can't find a decent guy. She's dating a guy and it's going okay, but he's so into himself that he doesn't know what a relationship means. Her plight seems to be bad timing. She's interested in guys she has great chemistry with, they get along well, they have feelings for each other, but like the musician who's having an affair with her, they're all taken. If she had met them before they were with their wives or girlfriends it would be a different story. But their paths didn't cross when both were single.

The flip side

While the reward for being the other woman seems to be attention, sexual satisfaction, and possibly power, despite a lack of commitment or stability, and the risks coming with discovery (which provide their own level of excitement), what's in it for the men they're involved with?

It varies. In the case of the musician, clearly he likes to have his ego fed. One of the guys my friend dated was also a local musician, and they like feeling like a star, like having a groupie if they can get one, and with this guy, he's clearly Joe Nobody when he's at home with his girlfriend or at his day job. When he's playing he's a rock star, and having her on the side feeds his ego.

But this holds true with others as well. Being in a long term relationship can make you feel like your interests and talents are dismissed. Think of my college friend who was cheating on his girlfriend. He loved Goth music, goth culture, and gaming. She rolled her eyes at all of that and refused to go to GenCon with him, where he quickly found someone with the same interests who found him attractive. Neither of them was going to leave their significant other, but they were both happy to bang, more than once.

There's also intimacy without strings or complications. The women I've talked to said that when they talked to the men they were with, the men would complain that they missed the days when they were younger and they could just go out with a girl, who may have been their current wife or girlfriend, and they would have a good time and lots of sex, no worries. But since there there were more pressing matters. Kids, bills, worries about dirtying the sheets or if the neighbors would hear if you got too raucous. They wanted to just relax and have fun like they used to.

Finally, there's intimacy, period. The real formula behind what led to these men taking up with the other women seems to be a combination of a dull or unpleasant home life and little to no intimacy in their relationship. It's an imperfect formula, since two of these women actively pursued married men who were miserable and not having any sex, and the men said no, and I know women who also were approached by married men, some of whom they had history with or feelings for and they told the men no. But in each case with the men who said yes, part of the problem was no sex. The woman who broke in the virgin had previously been with a man who was engaged and his fiancee' was adamant about them waiting to have sex until marriage. However, she also wanted to wait until she was done with grad school to get married, and she was going for a PhD. They had been together for 6 years at that point and the guy was tired of waiting but still wanted to marry his fiancee'. As the woman said, "I have a long history of breaking in virgins." None of them were long-term relationships, several of them were in other relationships, but she always felt privileged to be their first.

That would seem to be the caveat from all of this discussion. When people aren't getting what they want, either from their relationship or because they're not in a relationship, chances are good they're going to try to get it.