In the past, we've done posts in which married people share how they'd caught their spouse cheating on them. In response to those posts, people who have been the "other" person in affairs have shared and reflected upon their sides of the stories.
Their sides range from retrospective regret to standing by their decisions — and from not knowing the person was in a relationship to being aware but in a vulnerable state. So here are some of their stories below:
Note: This post contains mentions of abuse and addiction.
1. "I found out I was the other woman, and I’m ashamed I didn't see the red flags sooner. We met through an online quiz and got to know each other over the last year. He had a girlfriend, but I never thought there was anything between us. Then, he told me they’d split up four months earlier and wanted to meet up. We immediately clicked, and it all moved very fast. He met my family, stayed with me half the week and with his mom the other half, while he had his son. I thought we were really happy. One day, I got a message from his 'ex' calling me a 'dirty, fucking homewrecking rat!' Not only was he still with his fiancée, but she was PREGNANT. He’d known about it before he even got with me."
2. "I'm a woman and was seeing a woman who was engaged to a man. She was unhappy and so was I. For a while, we were a comfort to each other. But it became workplace gossip, and she left. It was fun in the beginning. It was exciting to sneak around, and I felt wanted. But I was more heartbroken than I let on when she chose him, who was abusive, over me."
"We tried to be friends when we decided to call things off, but some things can't be brushed over. I know it would never have worked out, but our friendship would have had we not muddied the waters." —Anonymous, Wales
3. "This was 15 years ago, back in high school. I knew he had a girlfriend, but I had such low self-esteem that I would take attention wherever I could get it. He told me I was beautiful and how much he wanted to be with me, and I believed him. We ended up sleeping together. When he shooed me out of his house, I knew I had made a huge mistake."
4. "I was 21 and had been with him for four years in a toxic relationship. He was incredibly abusive in all senses of the word — mentally, physically, and psychologically. However, I was insecure and attached to him, and developed an addiction to painkillers to numb both the physical and mental pain from the abuse. Then, he started cheating with a barely-legal, younger girl. He was 22; she was maybe 17. By then, my painkiller addiction spiraled out of control into full-blown heroin addiction. He'd also begun using, making his violent mood swings much worse. Eventually, something in my head clicked, and I finally found the courage to leave him. Naturally, he kept seeing and eventually started dating this other girl. A year later, I ran into him. We ended up having sex. I justified it as 'he cheated on me with her, she deserves to be cheated on with me.' After everything he had put me through, I still saw her as the cause of my problems and blamed her."
"When we ran into each other, he had just gotten out of treatment and was still involved with the girl. I was still deeply addicted, just as mentally troubled as I was before, and, somehow, still loved him. Even during our relationship, I kept telling myself the typical excuses as to why I should stay with him: He isn’t usually like this; He said he’ll never do it again; He actually loves me; I can change him; I deserved it.
A clear-headed person would think of him cheating on me as the last straw. But, again, as an insecure woman stuck in a vicious cycle of abuse, I just saw it as a reason why I needed to try harder to get him to love me.
We continued hooking up for a while before I met someone. I struggled with the repercussions of my abuse for years — nightmares, trust issues, PTSD, etc. — but he never gave up on me. I've now been with him for about 10 years, been clean for 4 years, and am now engaged." —xassylax
5. "I was 21, and he was 36. He was kind of a supervisor and definitely married with young kids. I pursued him, and it was more to see if I could. I was young and wild and not making good choices for myself. We snuck around until it blew up in our small community. Everyone knew because he came from a respected family, and immediately, I was hated. People would even make comments to my mother about it. He left his wife to be with me, but by then, I knew it was a mistake and couldn't imagine a life with him at my age. I broke it off, and it hurt, but I didn't want to be with him. He eventually got back together with his wife and the gossip died down. I would still run into them, but I worked hard to put it behind me and become a better person. He continued to cheat on his wife throughout the years. One time, I ran into her and apologized for what I did to her and their family. She was kind, gave me a hug, and, I guess, forgave me."
6. "I was in my twenties and had very low self-esteem with a destructive streak. I was hooking up with a lot of people, and I didn’t care if they were in a relationship or not. One man was twice my age, and I actually ended up falling kind of hard for him. I encouraged him to leave his wife, but he said that he was too self-conscious about our age difference."
"I have no idea if that was the real reason he stayed with her. I feel terribly for her, and I am glad that I didn’t become her. With some perspective, I can see that guy was far from a catch." —Anonymous, Illinois
7. "My friend's boyfriend had been working out of town, and she came to visit my hometown with me. She kissed me after a night out at the bar, and we hooked up. We fell in love during those two weeks before her boyfriend returned from work. We both decided to end it, but she had fallen in love with me. He was only back for one day, but she couldn't do it, so she told him. He was pissed, and she decided to stay with him. We were all friends and had been for over four years through college. I ended up moving back to my hometown, but she couldn’t forget about me. After about two months, she called me one day and had left him. We ended up dating for four years. We ended things amicably and are still friends. She told me I had saved her. Her ex was toxic, and I don’t think she would have been in a good place if she stayed with him. She was a great love of my life and it was worth it. I don’t regret one second of my time with her or what I did. She was worth it."
8. "We worked together and had great chemistry. I thought he was single when it started, but it continued on and off for 10 years after I knew. He got married and divorced twice in that time period, all the while still sleeping with me regularly. I’d always been a strict rule follower and 'good girl,' so it was exciting to have this one thing that no one could know about. Plus, I had such low self-esteem that I didn’t think I deserved more. It sounds awful, but I never really felt guilty about my part in it, even though I probably should."
9. "My story is really shitty, and the only excuse I can offer is that I was in a really dark place at the time. When I was married, we were good friends with another couple. When I got divorced, those friends stayed friends with my ex, and I lost touch with them. A few years later, I went to a school reunion, and the guy from the couple was there. We spent the whole night talking about everything and just clicked. At the end of the night, he tried to kiss me, and I turned him down. That should have been the end of it, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. We kept texting and met up a few times — first just for walks, then we kissed, and then we had sex. It was more of an emotional thing for me. I was single, and he was in an unhappy marriage. No excuse, I know! It fizzled out after about six months."
10. "I was single, and he was with his girlfriend whom he is now married to. I found it exciting to sneak around and to do something 'forbidden.' The thrill of getting caught just made it that much better. We stopped when he got married as I didn’t want to cross that line, even though he would have."
"It went on for two years. I didn’t love him, but we had always flirted around. It was fun." —Anonymous, France
11. "I was broken and insecure; it was the lowest point in my life — although I didn't realize any of that then. It was exciting at first. Months in, I admitted what was happening in therapy and worked through a lot of feelings of self-hatred and shame. I broke things off with him. I had to threaten to send all of our communications to his wife in an effort to get him to stop harassing me. I haven't been in a real relationship since because I'm afraid my karma will come in the form of a disloyal partner."
12. "I used to think, How could you live with yourself being the other person? You have a responsibility even if it isn't your marriage. But when I was in a vulnerable place, I became friends with an amazing woman. I was attracted to her but was 100% respectful of her marriage. I never made a move or flirted. One night when we went out, she kissed me. I'd been wanting it for such a long time, there was NO way I was going to try to logically think it through and be the bigger person here. In my mind, she must've had an open marriage, or some people don't consider it cheating with the same sex — that's bullshit, of course, but I was drunk and horny. We ended up talking it through, and she was married straight out of high school, in an abusive situation, and had completely lost sight of her agency. Our affair was stressful, and I hate that I disrespected a marriage, but I would do it again. She got divorced and is so much happier, and we are just friends."
13. "My first year of college, I was infatuated with a boy in my dorm, but he had a boyfriend at another school. When we hooked up one night, I assumed it meant he would be leaving his boyfriend for me. While that didn’t immediately happen, he promised that it eventually would, and I believed him for our entire freshmen year. The last week of school, I told him about a guy, 'Alan,' who I had met and thought was very cute. He told me he had met Alan — and slept with him. I was so hurt that I wasn’t the ONLY 'other man.'"
14. "A few months before we started dating, she came out as a lesbian to her husband. He was pretty understanding about it. They had two kids together, though, and they weren't quite ready to split up the family, so they hadn't formally separated. I found out she hadn't been upfront with her husband before we started dating and still refused to do it even after we'd been dating for four months."
"I knew her situation going into it and would have been totally fine with it if she'd been completely upfront with her husband about exploring dating women while they were still living together. That's why I stopped seeing her." —Anonymous, Maryland
15. "I met a guy through a friend, and we immediately hit it off. Right off the bat, we were very attracted to each other. We went on a few dates, and he told me he recently ended a relationship. We started sleeping together — usually at my place because he had a roommate. This went on for a few months. Well, one time we went to his apartment instead because his roommate wouldn’t be home that night. We were in the middle of having sex on his couch when a woman walks in, slams the door, and immediately starts freaking out. Obviously, we stopped. I put my pants back on and immediately left. She was screaming, calling me a whore, a bitch, a slut, just all the worst things that I knew in my heart I was not. It turns out his 'roommate' was his girlfriend of four years, and this was not the first time she walked in on him."
16. "My first boyfriend — we were both closeted at the time — left me after a two-year relationship. He couldn’t deal with being gay, so he married a girl to have a 'normal' life. A year and a half later, he calls me out of the blue and wants to have lunch. When we'd broken up, we'd never talked. I'd found out he was engaged when he announced it to our friends. So I wanted the chance to talk and get closure. When we did, he told me that he and his wife had just separated, he was still in love with me, and he wanted to get back together. Of course, I believed him. It lasted for three weeks before he ghosted me. A week later, he posted on Facebook that after long discussions with his wife, he was closing his social media accounts. A year later, I was talking to a mutual friend who I hadn’t seen in a while and didn’t know about us. She told me that my ex had been kicked out by his wife about a year ago for having an affair."
"She explained how that was the reason for his whole social media deletion. He'd even gotten a new number. I was basically just a side piece for three weeks!" —tomb4adc7727a
17. "My marriage had ended, and, near the end, he was horrible to me. He sexually assaulted me. Once I was out, I was celibate for a year. I was scared to let anyone near me. Eventually, I decided to get back into the physical realm and went online. I end up connecting with this man who was intelligent and funny. I was upfront about my issues and told him that there was definitely baggage on my end. He was kind about everything. At no point did he mislead me about the fact that he was married. In all honesty, as fucked up as it is, that created a layer of protection for me. If he was married, he wasn't in a position to require much of me, and I didn't have much to give. We ended up sleeping together several times. It was honestly the best sex I've ever had in my life. It probably always will be. Once COVID hit, it became really hard to see each other or talk much. I'm not sure if she ever found out. We don't talk anymore, but I hope he's happy."
18. "After I graduated college, I was single and moved to a new city, where I met a guy online. We were casual for a bit, then started seeing each other more regularly. We never discussed being exclusive — I didn't want that — so I went out on some other dates, as did he. After six months, he started ignoring me or only reaching out in the middle of the night. He eventually told me that his dad died, and we reconnected for a couple of weeks. Something still seemed off, and I finally ended things after seeing a Valentine's Day card signed by another woman. I found out he lied about his dad's death and had been in a serious relationship for years. For the next few years, I'd get occasional texts and Snapchats from him about how he missed me. He's now married to the girlfriend he cheated on. I never reached out to her because I didn't want to blow up her life, but I hope he treats her well."
"His then-girlfriend — now-wife — actually moved into his apartment a couple of months after we stopped sleeping together." —balik1
19. "I wasn’t exactly banging him as we never even met in person, but during COVID, I met this guy at an online conference. We hit it off right away. A week after the conference, he told me he had a girlfriend. We were just friends, and he lived in a completely different state, so we continued to talk. However, it came to the point where I was struggling with the idea that it was emotional cheating. He and his girlfriend had been together for over two years, but he was getting ready to finish his senior year of college and didn’t plan on staying with her through grad school. They also often didn’t seem to see eye-to-eye. I told myself that talking to him made everyone feel better — him because he was filling the emotional and intellectual void he felt when speaking to her, and her because he could probably treat her better when he didn't always feel like nobody understood him."
20. "I could never understand being the other person — but I did do it once. After months of him telling me that I was crazy and annoying for being suspicious, I found out that my ex-husband was cheating on me. He left me for another woman — but not before telling me that 1) I'd gained too much weight, so he was no longer attracted to me, and 2) due to my anxiety, he'd never want kids with me in case they ended up like me. Anyway, after he left me for this other woman and moved in with her, he started cheating on her with me. I’m not proud, but it felt a little bit good to stick it to the girl who pretended to be my friend — the 'skinnier' girl who was 'so much better' than me. I regret it and would never do it again, but the grass isn’t always greener."
21. "I was the other woman, but it took me a year to realize it. My 'boyfriend' told me on our first date that he was separated from his wife. I took that to mean legally separated and moving forward with a divorce. He let me believe that, too. They lived in different houses and only communicated about their kids, so it seemed normal to me. A year later, he casually mentions that he won't even consider a legal divorce until his 9- and 4-year-old kids turn 18 so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support. He actually thought I would be okay with that. I was very young and naive."
