My Story: 9 years as the OW

[Sophie11]

Hello. I’ve read this forum for a while now and I wanted to share my story with you. I’m doing this to get it off my chest and hopefully to help other OW out there.

 

I’m 31 now but back when I was 21 I’d been single for 6 months after splitting up with my first love who I’d been with for 7 years and I was looking for comfort, passion and love. That’s when I met my exMM who was 10 years older than me. It started off by flirting online, then meeting up and ‘having fun’ and it quickly, within a month or so, turned into love.

 

I didn’t particularly fancy him but he grew on me a bit and treated me well to start with so I became quite besotted. He told me he loved me, didn’t love his wife, didn’t sleep with his wife etc and I (stupidly) believed it. He made me feel really special and acted as though I was ‘saving’ him from a miserable, mundane life. I know he got a thrill from being with someone quite a bit younger than him too.

 

As time went by I wanted to settle down with him. He moved in with me in 2010 after the affair had been going on for 18 months but he didn’t even stay for two weeks before he was telling me he loved his wife and kids and went home. I should’ve stopped it there and then but he wormed his way back in and we were back to having an affair again. A few months later he told his wife about me again (this must’ve been the 3rd time she’d found out) and told her he was leaving but due to health complications he didn’t in the end.

 

The affair continued for years. I’d go to see him when his wife and kids were at school (she’s a teacher). He lived an hour away so I’d get there for 9am and have to be out of the house by 3pm. I got 6 hours a week with him plus the occasional time when his family would go on holiday without him or the times when we managed to go on holiday together. We went to Vegas together every year for 4 years and he’d have to go to extreme lengths to make sure she didn’t know he was taking me. I also had to lie to my family which caused problems with them then and still to this day.

 

In 2013 I was raped whilst out drinking with a friend. I was drugged and taken to a house where multiple people sexually assaulted me. My exMM didn’t believe I’d been raped and accused me of just cheating on him. Because he was a liar and a cheat himself he didn’t believe that something terrible had happened to me and he gave me a lot of grief I really didn’t need at the time. He wouldn’t even touch me because I was ‘contaminated’. Again, I should’ve put a stop to it there but I didn’t!

 

In 2016 we finally started discussing the future. I’m not exaggerating when I say we discussed every tiny little detail for 6 months before he made the decision that he was ready to leave his family and be with me properly. Obviously I was over the moon. He made the decision in December 2016 and it took him until July 2017 to actually sit his wife down and tell her he was going. The woman must have issues because by this time she’d probably discovered our affair about 8 times and had always forgiven and believed his promises and despite all that she still begged him to stay.

 

So he left her and the kids and moved into my house with me. It was all good at first but over the past 9 years we’d had hundreds of issues with each other and living together became tiring and unhappy. He’d fly off the handle over nothing and start punching furniture, throwing things, shouting in my face and pushing me around. He didn’t hit me but he did say that one day he would probably kill me. This was the man I’d waited 9 years to be with, threatening to kill me because of something stupid like the way I’d cuddled him wasn’t good enough or because my elderly dog had peed on the floor.

 

We both knew it was over but I wasn’t strong enough to let him go. My dog died on November 5th and it completely broke me. I had two weeks off work and cried my heart out everyday. Then when I returned to work I came home after the 3rd day to a two page letter stuck to the kitchen door telling me that he’d left me. A letter after 9 years!

 

Still grieving for my dog and hurting and shocked by him going I became suicidal and was in a very bad way. I tried calling the Samaritans over 60 times before I got through and waited 4 hours for a call back from a 111 doctor who immediately dispatched an ambulance to my house and I was taken to hospital. To cut a long story short I was discharged after a long talk with a psychiatrist and went to stay with my Mum. ExMM then decided we could sort it out so I made the journey back home and went to visit him at his hotel where he’d been staying. We slept together and he told me he loved me. I then went back the next day and he said it was very likely we could sort it out. The day after that he called me and told me it was over. I guessed he was going to go back to his family 4 months after he’d left.

 

I hit rock bottom. My aunt got me to stay at her house and two days later I took an overdose of diazepam. I could not cope with the pain and wanted to end it. It took me a long time to recover, I was like a zombie for about a fortnight and then one day I just perked up somehow. The crisis team had been visiting every day and weren’t helping, the psychiatrist I’d been seeing was just not interested but my aunt had taken 3 weeks off work to care for me and I owe my life to her for what she did for me.

 

I was off work for 5 weeks in total. I’d been signed off for 6 but felt strong enough to return after 5. Going back to work was the best thing I did. I saw my friends, had fun and got a routine back. I actually made a tonne of new friends because I wasn’t tied down to exMM and his control.

 

A man I’d known at work for a year, someone I spoke to occasionally, messaged me out of the blue in February. We’d been playing online games together and he was telling me to take my go. That message soon turned into a 7 hour chat and another 5 hour chat the following day. He then asked if I’d like to go over to his house after work the following day and the rest is history.

 

I now live with him. We didn’t need 6 months worth of discussion to see if we wanted that. He just asked me one day and I said yes. I get to see him every day, not 6 hours a week. His family have met me. My family have met him. We can be seen together. We’ve been on holiday together without lying to anyone. We can be open on social media. We both love each other and there’s no one else in the background. We discuss the future. I trust him and he trusts me. We are equal and don’t control each other. To me, that’s a nice, normal and happy relationship and I just wish I hadn’t wasted pretty much the whole of my 20s being treated as second best.

 

If you’ve got this far you’ll see I’ve been through a lot. I used to read these stories and think that me and exMM were ‘different’ and we’d be the ones with the happy ending. I don’t think happy endings happen often after affairs and I hope that anyone currently being the other woman or the other man realises that they deserve the real thing.

 

Yes he left me and it broke me for a while but he did me a favour in the end because I’ve genuinely never been happier. Please know that everyone deserves to be number one to someone. Don’t be second best. Don’t be the afterthought.

 

Thanks for reading

[Marc878]

You are very young. I hope you've learned from you experience.

 

We all have the option to make our lives what we want. It's not dependent on anyone but ourselves.

 

Don't ever look back there isn't and wasn't anything there.

[jah526]

Wow, quite a story. Thanks for telling it here. Not sure what it is about affairs but they seem to be especially “sticky” and difficult to extricate oneself from. Glad you were able to find real happiness after all the trauma.

[flubberghaster]

This is wild. I'm so glad you found your happy ending after such agony.

[lilacwine]

Thank you very much for sharing your story. It's the PERFECT example for why women should run away from MMs and never look back. I have two questions:

 

1/What made you stay with exMM for too long? I couldn't quite get it. You got to see him only 6 hours a week and he treated you horribly throughout the entire relationship.

 

2/Did you tell your current bf about your relationship with MM? If yes, how did he react?

[Sophie11]

Thank you very much for sharing your story. It's the PERFECT example for why women should run away from MMs and never look back. I have two questions:

 

1/What made you stay with exMM for too long? I couldn't quite get it. You got to see him only 6 hours a week and he treated you horribly throughout the entire relationship.

 

2/Did you tell your current bf about your relationship with MM? If yes, how did he react?

 

Why did I stay so long... there are many reasons really. I had low self esteem so didn’t think anyone else would love me and thought he was the best I could get. I was scared to move on because he was like a security blanket to me, he was the person I spoke to every day, he was my only friend as he’d stopped me from having a social life. He also provided financial security which is something I’d struggled with for years because I lost my job after being raped due to all the time off I had.

At the time I thought he was perfect for me. I knew he had a lot of faults but because we’d been together for so long and he knew me so well I just believed he was the only person I could be with.

 

As for telling my current BF, yes, he knows the whole story. In fact, everyone I am close to knows it. My current BF is the total opposite to the exMM, he is so laid back and non-judgmental. He lets me talk if I need to. I am over the ex but I’m not quite over the damage he did so I still have moments of not feeling good enough etc. I never thought I’d genuinely trust a man after seeing how easy it was for exMM to live two separate lives for so long but I can wholeheartedly say that I 100% trust my new man - which is a weird but nice feeling! He also trusts me totally. I’m allowed to go out with friends, I’m allowed male friends etc.

[CloudyHead]

I am so glad you survived it all. If you slip and do look back, do NOT berate yourself. Your experience with xMM allowed you to learn more about yourself, realize that you are a strong person and has given you the insight to recognize people like xMM in the future (so you can avoid them from entering your life again). Best of luck to you!

[misspalmy]

I was ow for 4 years got pregnant. my son is 19mths. I ended up telling his wife as i was getting unwell from all the lies. i was only 27 when i met him. i look back and think what a waste of time i spent on him.

 

i does get better. take one day at a time. exmm was like a drug.