I found a blog titled The Other Woman which I’ve been processing slowly, trying to find something of value but continue the end up simply feeling disturbed by what is written. It is apparently a South African blog because I ran into it on Amatomu a South African blog aggregator and there are some references to other South African sites as well. Is this site for real or is the author simply a lonely guy with a pot belly for company expressing some fantasy?
The more I read the more I consider the latter as being the case. Look at the author’s bio: “I’m a professional woman with wonderful friends and a busy life. I enjoy an active love life with a number of lovers – among whom may be your husband!”
Whether this person is for real or not is in the end neither here nor there. But for me the end result is just something creepy. Being polyamorous I am very sensitive to everything being out in the open but on The Other Woman deceit and subterfuge is revelled in and validated as really being caused by the wives of the men she dates as they are stupid, boring and lacking in any sexual desire and/or skill.
Reading this blog left me wondering why so much energy has to be spent on lies when that energy could be spent on opening up the relationships, being honest about what is lacking and as a group working on something that is bigger than the participants.
Here are two examples of the posts on the blog:
You don’t know me. But then you don’t know Phil either – not really. If you did, you’d know that I existed, and why I existed in his life – and by extension, in yours.
Two big issues can be highlighted here. 1) People don’t really talk in their relationships and they do get into a rut, it’s normal but luckily we have brains that we can use to figure this out and make changes. As time goes by we slip into complacency but something I believe that should be taught to kids, which will make them more effective relationship partners is to communicate with your partner. Life goes on people change and the only way you’ll figure it out is to get feedback, that usually happens when you ask.
The second being that any new relationship will affect your current one since the old adage about “When you marry someone you marry their family.” holds true in non-monogamous relationship configurations as well. And if you can communicate with those others involved in the relationships that you are in as well you won’t have to build up fantasy images to represent them. Rather than the demons or angels they become in your mind they’ll just be real people like you.
I am Phil’s lover. I have been, for a while now. Exactly how long you don’t need to know. Trying to pin it on incidents or other people won’t help you to understand Phil any better, or why he feels a need for a lover when he already has a wife.
You don’t need to cheat to love other people or have sex with them, cheating is just much easier in the short term where being honest about it will be more difficult initially but in the long run the benefits start generating interest. Also, cheating is the only option most people know about when they enter into monogamous relationships.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten who Phil is, so caught up as you are with seeing him as your husband, that convenient if slightly irritating presence around the house who fixes things, lifts kids, takes you places and brings in money. You see a role, you no longer see a person.
That’s a trap most marriages fall into. And it’s time people start owning it rather than just hoping it’ll go away.
You see him as obsessed with work – staying late at the office, forever on his computer at home. You don’t know that his late evenings at work are spent with me, his computer sessions are chats, mail or virtual sex with me, when he’s trapped at home and we can’t be together.
Ok, so now she’s not just exposing the husband as a liar and a cheat but is also rubbing the wife’s nose in it. That’s just bad form. It’s no real accomplishment to hoodwink someone who wants to trust you. This also reminds me of the movie The Witches of Eastwick where the Daryl van Horne comments on marriage: “The husband complains that he is in bed with a corpse but, he’s the one who killed her!”
Just as it is always useful to ask, sometime for people to know you you have to open your mouth and talk. Communication isn’t about expressing what you need and what you want and resolving what is wrong it is about expressing who you are. Don’t always blame others for not being interested in you when you are not doing the work of enlightening them a bit about how you are experiencing life too.
But D-Day comes at enormous cost, almost always.
The exposure of any type of deceit comes at an enormous cost and that cost is often much higher than the payoff received for the deceit in the first place.
Wives pull every trick out of their manipulation books to recover something similar to self-respect – at the cost of the husband, and especially at the cost of The Other Woman.
Now it seems the author is trying to project some of her own behaviours onto the wives. And why shouldn’t The Other Woman also bear some of the cost? In my opinion everyone involved in the deceit should bear some of the responsibility. Whether it is the other man or woman, together with the cheating spouse.
Where a wife is trying to salvage a doomed marriage – either because of children, or because she is incapable of survival on her own – she cannot demonise the husband too soundly without imperiling the logic of her choice – and must thus pin all blame on The Other Woman.
I find the whole logic behind this site unsound. If it was an honest look at the feelings of The Other Woman, baring her emotions and expressing her motivations and fears I would agree that it is a sound investment in time and effort; we could learn from it. It could have helped me understand why rather than be open and non-monogamous she is deceitful and non-monogamous. In that last quote she is again projecting the blame of her choices and her incompetence at keeping things hidden on the wife.
In the end there is blame to cast everywhere and everyone will feel it’s someone else’s fault. The only method I can see to this is to realise that a relationship isn’t something that comes with a warranty and is self sufficient. It’s like you, it needs daily feeding and grooming and needs to be cared for when it’s ill. Everyone has an equal responsibility to take care of the entity which is the relationship and if they don’t maybe they shouldn’t be in a relationship.
Filed under: Polyamory | Tagged: Adultery, Affair, Cheating, Deceit, Illicit, Lies
