Moving On

This post follows on from the Toys and Mind Warfare posts.

S and I saw each other regularly through the summer of 2003. Often, we would meet up at a pub which was conveniently on the route home for both of us after work. We would then drive together into the countryside and shag in the woods.

In some ways it was a wonderful time but deep down it it didn't feel right. I knew she wanted more and I knew I couldn't give it to her.

She knew it too. She wanted to believe otherwise but it was dawning on her that, despite her worst efforts, I was not going to leave my wife.

We ended the affair yet again. We had a period of several weeks in which we had no communication at all. Then there were a couple of phone calls but no meeting; then a couple more months without contact.

And then she called me and told me that she had met someone else. A few weeks after that she told me that she was quitting her job and going to move in with her new man who lived in another part of the country.

I was upset but simultaneously hopeful for both of us. I wanted her to be happy and so I genuinely wanted it to work for her. I also wanted to continue to repair my marriage and I knew that not having the temptation of S to contend with would help with that.

At that time I was obsessed with openness and truthfulness in relationships. I felt that my relationship with S was characterised by incredible intimacy and mutual honesty and I aspired to find that with W.

Spurred on by this desire I decided to tell W some of the truth. One day, whilst we were out in the countryside walking the dog, I told her that S had made contact with me to tell me that she was moving away to be with a new man.

W's reaction surprised me.

She was quiet and thoughtful for a few moments. Then she took hold of my hand and squeezed it.

"That must be quite painful for you" she said.

I was taken off-guard.

"Yes, it is."

I was quite choked up. This was at a time when I was used to suffering emotional pain alone and silently. I was not accustomed to understanding from anyone, let alone W. I half broke down and I sobbed a little.

W did something that she rarely does. She held me, acknowledged my pain and comforted me.

As we walked back to the car I became concerned that she might have been hurt by my display of emotion so I began trying to explain that I was actually glad that S was moving away. I became a little tearful once more.

"That's enough now. Pull yourself together. We've got things to do."

I had received my 20 seconds of emotional support for that particular year. It was clear that I wouldn't be getting any more.

I don't want to sound ungrateful though. The reality is that I was very glad of her understanding. I treasured it in fact. I was filled with relief and hope.

I took a deep breath, looked up to the blue sky and looked forward to the rest of my life.

T

Temptress

A friend of mine is a serial and single mistress. She has the truly incredible record of enticing three different married men to leave their wives for her.

"I've never cheated on anyone!" says she!

Now, I do understand the claim she is making.

She is saying that:
A. she has never been in a relationship with someone (married or otherwise) and slept with someone else whilst that relationship is ongoing; AND
B. she considers the infidelity of her married men to be SOLELY their responsibility.

Point B is the interesting one here (although I also doubt her claims in relation to A).

On face value, I do agree with it. Her married men have to take responsibility for their crimes, as do I for mine.

But, here's the thing. She encourages their infidelity doesn't she? She facilitates it. I bet that sometimes she bloody demands it! (She is an assertive lady when she wants to be.)

Let's face it, the wives would not consider her to be an innocent party. One of them has a conviction for assaulting her.

Once is fair enough. We are all human after all.

Twice is careless. But three times?

I think she should acknowledge her guilt. She might as well be one of us.

T

Wedding Rings

What do you do with your wedding ring when you are with your lover?

For most of my affair with S I did not have a wedding ring so it wasn't an issue. But, some time after we finished our relationship counselling, W did buy me a wedding ring and I have worn it ever since.

At that time I was still seeing S. At first I always remembered to remove the ring before a tryst but eventually I became so accustomed to it that I forgot to remove it.

S was not amused. She pointed at the ring and gave me a stern look.

"So! She has reclaimed you has she?"

I prefer to remove the ring. It doesn't feel right to keep it on. It is disrespectful to W and also to a lover.

The thing is though, I hate taking it off because I am terrified of losing it! Imagine having to come up with an excuse for returning home without it!

I used to leave it in the car. But what if the car was stolen? These days, if I remember, I tend to take it off and put it on my car keyring.

But, there is another school of thought isn't there?

It's just a piece of metal. So what? It's best left on the finger. That way, you don't need to worry about it.

I have to say, I don't actually mind if a lady keeps hers on. In fact, the naughty part of me secretly likes it. It is a symbolic reminder that I am sampling forbidden fruit. Succulent, gorgeous, irresistible forbidden fruit!

Even better if there is an engagement ring and, naughtiest of all, an eternity ring!

Let's have a poll.

T

Good Girl Bad Girl

"The difference between you and W is that you are a 'Bad Girl' and she is a 'Good Girl'."

This is what I once told S in response to questions about my wife.

She went quiet and looked thoughtful. I knew that look. She was hurt and I was in trouble.

Women are funny things. You see, in my book, the distinction I was drawing amounted to paying S a high accolade.

S was intelligent, attractive and had fantastic interpersonal skills but she had something else too.

She was a "Bad Girl".

You know what I mean don't you? I'm not saying she was evil, criminal or motivated by malice.

I'm saying that when it came to pushing boundaries, particularly sexual boundaries, she gave me a run for my money.

I know what was going through her mind that day. She was thinking about the myth that men like bad girls for a fling or an affair but they only have real world relationships with good girls. She was thinking that I had pigeon-holed her as "fuck-material" and that she could never be "wife or girlfriend material".

Well, I don't know what other men think but from my perspective this is completely flawed paranoid nonsense.

Let me explain.

My ideal woman is:

(a) beautiful, socially skilled, intelligent, bubbly, brave, loyal and a good cook;

(b) a little bit vulnerable so that that I can reassure her, protect her and solve her problems from time to time; and

(c) overflowing with outrageous sexual fantasies and eager to know what filthy thoughts are in my head so that together we can think up ways to entwine the two and thereby create even hornier possibilities.

The woman who possesses every one of these attributes will have my full attention.

T

High Maintenance

"You like it when women are high maintenance, don't you?"

This question was put to me by Cate, a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't a question I had really thought about before. However, I immediately knew she was right.

I do like drama.

I hate it too. It can give me a headache. But so can beer, and I still drink it.

I love emotion. In the past I have described myself as an emotion junkie. Once, S accused me of being more in love with the feeling of being in love than I was with her. Sometimes, during our crisis moments, she would put it to me that I was enjoying the tragedy of it all.

She was right. I love romantic-tragicomedy. And if I am the role of the leading man, all the better.

Hmmm...

Now I come to think about it, I am a little concerned that I might be high maintenance.

T

Mind Warfare

From time to time I used to ponder the possibility that S had read a book on "How to Get Your Married Lover to Leave his Wife". As she gradually raised her game I wondered if the chapters in this mythical guide were sequenced in order of increasing savagery.

For S, jealousy was a weapon of choice. However, I don't readily succumb to the green eyed monster, so she was forced to resort to the later chapters in order to gain the ascendancy.

And she showed no mercy. After all, all's fair in love and war isn't it?

Following the Toys Incident*, S and I fell back into the affair. It was during this period, which partially overlapped my relationship counselling with W, that S and I began to become more sexually experimental.

For example, we enjoyed the threesome I mentioned in this earlier post.

There is a little follow up story to that episode.

For a brief period, S remained in contact with Mike, the guy who had joined us for the threesome. Mike knew that I was married and that S was frustrated that the relationship was not going anywhere. The cheeky sod therefore decided to ask S out on a date.

Well, actually, it was a special kind of date. You see, Mike was a swinger. I knew that. That's how we met him: through a swinging web site.

Mike asked S if she would like to accompany him to a swinging party.

S casually dropped this fact into a conversation with me.

"Am I invited?"

"No."

"Oh. You're not going are you."

"Well, I thought I might, yes. I'm a single woman. You don't have any right to exclusivity. You don't have any rights at all. It's none of your business."

Checkmate!

"You have no rights to ask me for exclusivity" is a line that I am sure many a single mistress has used to force a crisis with her married man.

But, I ask you this: how many single mistresses have seriously threatened to fuck up to EIGHT other men in a single evening?

What a woman! I was seriously impressed.

When I say "impressed", I mean that, as a student of the vicious mind-games that couples play in relationships, I was intellectually impressed. I was obviously not impressed to be on the receiving end of such a move. In our little battle of the sexes this was the move of a grand-master (or mistress?). I was on the ropes.

For those of you who are thinking that her declaration was a little extreme and that it had to be a bluff, please let me reassure you that it was not. It was a scenario that I knew would excite her and she was definitely brave enough to do it.

I tried to be cool.

I tried to pretend it didn't matter.

But it did matter. The mental image of S with numerous other men was driving me insane. Interestingly, although I never mentioned this to her, another major contributor to my anxiety was the prospect of missing out on all the fun myself. It was a double whammy!

I lasted about a week. Then I cracked and begged her not to go. I fear I was quite pathetic about it. I seem to recall that I was actually in tears.

Not cool.

S smiled and relented. She had made her point.

T

* I left a cliff-hanger in that post suggesting the possibility that S may have been pregnant. S did indeed utter the words "No, I came off the pill, I'm pregnant now" but she was merely speculating about the consequence of the fact we had just enjoyed unprotected sex. Fortunately for me she was not pregnant and I did not have to fret about the possibility for too long because her period started the very next day.

Conspiracy Theory

I once read an article about Princess Diana and her extra-marital affairs, of which there were several.

The writer suggested that despite her dalliances, Diana continued to love Prince Charles throughout her marriage and that she wanted nothing more than for him to love her back and to find true happiness in the marriage.

An outside observer, especially one with the benefit of hindsight, might say that she was deluding herself.

Now, here's the thing. Long time readers will know that I have a penchant for amateur psychology. Diana had the same Myers-Briggs personality type as me: INFP.

I sometimes wonder if W is my Prince Charles.

I also note that the experts say that INFPs often have difficulty leaving bad relationships.

T

Fixing me

My former mistress, B, was strongly of the opinion that I should leave my wife.

I think she was trying to "fix" me. You know, the way woman do. They like to "change" or "fix" men, don't they?

It all got a bit much.

So, I dumped her. Or, rather, I got her to dump me using the technique I described in this post.

Whilst dumping me, she took the opportunity to tell me what she thought about me.

One of her points was this:

"And whilst you insist on staying in your stupid marriage, what about all those women you will fuck up by having affairs with them?"

Ouch!

That one hurt a little and got me wondering.

Hypothesis 1:

T is a fucked up individual who cannot bring himself to leave a defective marriage. Instead he seeks to fill his emotional and sexual voids by having affairs. The affairs tend to become emotionally involved but ultimately end in frustration. T is a danger to women. He fucks them up.

Hypothesis 2:

Sometimes relationships don't work. They don't feel right and they come to an end. It doesn't matter if they are real-world relationships or secret ones. Quite simply, some of them fail. It's no-one's fault. You just have to get over it and move on.

Naturally, I subscribe to number 2.

What if I am wrong though?

T

The Secret Lover's Spouse

"How is that woman who's got my job?"

"Which woman?" I replied.

"You know, that wife of yours!"

This was the beginning of a conversation between S and myself a couple of years ago. It was the first time we had spoken for several months, during a period when we kept in touch only occasionally.

It always makes me stop and think when a mistress is jealous of W.

On one level, it obviously makes sense. When a secret relationship becomes an emotional one it is inevitable that the protagonists will start to wonder what it might be like if it became a conventional and real-world relationship. And it is only one step further to become jealous of that which stands in the way of such a development: the secret lover's spouse.

That said, I don't think I have ever personally suffered from this affliction. If anything, I tend to feel pity for a cuckold husband and I have been scolded by more than one mistress for being too sympathetic towards him.

The reason jealous mistresses catch me by surprise is that my relationship with W does not have any of the secret ingredients that make an affair great.

There is no passion, no hunger, no build up to meetings.

In the past I have not experienced anything like the same level of intimacy or excitement with W that I have felt with a mistress. For many years I felt that not only did W fail to show any interest in my own emotional well-being but she also pushed me away when I tried to care for her. In short: she would neither give nor receive.

Not emotionally.

Not sexually.

Why on earth should a mistress be jealous of a relationship like that?

Hmmm...

But maybe it isn't jealousy at all. Perhaps it is anger.

I have experienced that one. Four years ago, S moved to a different part of the country to live with a new boyfriend. She changed her job and took a step backwards in her career to be with him. I genuinely hoped that she would find happiness. Unfortunately, the relationship failed. He developed an addiction to gambling and bankrupted himself. She persevered for longer than I thought wise, but then she gave up and threw him out for the sake of her own sanity and finances.

I remember being both perplexed and furious that this fool could throw away his life and a relationship with such an incredible woman by succumbing to such a pathetic addiction.

Yes, anger - I can understand that one.

As for being jealous of the real-world boyfriend or husband.

No. Never. Not me.

T

Status Report

OK, so by now many of you will have read Cate's blog and spotted that we have not broken up after all!

I am a little embarrassed because of all the lovely supportive messages you left me. Thank you for the emotional support and the encouragement to carry on blogging.

Please rest assured that I will carry on. I don't really hate my blog. I still have plenty of ideas and stories bubbling away and I am sure that my productivity will pick up again shortly and normal service will be resumed.

In the mean time one message that was coming through to me loud and clear in the comments on my last post was that this blog is not glorifying infidelity. I am glad about that. It has always been my hope that this blog can be a honest reflection of a topic that is often misunderstood.

That isn't to say infidelity is a good thing. It isn't. But equally, I believe that many people who are involved in adultery are fundamentally good people.

It's just that they are also human.

T