This is a work of fiction. The characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The wife
The husband
The lover
Epilogue
The wife
The husband
The lover
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The autobiography of a frog
When I was just a tadpole
I didn't understand
about the metamorphosis
that mother nature planned
You don't know disappointment
'til you're sitting on a log
when you thought you'd be a butterfly
but you've turned into a frog
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After 20 years of marriage I had an affair.
My marriage had been happy and fulfilling for many years and I loved my husband but then I became bored and frustrated and started asking myself if this was all there was to life. At the same time, I never really had anything to complain about, Vernon did his best and our children were more than I could ever wish for. They had both grown up into wonderfully loving and gentle girls and I loved them more than anything else in my life.
So an extra-marital affair at that time of my life came as quite a shock to me.
His name was Dale and he was Patrick’s brother.
Patrick wasn’t my husband, I hadn’t seen Patrick for twenty-five years, he was my first love. We met when I was sixteen and I fell for him almost immediately and believed, in my naivety, that we would be together for ever.
He was also, of course, my first lover. We had been going out for six months and we had such fun together, we laughed a lot. He had been trying to get me into bed almost since the relationship begun, but I had resisted him until that night.
It was very romantic, or so I thought at the time, being a teenager, but on reflection it turned out to be far from romantic, I was tense and concerned that I was doing the wrong thing and worried about becoming pregnant. And through it all I thought about what my mom would do if she ever found out. So I don’t know how it became romantic in my mind after it was over, I guess that for so long I had imagined losing my virginity would be romantic and exciting and I wanted it to be so much that I just believed that it was.
But I loved Patrick and things improved quickly in that area and we soon had a very satisfying and loving relationship that lasted for four very happy years.
Things started to go wrong when Patrick became quite well known in our small city as a tennis player. The small amount of fame he achieved went to his head and he became over confident and slightly arrogant. On reflection, he had always been a little arrogant and very self-centred and had never treated me particularly well. But I loved him at the time and never saw his faults, no pun intended.
He’d never been the best looking of guys but suddenly, it seemed, he was becoming popular and getting inappropriate offers from girls. It first I thought it wouldn’t make any difference to our relationship, not after all this time, he would never stray from me now, surely?
But doubts began creeping in and although I never caught him out, I am sure he wasn’t as faithful as he should have been. We broke up and got back together a few times and I began to wonder if he loved me at all or if he came back just for the sex. But I put up with it because I still loved him and stupidly believed that we were destined to be together always.
Then one day I realised that he was gone for good and when I eventually got over the heartbreak, which I have to say was pretty acute, I started getting on with my life and going out with other guys.
I wasn’t promiscuous, but I did have an intimate relationship with one guy who I really liked. I was wiser now though and I had no further romantic illusions about undying love, so when it ended after a few weeks I got over it and carried on with life without too much angst.
A few months later I fell in love with the Patrick’s best friend Jeff, who was a very good looking guy who I had known for a long time but never looked at in a romantic way before. When I did, I liked what I saw and we stayed together for two years in a very up and down but mostly satisfying relationship.
I was hurt when it ended but nothing like as bad as I had been the first time. It must have been about that time that I started wondering if I would ever find the right guy and be happy with him for ever.
And it was not long after that that I met my future husband Vernon, He was totally different to anyone I had been out with before, sophisticated and smart, with a progressive job and a bright future. Exactly the type of man I wanted to be with, so it was easy to fall for him.
And he fell in love with me too, almost immediately, and after we had been together for a few short months he asked me to marry him.
It was quite a surprise, but I said yes without hesitation. It was what I had wanted for a long time, a commitment from someone who really cared for me as a person. For the first time I felt truly loved, he made that obvious all the time with his thoughtfulness and caring gestures. He wasn’t scared to tell the world that he loved me, and I loved him and was deliriously happy anticipating our future together.
We were married in a lovely chapel in the country and it was such a happy day for me, and for him too, he so obviously adored me and I him.
We settled into a wonderful loving relationship in a new house that his parents had helped us to buy and I gave birth to my first child a little over a year later and another one two years after that.
My children became the centre of my world and I needed nothing else. Our marriage was still working but my babies were top of my priority list. Perhaps this caused my husband some consternation and, although he never said as much, he had bouts of sullen brooding and we were not as close as we had previously been.
But he loved the kids almost as much as I did and we were a happy family most of the time.
When the kids started school I got very bored at home and went back to work. I got a very nice little part-time job which I really enjoyed, and I threw myself into it with enthusiasm.
Then Vernon was made redundant and had to get another job, with a lower salary, which put an end to our plans to get a bigger house. And a year later he was made redundant again.
Fortunately I was doing well and was offered a full-time position and became the main breadwinner as he moved from one dead-end job to another.
He later went into business for himself and did reasonably well, and with the promotions I had been given we were financially comfortable again and moved into the bigger house we’d wanted for so long. Things were going well apart from our actual marriage which felt stale and lacking in romance.
Then, by chance one day, I bumped into Dale, who I hadn’t seen for years and who brought back many memories of what seemed like another lifetime.
I hadn’t liked him very much, he had come on to me when I was going out with his brother and, at the time, I was shocked and incensed that he would do something like that, but he was a charming guy and I was pleased to see him. So I agreed to meet him that evening after work for a coffee and talk of old times.
Remembering what he had been like, I didn’t go to meet him alone but took Vernon along when he called to fetch me from work. I introduced them without mentioning my relationship with Patrick. After all it was so long ago and I was unlikely to see him again as he had apparently moved away and was living with his wife and two children in another city.
We spent a genial hour in a café and in the coming weeks Vernon and I visited Dale and his wife and had them around to our house for a couple of meals. Dale and I never discussed Patrick unless we were alone together which wasn’t very often, and even then, he said very little about Patrick and I didn’t want to appear too interested in case I gave out the wrong message.
The fact that we didn’t talk about Patrick when Vernon was there didn’t make me feel that I was being deceitful, I just didn’t want Vernon to get upset about my life before I met him. When we first became close I had told him about Patrick and he had accepted it graciously, but it was obvious to me that he hadn’t liked the thought of me being with another man and it was something we had talked about on only one or two occasions since our marriage.
Vernon and Dale never really hit it off anyway, however, and I was certain Dale had said something about his brother. Neither of them said anything to me which reminded me how deceitful Dale had been in the old days.
They never became close friends on any level. But I found Dale very charming in an overstated sort-of way and he often complimented me, saying things like how beautiful I still was. I wasn’t gullible enough to believe him and he was so transparent with the sexual innuendo he would bring into the conversation whenever he and I were alone, but I enjoyed the attention, it was something I lacked at home.
So when he called me at my office one afternoon and asked if we could meet for a drink after work as he wanted to talk to me about Patrick, I knew immediately what he had in mind. But I was intrigued, and curious about what he wanted to say, and even wondered if he really did want to talk about his brother. So I agreed, and we met in a little pub around the corner from my where I worked.
As I expected, it had been a ruse as all he had to say about Patrick was that he felt I should get in touch with him just for old times sake and he gave me his phone number. But I found myself enjoying his company and after a few drinks I had forgotten why I’d agreed to meet him alone.
We met again in the same pub a week later and it became a fairly regular occurrence. We would meet in the pub for a drink, or we would take a walk through the park and talk. It was all totally innocent until one day he told me he had been in love with me for years and was so happy to have found me again even though we would never be a couple as he knew we were both happily married.
But we talked about his marriage and about mine. He told me he had been married for so long that there was no romance left and he was bored, and I easily related to that sentiment, although I never said as much.
And then one day as we sat in his car in the park he kissed me and foolishly I responded. It never went further than a kiss the first time but we did the same thing again the following week and eventually he parked in a secluded area and we made love in the car like a pair of love struck teenagers.
I couldn’t believe what I was doing, I had never even considered having an affair, it wasn’t “me” at all. And even more curiously, as we made love I felt guilt not for the betrayal of my husband, but for cheating on Patrick with his brother of all people.
The sex was wonderful though and it made me realise how bad my sex life had been with Vernon recently, it had become almost a chore to be performed from time to time, like cleaning the windows.
But all my life I had thought of myself as having high moral standards and was quick to condemn anyone who broke their marriage vows, so when I got home I collapsed on the bed and cried my eyes out for almost an hour until I had no more tears to cry. I was shocked and disgusted with myself and tried to analyse the situation without much success. I told myself that it had happened because my marriage was at such a low point and I was lonely and vulnerable.
But I couldn’t really convince myself that that was the truth. How could I be lonely, I had my children who were my best friends, and I had many others friends too, both family friends and work friends, who loved me and cared about me. But there is more than one kind of loneliness and we don’t have to be alone to feel lonely.
If anything, it had been my behaviour with Dale that had made me feel lonely because I couldn’t share my thoughts with anyone. I had a close girl friend with whom I shared some fairly intimate thoughts, but I would never tell her I had had sex with another man. While I knew she would not be judgemental and would do what she could to help, I hated the thought of anyone knowing what I had done. I was totally alone on this one.
The next time Dale and I met I told him that we must stop seeing each other. I was never going to leave my family and he should consider his wife and forget that anything ever happened between us. He agreed and told me he was not going to leave his wife for me either and that I should think of it as a diversion. It did no one any harm as long as we kept it to ourselves.
I was humiliated and dismayed with what I had done and swore to myself that it would never happen again. What if my husband ever found out, or worse, what if my children found out?
But it did happen again, a few times. He was a good lover, if a little selfish, and I found myself justifying my actions by thinking that there was no emotional connection, it was just sex. Even I couldn’t live with that for long though and it soon ended.
Further justification, in my mind at least, was the fact that Vernon had had an affair with a friend of mine a couple of years earlier. I hadn’t even told him that I knew it had happened so he always felt that he had got away with it. But I had been very upset at the time and had spoken to the woman concerned, who was a family friend, if friend is the right word. Vernon had been so transparent when it happened that I had known immediately what was going on and when I thought back on a few insignificant things that had occurred, I also knew who was involved.
No one ever did find out about my affair though. I was very nervous when I went home after each time I’d been with Dale and was desperately concerned that Vernon would see the changes that were occurring in me and become suspicious of what I had been doing. But he took so little notice of what I did that I don’t think he would have noticed if I brought a lover home to share our bed.
Things had changed, however. I realised just how much was missing from my marriage, and my secret liaisons with Dale had worsened things for me. If the romance in my marriage had been diminishing in recent years, it was now gone completely. I never had the adoring man I had married, and I wasn’t the adoring wife any more either. We had become emotionally estranged without even realising it. If that hadn’t been the case I would have been outraged by the mere suggestion of an affair and not only after it had happened.
For a while my thoughts were in turmoil and it made me very unhappy. I tried to be more attentive towards Vernon in an effort to revive our love and bring a little passion back into it, but received the sullen response I had become all too familiar with. The whole episode only made me realise how far apart we had grown.
And then one day while rummaging through my handbag I found Patrick’s phone number that Dale had given me and without much thought called it and heard a voice from the past that I had, for so long, believed I would never hear again.
He sounded very happy to hear from me and we talked about our respective families and gave each other the impression that we were both happy and contented with our lives.
This proved not to be the case for either of us however, it wasn’t just me. We spoke on numerous occasions and although he never said as much, I could hear that he wasn’t as happy as he had first sounded.
The more we spoke, the more we connected and soon the rapport we had had so long ago began returning and our conversation became more and more intimate as we started sharing our feelings about love and life and dreams.
It was soon obvious that our feelings for each other had been rekindled and the flame was burning brightly once more. There is a saying that a girl’s first love never dies and, in my case, that was proving to be true, and our calls became very regular and something I looked forward to very much. Needless to say, I didn’t tell him about my affair with Dale, and Dale obviously hadn’t mentioned it because Patrick never said anything either.
It wasn’t long before we told each other of our love and not long after that that he formulated a plan to visit his brother, who had a house a few miles from where I lived, so that we could meet.
The idea of meeting up with him again was very exciting but it also made me very nervous. I knew what was going to occur, this would be more than just an affair. He was going to tell me that he wanted us both to leave our respective spouses and be together. And I wanted the same thing, but, as always, it wasn’t as simple as that.
He had two grown-up children who were about to leave home, but my baby would still be dependent on me for another few years at least and I was unsure what would happen if I was to divorce. What if my husband contested it or fought for custody of the girls? What if he won and I couldn’t live with my own children?
When Patrick and I met it was as though we had never been apart. It felt so wonderful to be in his arms again and I realised what I had been missing for so long, the euphoria of loving and being loved.
We met every day for the week he was in town and one night I told Vernon that I was going away for the night on business and Patrick and I booked into a hotel and spent the night together. It was wonderful and felt so right, even though guilt nagged at me the whole time. The problems we would have to face before we could be together were far from our thoughts. I felt so happy that I believed that we could achieve anything and it would all turn out right because it felt so right.
He felt the same way and we didn’t even discuss in any detail the difficulties we would have to face, we just sailed along, caught up in the rapture and exhilaration of being together. We talked about the past and about the love we shared and we walked hand-in-hand through the park and we made love and life was wonderful.
As the time for us to part again drew closer, however, doubts began to form and the complexities of the situation grew in my mind. I don’t know whether he felt the same doubts that I did, but when he left we agreed to start putting our plan into action. We even set a date when we would marry. One year ahead, and this seemed an awfully long time away.
This was all against my better judgement, I knew that there were many issues to be discussed and resolved before we should even consider such a major life-style change, but I felt that if I said as much to Patrick it would hurt him badly and I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I decided I would go along with it for the time being and maybe it would work out.
And then he was gone.
We spoke often using email and the phone, but it was very difficult to discuss, in any depth, the issues that worried me, and he didn’t seem to worry about these things. He appeared happy to let any problems sort themselves out and I began to feel that he had adopted a very immature stance.
This, in turn, reminded me of how immature he had acted towards the end of our earlier relationship, and my doubts about the wisdom of leaving my family to be with him grew even more swiftly. I remembered my feelings after I got over the initial heartbreak of losing him all those years ago. I felt that I had been lucky not to have married him because, even then, I had grown up faster than he had and would continue to do so.
Now I began to realise that those feelings were correct which only went to create another dilemma for me. After everything I had told him during our week together and after all we had done, how would I now tell him that I had been mistaken and we should forget the whole thing?
I still loved him but there were too many risks and too many people in danger of being hurt for me to just run away from my responsibilities. So I tried to convey these thoughts to him, but he wasn’t listening and interpreted my thoughts as nerves and tried to assure me that everything would be fine and he would resolve all the problems we came across.
And there was the other issue I had to think about. What would happen if we married and he later found out that I had had an affair with his brother?
And I soon realised that I was going to have to hurt him, and sooner would be better than later. It was either him or my children and while it broke my heart to cause him the pain I now knew he was going to feel, when it came to my girls there was no contest.
I tried hard to let him down lightly, but all I achieved was to sustain the hurt and draw it out far longer than was necessary. For a long time he wouldn’t accept that it was over and only when I eventually told him straight out that I was not going to leave my family did it really sink in.
We continued to correspond, emailing each other almost every day, and I tried to be a friend in the hope that we would develop a meaningful friendship without the tension involved in an illicit sexual relationship.
I could tell by his messages that he was very hurt and I felt a lot of guilt about the way I had handled things. I should never have told him that I would leave my family and marry him, but at the time I truly believed that it would work. I guess I was very vulnerable at the time and I got caught up in the moment and needed some excitement and romance in my life.
I was hoping we would eventually settle into a friendship without complications, but although I stopped leading him on and never told him that I loved him or ever wanted to be with him, it never got to be just a friendship. Too much had happened between us and there were too many strong feelings. He continued to tell me he loved me at the same time as saying that he had accepted that we would never be anything more than friends.
So for over a year we had this friendship that always had something more bubbling just beneath the surface. Then, for reasons I couldn’t even explain to myself, I took some time off work, telling Vernon that I needed some time alone. Patrick did the same and we met in a neutral town and spent a week together and had a wonderful time walking and talking and making love.
I had hoped that we could have developed a platonic friendship but that was not to be. Call me weak! However, there were no promises made of a future together and it actually helped our relationship by releasing the tensions and guilt that I had been feeling. I had moved on from the guilt and he had moved on from the pain and our love became more settled as we both accepted that we would always be much more than friends but never completely together.
When I returned, I threw myself into my job which had become a very steadying part of my life over the past years, and I was rewarded with more very satisfying promotions.
We did the same thing again a couple of months later and kept communicating on a very regular basis. It was a pleasant diversion for me, it felt good to know that someone loved me without conditions, and it gave me a break from my dull routine at home. And I have to admit that I did start to think of him as a sort of insurance policy. If my marriage ever did break down completely when the children had left home, he would always be there for me to fall back on. And I had once had the cheek to call him arrogant!
My job had become far more important to me than I would have believed possible. Not only had my confidence soared with the success I was getting at work but it had improved my whole self-esteem and gave my life a focus outside of my rather unvarying and lacklustre marriage.
The girls were now adults and although I saw them often, at least every week, they led their own lives in which I was a relative outsider. For years I had been dreading the time when they flew the nest and my husband and I were alone again, so I felt fortunate to have a fulfilling job to keep me occupied and give me the independence I craved.
And I was quite happy in my life outside of my job too, although I felt enormous guilt from time to time when I thought about the extra-marital affairs I’d had. I still hadn’t figured out why I had done it. I blamed my affair with Patrick on the idea that he was my first love and that I had never completely stopped loving him and we had met at a time when I was particularly vulnerable. I thought of him fondly and with regret and sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out if I had left my husband and married him.
I never found a way to justify my affair with Dale, apart from the vulnerability story. So I told myself that it was now all in the past and I had come through it all relatively unscathed and things could only get better.
But worse was to come. Much worse.
One day Vernon confronted me with an email he had found in our deleted folder. Patrick always emailed me at work, except once when I’d been off work with the flu and he mailed at home. I had deleted his message without realising that when I pressed delete and it disappeared, it went into the deleted folder. And so it was that Vernon found it, and although it never contained any conclusive evidence that we were having or had had an affair, it made Vernon believe that we had and I realised that there wasn’t much point in me denying the facts.
So I told him the truth, that there had been an affair but it was over now and would not happen again. I considered bringing up his earlier affair, but he looked so despondent and heartbroken that I didn’t feel the need to. Although his discovery came as a great shock to me, I knew that I was still in control and that he would never leave me or try to take the girls away from me.
I was mortified, however, and more than a little sad that it had come to this. I had half expected to be found out sooner or later, but now that it had happened it was very traumatic for us both, and I broke down and cried and asked for his forgiveness and promised that it wouldn’t happen again. And I was sincere, I didn’t want to be seen as this scarlet woman who ran around with men having affairs, I wanted to be happily married and in love with my husband.
Vernon began to cry as well and I knew that I had hurt him badly. It seemed that I had a talent for hurting people and that, too, made me very upset. He had been so good to me and loved me with all his heart, just as Patrick had done, and in return for that I had hurt them both and myself along with them.
Then Vernon stormed out of the house and, in spite of my earlier confidence, I wondered if he would ever come back.
After lying on the bed and crying for a long time I gathered myself and tried to decide on a plan to put things right again. First I had to get Vernon back and establish that we should stay together and work it out. If he came back tonight, I vowed, I would do just that, I would talk him round and force myself, if necessary, to love him and be faithful to him.
He came back well after midnight and I had had a lot of time to work out my strategy. At first I went on the offensive and asked if he wanted a divorce knowing, or perhaps hoping against hope, that he would not take that option.
It was obvious that he had had a few drinks and had been crying and he couldn’t talk for a while but eventually he went down on his knees and begged me not to leave him. This made me feel even worse about myself, I was the one who should be on my knees begging for forgiveness, he had done nothing wrong and was guilty only of being a wonderful husband and father. So and I joined him on the carpet and held him close to me and swore to never hurt him again.
We went to the bedroom then and I took off my clothes and gave myself to him completely, something I hadn’t done for a very long time, and afterwards we lay in each other arms quietly and eventually we slept.
It hurt me badly to see the pain I had caused and once more I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t happen again. And it took Vernon a long time to come to terms with what had happened, he wanted to forgive and forget but didn’t find it easy and I knew it would take time for him to get back to normal.
Our relationship improved as time went on, I worked hard to become a loving wife again, and it paid off, Vernon seemed to appreciate what I was doing and his trust in me began to grow again.
Until some months later when it all took another step backwards.
My elder daughter, Nina, had been out on a couple of dates with a young guy named Raymond who lived in the same street as we did. His and our families had become friends and we all met socially from time to time.
Raymond was a very likeable and very mature twenty-year-old and totally gorgeous, and I was amazed, and rather disappointed, that Nina didn’t seem particularly interested in him although he was obviously smitten with her.
I even tried to sway her thinking towards him, saying how much her father and I liked him, but that had the reverse effect and she dated other guys and ignored him until he finally realised he was not going to get anywhere with her and gave up.
Vernon and I and Raymond’s parents still met occasionally either for a meal at one of our homes or at a local pub for a few drinks. It was on one such occasion when Raymond joined us and he and I got chatting after being left alone at the table. His mother had left early and gone home and the two older men were playing darts.
I had had a few glasses of wine and was in a very mellow mood, and Raymond looked gorgeous as he always did. He had a rather angelic face and a great physique which he kept in shape playing sports and working out in a gym.
He had had a little too much to drink as well and we found ourselves flirting unashamedly with each other and trading sexual innuendo. If Nina had heard me she would have been dreadfully embarrassed and probably wouldn’t have spoken to me for a year. But she wasn’t, and that thought never even occurred to me as I was thoroughly enjoying Raymond’s company.
The conversation died when the men returned from the dart board and I never thought any more about it until the next morning when I found my actions of the previous night very embarrassing. I hoped Raymond felt the same way and would say nothing about it and that would be the end of it.
A week later, however, he phoned me at home. I hadn’t seen him since the night in the pub and the embarrassment had receded, although it flared up when I realised who was on the phone.
He told me he had been thinking about me the whole week and would like to talk to me. I started to say that I didn’t think it was a good idea, but then thought I had better talk to him and put things straight as he was very young and I needed to nip this in the bud before it got out of hand. So I agreed to meet him in a pub at the shopping centre. I knew this meeting wouldn’t bring good news, I guessed he had misinterpreted our flirting and was going to try to take things further and I was preparing myself to let him down as gently as I could.
When I got to the pub Raymond was already there, but instead of being the nervous young boy I was expecting, he was confident to the point of being cheeky, saying that we both knew that there was a spark between us and that life was too short to let something as good as this go by without making the most of it.
His whole attitude threw me. Suddenly Raymond didn’t appear to me as the young boy I’d always thought him to be, he was a sophisticated and confident and very good-looking man who knew what he wanted and, it seemed, knew what I wanted even before I did. We had a drink and before I knew it we were back into flirting mode, only this time it was much more serious with less innuendo, it was a real come-on.
I can only guess that I was so flattered that he found me attractive that my mind stopped working, because without any thought of the consequences we left the pub after a few drinks and went back to my house. Vernon was away on business and the children were on a trip with a group of friends, so I had the house to myself for the whole weekend.
In retrospect the whole episode seems surreal. Raymond must have had a few successful sexual encounters with girls to be so confident, but he lacked finesse and when he started fumbling with my underwear I lead him through the motions and his self-assurance quickly returned.
Perhaps it was because of the risks I was taking, or perhaps it was because he was so young and so beautiful, but we had the most exciting and fulfilling sex I had ever had. It was only after he had gone and I had come back down to earth that the horror of what I had done came to me. The shock I had felt after my affair with Dale and the guilt I had suffered after being with Patrick was nothing to what I felt now. What had I been thinking? Or, rather, why had I not been thinking?
The potential consequences of my actions were terrifying, so much so that I couldn’t even contemplate them for some time and, initially, my thoughts were concentrated more on why I had allowed it to happen. My mind went in circles trying to latch onto something, but there was nothing. It felt as though someone else had done this, it was not me at all. A week ago I would never have considered doing such a thing and if someone else had done it I would have been outraged and disgusted.
Then I tried to figure out what motivated Raymond to want to have sex with a woman of my age. Perhaps he just saw an opportunity and took it, or maybe he searched for an opportunity to get his own back for the way that Nina had treated him.
The question in my mind now, though, was what he intended to do next. He wasn’t in love with me, which was a pity because if that had been the case I would have had some leverage and been able to keep him from mentioning our affair to anyone.
I felt cold at the thought that he might go straight to Nina and tell her that he had had sex with her mom. She wouldn’t believe him and would come straight to me and tell me what he had said, at which point she would read it in my reaction that it was true and my life would fall apart.
Over the next week I lost a lot of sleep worrying about what Raymond might do and what would happen if the truth came out. I never saw Raymond and he never contacted me, which only made things worse. If he had come back for more I would have been relieved because it would have meant that he was not going to talk to Nina about it, but I heard nothing from him and I never contacted him as I hadn’t yet figured out a way of dealing with the situation.
The worry started to affect my work and I had trouble concentrating on anything, so eventually I phoned Raymond and suggested we should talk. He acted as if nothing had happened and assured me that he would not talk of our liaison to anyone and when I said it had been a serious mistake and would never happen again he was very casual as though he it meant nothing to him either way.
When I left him I felt only marginally better about the situation. I wasn’t worried that he would talk to Nina any more, but, knowing what young guys were, I was still concerned that he might let it slip that he and I had been lovers to one of his friends and the cat would be out of the bag.
I felt like I would expect a criminal to feel, looking over my shoulder all the time to see who had caught me out, and decided that I needed to make some big changes if I was to get past this. So I decided that I would ask my employer for a transfer and talk Vernon into moving to another city. In the past we had briefly discussed moving down to the coast and buying a place closer to his now elderly parents, and while I had resisted it then, it felt a lot more appealing now.
He was a little surprised at first, but soon agreed that it might be a nice idea, and we started planning the move. I applied for a transfer and it was granted and Vernon worked for himself and could operate from anywhere so it wasn’t a big problem for him.
Vernon and I still socialised with Raymond’s parents from time to time and he and I crossed paths occasionally and became reasonably comfortable in each other’s company again although the guilt I felt always made me feel very uneasy.
I still felt nervous that something might slip and the affair I had had with Raymond would be found out. One evening he phoned me and suggested that we might ‘get together’ again and I quickly cut him off and told him very brusquely that we would never ‘get together’ again and reminded him that it had been a huge mistake that would never be repeated.
But he asked again a few days later, saying that he cared for me and would never tell anyone and it wouldn’t do any harm as long as no one found out about it. Again I refused to entertain the idea, but he became quite persistent and began phoning fairly often with the same suggestion becoming almost pleading at times. I have to admit that I was tempted when I remembered the ecstasy I felt when we had made love, but I remained strong and resisted him and told him to forget it and move on and stop pestering me.
Which he did, but only after he phoned one evening and had Vernon answer. I had left my phone in the living room while I was cooking and Vernon had picked it up when it rang. Raymond hung up immediately but Vernon read his number and asked why Raymond would be phoning me. I brushed it aside saying that he was probably trying to get hold of Nina again and Vernon accepted that without further questions.
But a short while later he saw Raymond in the street and Raymond foolishly avoided him which made him suspicious and he later challenged me, suggesting that something was going on. Of course I told him not to be silly and that nothing was going on and he shouldn’t be so paranoid, but it shook me and I began hurrying my plans to move away. Things were getting out of hand and I felt that it was only a matter of time before the truth about Raymond and I came out.
I was also still corresponding with Patrick and although it had been a long time since I had seen him, he was another thing to worry about, if my family found out that I still talked to Patrick it would cause further trouble for me.
A month or so later we moved down to the coast and I vowed to myself that there would be no more affairs and I would make every effort to rekindle my marriage. I tried to stop corresponding with Patrick but he was very persistent in his argument that we shouldn’t lose touch again after all we had been through together over the years. And I had to agree with him to a certain extent so I talked myself into believing that it would do no harm to talk occasionally as long as we didn’t continue with our sexual liaisons. I had been more worried about Raymond and I felt that that problem was gone now that we had moved away and a great weight was lifted off my shoulders.
I made the effort and my marriage improved a bit although I also met up with Patrick occasionally. But only very occasionally, it wasn’t an affair as such. We just got together a couple of times for old-time’s sake, and although we did have sex, there were no promises and nothing more was expected by either of us.
I had another brief affair after I’d been in my new job a few months. It seems that, like most things, affairs become easier and less stressful with practise. They are like chocolates, it is easier to resist the first one than the subsequent ones, particularly if the whole box is open to you.
My job transfer turned out to be yet another promotion and it involved spending a fair amount of time away from home, usually for a couple of days at a time. I was required to travel to other branches, often in other cities, to assist the sales team and senior management in selling our product to our larger clients.
Offers on a social level came thick and fast, usually for a few drinks and a night of passion, but sometimes much more than that. I had grown up enough, however, not to take any of these offers seriously, I wasn’t going to fall for any man again, especially one who was married and merely wanted a mistress, so I rejected all these offers. Or at least most of them.
But I was flattered on one trip when one of the top executives in the company asked me to join him for a dinner in the hotel restaurant.
It was a very classy and expensive hotel and the restaurant was equally sumptuous. We had a lovely dinner and then adjourned to the bar. The talk was amiable to start off with but I soon realised what he had in mind for the evening and was even more flattered by his attention. He was an attractive man about my age and I found him quite fascinating. He spoke of weekend jaunts on his yacht and of some of the famous people he’d met.
He made me feel important with the attention he gave me and I felt proud that others in the bar watched us with envy. Or at least that is what I thought it was, possibly because of the wine I had consumed.
So I wasn’t surprised when he invited me up to his room for the proverbial “nightcap”. I knew what he meant, the cliché wasn’t lost on me, and I found the idea of spending the night with him very appealing. I was attracted by his power and confidence, and I actually felt quite honoured that he wanted me, someone who, a few years ago, would have past unnoticed if I’d come into contact with him.
I also knew that he was married as his wife occasionally came into the office. She was a rather self-important lady who looked down on everyone she met and I’m sure she had never noticed me. But I wasn’t thinking of her as I took my clothes off in his bedroom.
Looking back on the incident I can see that even in the bedroom he continued to be “the boss” and was used to giving the orders and being obeyed. Although I felt very worldly and sophisticated, there was no doubt about who was in charge.
The liaison wasn’t very satisfactory from my point of view at all, his idea of foreplay was making me go down on him, which, it appeared, was the only way to get him started. He then lay me down on the bed and entered me and within a minute or two it was all over. At no time did he consider my satisfaction and shortly after it was finished he told me that we had an early start in the morning and I realised that I had been summarily dismissed for the night.
It was a very humiliating experience altogether and I told myself that it would never happen again and quite looked forward to rejecting his advances the next time. But no further advances came and he treated me as though nothing had ever happened, which added to the humiliation. The only consolation I felt was that he must feel humiliated too after such a poor performance.
A few months later I had another brief affair with a lovely man who was part of the sales team of one of our clients. Grant was single and a couple of years younger than me and he was very attentive and loving. He was also a very good lover and in bed concentrated almost entirely on pleasing me. He totally restored my faith in men and I felt loved and appreciated every time I was with him.
There were no thoughts on either side of a permanent relationship, he knew I was married, so there was no pressure on me to promise anything I couldn’t deliver. The affair might have lasted for years had he not found a job in another country and moved away. I missed him after he’d gone, it had been wonderful to have a gentle, loving man to hold me and make me feel loved again. Vernon loved me, I had no doubt about that, but he also took me for granted. He treated me more like a silly little sister than a partner.
After that I started wondering what the future held for me. The girls had not come down to the coast with us, they had rented an apartment which was working out well for them. We saw them often and were still a very close family but I now began considering leaving Vernon and getting a place of my own. Was it right for me to stay when I couldn’t seem to bring myself to be faithful to him? Should I divorce him and let him find someone who would give him the love and respect he wanted?
When I asked myself these questions the answer was always grey. Vernon didn’t want me to leave him, he had begged me to stay, even after he found out about my affair with Patrick. But I had promised him that it wouldn’t happen again and I had let him down, even though he didn’t know it. At times I wondered if I should let him choose again whether to continue the marriage or divorce. Perhaps if we went separate ways we would both be able to find what we were searching for.
On the other hand, I felt that I had an obligation to him and to the girls and I should stay with him. So it came down to two options. I could go with honesty and tell him that I didn’t love him and wanted to leave him, or I could stay with him and live with my responsibilities and lie to him about my true feelings.
Neither way was perfect and I found it impossible to decide which was the correct course of action, so for a long time I maintained the status quo, that being the easier option.
But the affairs persisted. Not continuously though, after each affair, none of which lasted very long, I would tell myself yet again that that was the last one, and then I would not get involved with anyone for a few months or even as much as a year. But then I would become restless and eventually weaken and another one would begin.
And as time went on this took its toll on my marriage. I became more and more frustrated with Vernon and sometimes wondered why I had married him at all and if I had ever actually loved him. He often became sullen and withdrawn and we argued more often and eventually even the girls noticed, or at least Patty, the younger and more sensitive of the two, so I decided that something had to be done.
And so it was, that after nearly 25 years of marriage we finally divorced and went our own ways. We sold the house and I moved into an apartment and Vernon into another, smaller house.
To this day I don’t know if divorce was the right thing to do, sometimes I was very happy with my independence and at other times I was lonely and sad that things had come to this and I was alone at a time of my life when I should have had a big family around me. But I still saw a lot of the girls and I had my job which was very fulfilling and took up most of my time.
I also still had the occasional affair, or were they relationships since I was divorced, or maybe just flings? They ended, however, after a shameless weekend of wantonness one summer. I had been out a few times with a very nice guy called Bill when he invited me to join him on his yacht for the weekend. We were to be joined by a close friend of Bill’s named Jack and his girlfriend Sheryl, and when they arrived at the marina I immediately hit it off with them both.
Sheryl was a sweet girl, a bit younger than me, probably mid-forties and very outgoing and fun to be with. Bill took us out to an island just off the coast on Saturday morning where we anchored and while the men fished, Sheryl and I lay in the sun and relaxed and talked. Sheryl sunbathed topless, she had a lovely body and the men could scarcely take their eyes off her, but this never made me feel inferior in any way and although I never removed my top I got my fair share of appreciative looks and I was very proud that I could still look good in a bikini. We had a wonderful evening on the boat, drinking and chatting and laughing and the four of us really bonded and became friends.
We all drank a little too much and sometime in the early hours we all ended up in the same bed and both women had sex with both men.
At the time I thought it was a wonderful experience and I felt so much love and closeness to all three of my companions that it didn’t seem at all out of the ordinary.
Even in the morning it seemed so natural and Sheryl was her bubbly self as we cooked breakfast and then spent another day together lying in the sun.
It was when we got back to shore that it hit me. We left the men on the boat to clear up and arranged for a cab to take us back into town. Sheryl said to me “It’s been so nice being with you, we must do it again, we’d make a great team”, and when she got out of the cab she wrote her phone number down and gave it to me saying that we really should stay in touch. And it was then I realised what she meant. The name she wrote down was not Sheryl, but Emily, and I realised that the whole weekend had not been as it had seemed and that she had been paid to be there and had assumed that I’d been paid too.
The whole situation amazed me, for the men it had been nothing more than a dirty weekend. My first thought was that I’d been so gullible, the men had got two for the price of one. And incidents that had occurred suddenly fell into place, no wonder Jack had been so confident that I wouldn’t mind having sex with him while his ”girlfriend” had sex with Bill. He thought that I was a prostitute. I was disgusted and angry, and more than a little hurt.
I began to wonder if I was a prostitute, I hadn’t taken any money, but I’d done everything Sheryl/Emily had done, I’d slept with a man who I had known just a few hours and shared a bed, and my body, with two men at once. If I wasn’t a prostitute, I was certainly a slut and my self-esteem hit an all-time low. But it cured me of my craving for random sexual encounters and I never did anything like it again.
My wife had an affair. At least one, probably two, she might even be a serial adulteress.
Which is surprising to me because we have had such a great marriage, and for twenty years I believed that she wouldn’t even look at another man? She flirted occasionally when she had had a few glasses of wine, but it was always harmless and I honestly thought she would be terrified stiff if a man tried to take her flirting further and get her into bed.
We had only known each other for a couple of weeks when we fell in love, she obviously adored only me and I did her and nothing or no one could have come between us.
It wasn’t that I was her first love but she wasn’t very experienced when I met her. Before we were married, Gillian lived with a guy for a couple of years. But she assured me, when she told me about him, that he was her only lover before me and she made it obvious that she loved me far more than she had ever loved him.
He wasn’t a very nice guy and he didn’t treat her very well, messing around with other girls at the time he was living with Gillian. And he didn’t make much money either, he tried to make a living out of playing tennis, and, according to Gillian, thought he was better than he really was and became very self-absorbed and big-headed.
I accepted Gillian’s past, after all we all make mistakes and I had had a few lovers before I met her, and we didn’t talk about our earlier sex lives, the past was water under the bridge. She loved me and had agreed to marry me and we were both very happy. In fact she was glad to have found someone who had a future, someone educated and bright enough to be able to look after her, rather than some fly-by-night nobody who looked after only himself.
I often reflected on the wonderful life we had together. Two beautiful kids that have made us so proud and happy and cemented our relationship and helped get us through the occasional difficult time that all marriages have to go through. The good times had far outweighed the bad.
Gillian had no cause for complaint either, I had given her everything. I had had a good, well-paid job until I was made redundant and then started my own business that became fairly successful. We had a nice house and a great family. We had it all.
Perhaps, later on, we weren’t as happy as we had been at the beginning and we had disagreements like any couple, but overall our marriage was strong. We did have our own separate lives, I had a business to run which took up a lot of my time, and Gillian had a full-time job and did a lot of work after hours at home. But we spent a fair bit of quality time together and with our girls. We were a normal, happy family.
So it came as a shock to me when I found an email message from her former lover in Outlook’s deleted folder. I wasn’t searching for it or trying to catch her out or anything like that, I would never read her messages, we respected each other’s privacy, but it was our shared PC and I was looking for a message that I had inadvertently deleted.
It wasn’t incriminating in itself, merely a friendly message, but reading between the lines I saw a certain intimacy that shouldn’t have been there.
I thought that it probably had no sinister meaning, more than likely they had bumped into each other and had coffee together and talked of old times, or something like that. Why hadn’t she told me about it though? If it was innocent she could have told me that they had been talking to each other again.
It started me thinking about incidents that I had previously thought nothing of. I remembered a few months earlier when she had decided she needed to go away for a week on her own to “relax and recharge”. She’d been working hard all year, she said, and needed space and time alone.
I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now my mind was in top gear. Had they spent the week together reliving old times, I wondered. Was she in love with him again and had he asked her to leave me and run away with him? The more I thought about it the more it all fitted. She had been very cagey about what she had done while she was away, “just read a few books and relaxed”. Gillian never read books. And she very seldom relaxed. She hated relaxing, she was always on the go, which was something I really admired about her, and the reason she had done so well at her job and been given so many promotions.
I said nothing for a few days after finding the email message. I hated the thought of her with someone else, but told myself that I was probably just being paranoid. I couldn’t believe what was happening, surely Gillian wouldn’t risk everything we had like this. I also felt a little hypocritical because I had had a short affair a few years earlier. But it had only lasted a couple of weeks and Gillian never knew about it so no one was hurt.
It worried me though, and every time I started to believe that I was just being obsessive and should trust her, it would pop back into my head and taunt me. It was very painful. How could she do this to me? I gave her everything, worked all my life to give her and the girls everything they wanted. But she didn’t notice my mood and I wondered when we had grown so far apart that she could no longer see something as big as this happening between us.
Eventually though, I could take no more of the agony and uncertainty, so I confronted her with my suspicions.
At first she was infuriated and angry that I would accuse her of such a thing. I should have expected this response; her first reaction in any argument was always to go on the offensive. But when she realised that she hadn’t prepared her answers well enough and wasn’t going to convince me that my suspicions were unfounded, she admitted that she had had an affair with him but assured me that, while it had been a major error of judgement, it had been very short and that she had now lost touch with him again.
This was a further devastating blow for me, however much I mistrusted her I still hoped that she would have a logical and reasonable explanation as to why she hadn’t told me about her communication with him and everything would turn out fine again and I’d just feel a little guilty about not trusting her.
She began to cry then and told me how sorry she was and how much she regretted what she had done. She assured me it would never happen again and that it had all been a silly mistake.
I very nearly caved and forgave her immediately. It is said that when a woman has tears in her eyes it is the man who can’t see clearly, and that’s certainly true in my case. The matter had truly brought home to me the love I still felt for her and the importance I placed on the family. But I was incensed and beside myself with what felt like grief and I couldn’t just let it go and pretend everything was fine. So I left the house and didn’t return until the early hours of the morning.
She was waiting for me when I got home, very calm and composed, and when I said nothing she confronted me with a question that shook me even further. “Do you want a divorce?”
I hadn’t even considered a divorce at this stage, I didn’t know what I wanted and I just wished it had never happened. But when I tried to explain this to her she suggested that there were only two options available to us, get over it and get on with life together or each go our own separate way and get on with life apart.
When I asked which option she preferred she said she wanted to get past it and continue with our lives, she was deeply sorry for what she had done, but she couldn’t undo it.
So it was up to me. She had effectively passed everything on to me, knowing full well that I would eventually accept what had happened and forgive her and live with the pain she had caused. I wondered how I had become so weak and how she found it so easy to manipulate me.
It took a few days of silence, but then I broke down and told her that if she would promise that it would never happen again I would try to forget it. It was a very humiliating experience and I felt as though I was apologising to her. And even when it was over and we had agreed to get our lives back to normal I felt as though I had been made to grovel and that she had the upper hand in our future and I could either go along with whatever she wanted to do or leave and she would be fine either way.
But the following days were great, we began having sex much more often and she tried hard to make me feel better about our relationship. I started to think that she was sincere and that it had genuinely been a mistake and she would be faithful to me in the future. And after a while I was happy again and the whole episode was forgotten, or at least no longer talked about. I even believed that our relationship had grown stronger and we were closer than ever.
It lasted over a year until the next bombshell dropped. One evening, out of the blue, she suggested we should sell the house and move to the coast. Well, not entirely out of the blue, I had suggested it once a couple of years earlier but she had immediately dismissed the idea saying that she couldn’t change jobs now and no more was said.
When I questioned her thinking, she explained that it would be a nice change and we would be nearer my parents and it would get us out of the rut we were in.
I didn’t even know we were in a rut, but we discussed it a lot and, although I didn’t understand why she suddenly wanted to move, I agreed in principle.
Then one day while I was watching TV and she was in the kitchen her phone rang and I answered it, only to hear the line go dead as the caller hung up. As we had similar phones it was natural for me see who the call was from, and it was from Raymond, the young guy down the street whose family we occasionally met socially.
While I was doing this she came running into the room with a look of panic on her face and then casually asked who had called. I told her and she said he was probably trying to find out about our daughter, Nina, whom he had taken out a couple of times.
The incident made me very suspicious again, but I didn’t know why. She wouldn’t be having an affair with him unless she had become a Mrs Robinson character, as he was less than half her age and interested in her daughter, but that panicked look said volumes, I just didn’t know what it was saying. She must have thought the call was from someone else who she obviously didn’t want me to talk to.
I didn’t associate the call with her sudden desire to move away, but it did make me think that she had been acting out of character a lot recently. Her previous affair came to the front of my mind once more and I wondered if she was seeing him again.
A few days later I was walking home from the newsagent when I saw Raymond coming toward me and I realised for the first time that he had certainly grown and must be 19 or 20 already. I greeted him in a friendly manner but when he saw me he became decidedly agitated and almost ran across the road and into his house without saying a word. This really stirred my curiosity and raised my suspicions. Could this young boy be having an affair with my wife? No, surely not. But I decided to call and say hello to his parents and do a little fishing and see what I could learn about him.
When his mother answered my knock I just got a glimpse of him disappearing out of the back door.
I never learned anything from my visit, but it was obvious that Raymond didn’t want to see me.
In the coming days I pondered the best course of action. Stewed is probably a better word. I couldn’t believe that my forty-something wife was having an affair with a teenage boy, but the evidence, however insubstantial, was certainly pointing that way. The look of panic when I answered her phone. Him running away from me like that. Why else would she suddenly want to leave town and disappear? If she was, or had had, an affair with him she must be terrified that it would be discovered, if not by me, by Nina or by someone in the community, and the embarrassment for her would be severe.
Too many unanswered questions, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted them answered. I was numb, angry, hurt, disillusioned and most of all heartbroken. Everything I had was slipping away from me. Would my beautiful family survive this in one piece or would it shatter? Would my children have to visit their mom and dad separately? Would I only get to see them at weekends, or one day a week?
Eventually I could take no more of the uncertainty and had to confront her yet again.
And I got her usual aggressive response. Don’t be ridiculous, she said and laughed at the suggestion that she would have an affair with a teenager who was in love with our daughter. Then adding, possibly just to muddy the water, that Raymond wasn’t a teenager anyway, he was twenty.
We argued for days over it and I even got to the point where I started to believe her, it did seem ridiculous, maybe I was just being paranoid, as she kept telling me.
A few months later we moved away to the coast and things settled down somewhat. I tried to forget the whole thing and get back to normal like I had the first time she had an affair. But it wasn’t so easy this time, she hadn’t admitted it and come clean and, although I didn’t know what it was, I did know that something had occurred that she wasn’t going to tell me about.
Gillian’s new job meant that she often had to go away for a couple of days at a time, and I soon realised why she had been so keen to move here and take this new job. She obviously had a lover here and with her working here too they would have every opportunity to spend time together and pursue their affair.
Of course she always denied this, but our marriage became very strained and eventually it collapsed altogether and we were divorced. I had been expecting it for some time, but it still came as a shock to me and it was very painful for a long time. The girls had left and now I had lost Gillian too and there wasn’t much left for me.
It was a shock for the girls too, they didn’t know about Gillian’s affairs and I never told them, but they were hurt by our divorce and worried about both of us. They never understood the reasons for it all and I don’t suppose they ever will, I will never be able to tell them of their mother’s disloyalty and I’m sure she won’t tell them the truth either.
Was I partly to blame? Many times I asked myself this question. I wondered if I could I have done more to make her happy, but I couldn’t think of anything more that I could have done. I had given her everything I had to give, my life revolved around her and the girls. There is always two sides to a story, so I have to accept that I could have done better. Perhaps I could have loved her more, or at least shown my love for her more often or in a way that she could understand, But I did the best I could.
I had an extra-marital affair, and although I feel some guilt, I can’t say that I regret it because it felt so wonderful and so right. That would sound like romantic mush even to a teenage girl, let alone a middle aged guy, which I now am.
But I’ll start at the beginning, there are extenuating circumstances. Of course there are, there are extenuating circumstances for every situation that you try to justify to yourself, it makes it easier to handle when you know that what you have done is wrong and selfish. The thing is, it didn’t feel wrong at the time, and now, years later, it still doesn’t feel wrong, at least not totally wrong. I feel that it was wrong on some levels but not on others.
Gillian has been a large part of my life for as long as I can remember. Although we’ve been apart for most of the time she has never been far from my thoughts, even when we lost contact for nearly two decades.
She and I had been “a couple” years ago when she was in her late teens. We met in a club and got talking and ended up together for about five years. At first sight I thought she was an ordinary girl with average looks, although I quickly noticed that she was very slim and tall and had fabulous, long legs.
Girls of all sizes were very attractive to me, but I’ve always preferred slim girls, in fact I’ve had a crush on Olive Oyl since I was ten. On the day we met I wasn’t particularly attracted to Gillian, she seemed rather plain. Not that I was indifferent to the attention she gave me, being noticed by girls was unusual for me, I was a very plain guy myself and not one who found it easy to attract the opposite sex. So it was a nice surprise when I asked her out and she accepted. And right from the first date we found ourselves enjoying each others’ company and it wasn’t long before I realised that I loved her and loved being with her and missed her when she wasn’t there. She loved me too and we became inseparable.
Naturally I tried to get her into bed very early in the relationship. I had only had one lover previously, but that experience gave me more confidence than I should have had and I hoped that Gillian thought of me as an experienced man of the world.
But she wouldn’t let me touch her for a long time, she was a virgin and was not about to jump into bed with the first guy who asked her, she said, and there was plenty of time. But, like any twenty-year-old guy, I was impatient, so I told her that we loved each other and were going to be together for ever so we should take our relationship to the next level.
She would have none of it and it took months and months of begging and grovelling before she finally let me make love to her. And it was very special when it happened and I truly believed that we would be together forever. When it settled down and we became comfortable with each other our relationship became better than anything I’d known, and we were very happy together.
It wasn’t a fairy tale however, and after five great years it was over, the magic had gone and eventually we went our separate ways. Gillian tried hard to make it work and I have to admit that I wasn’t as loyal as I should have been and I didn’t treat her as well as I should have, something I would later seriously regret.
I missed her for a while, but life went on for both of us and we were both soon in new relationships, Gillian with my closest friend Jim, which hurt a little although I never let it show to either of them.
Later they, too, split up and she moved away to another town and we lost touch with each other. But she had been a big part of my life for a long time and I never forgot her and often thought of her with affection and wondered how she was doing.
It was not long after that that I met and fell in love with Julie and a year or so later we were married. She had met Gillian when she was with Jim and knew of our past, but never felt threatened by her as there was no longer anything between us.
My marriage was very happy, we had two great kids and although I went through a bad period when I drank too much and did some hurtful things, Julie was always on my side and stuck with me through thick and thin. Julie was always faithful and loyal and put me straight when I was in danger of falling over.
And then one day I realised that I wasn’t very happy anymore. It didn’t happen suddenly, it was a gradual process but Julie and I had slowly drifted apart. There were no major disagreements or fights or anything, we just got bored with each other and I started to think that there must be more to life and I felt that I was missing out somehow.
For a long time I thought I was going through a mid-life crisis and was yearning for my youth again. I thought it would pass and I’d settle down and be happy again, but that never happened. The kids grew up and went off to university and we were alone again, but we had very little in common now and there was no romance left in our marriage.
There were times when I felt attracted to other women and sometimes even felt that the attraction was reciprocated. Whether I was seeing signals that weren’t really there or misinterpreting them I don’t know, but I never followed them up anyway.
It always felt awkward and I couldn’t bring myself to act on these signals. As appealing as the idea was. I didn’t like the idea of trying to get into an extra-marital relationship for numerous reasons. I still felt some loyalty to my wife and still cared enough to hate the idea of hurting her, and, apart from that, what sort of woman wanted to have an affair with a married man anyway.
I hated the idea of telling a woman that I wasn’t married. What if I really fell in love with her and wanted more than just an affair, the whole relationship would be based on a lie and would be dead on the ground before it even started.
Another difficulty is that I would never be able to take her home, so it wouldn’t be long before she found out what was going on. So the best I could hope for was casual sex with someone who was probably also married and in a similar situation to the one I was in. It didn’t seem worth risking everything I had for that.
But I wanted something different in my life and I often found myself reflecting on the fact that I had everything, a loving wife and family, a reasonable job with a steady income, but I wanted more, I wanted to feel alive and enthusiast again.
My morale and self-esteem was very low, I had had my share of success in my life, in sport and in my marriage, but it seemed to me that every success I’d enjoyed had come to me more by chance than by hard work and I felt that I had done very little in my life.
Then I heard from Gillian again. She lived in the same city that my brother Dale lived in and he had met her by chance one day and given her my phone number. It was wonderful to hear from her and we talked for some time about our lives. She was also married with two children and was obviously very proud of them, but she didn’t say much about her husband and I didn’t ask, for some asinine reason I felt a pang of jealously thinking of her married to another man.
I had often thought of Gillian over the years, she had been a very large part of my life and I remembered her with great fondness. And a lot of regret, too, many times I wondered what my life would have been like if I had married her when I had the chance, and every time I thought about it, it seemed to me that I had made a big mistake letting her go. Not that I dwelled on this or made a big issue of it for myself, but I regretted the loss at times and regretted the way I had treated her at the end of our relationship even more. I wished I’d been more thoughtful and kinder to her. Basically, I wished I’d been more mature when I’d known her, then perhaps I would have done things differently and my life would have turned out differently.
We started talking a lot, mostly of old times, and it brought back many great memories of the time we had spent together. And it wasn’t long before I realised that I still had some very strong feelings for her and I also soon realised that if I got the chance I would happily become romantically involved with her again, even with the knowledge that we were both married.
The more we spoke to each other, the more it became obvious that Gillian shared my desires and eventually I told her that I loved her and would like us to get together and see what happened. She told me she loved me too and we agreed to a clandestine meeting.
At this point I was completely bewitched and, as in the words of Lorenz Hart, “I couldn’t sleep, and wouldn’t sleep, until I could sleep where I shouldn’t sleep”. So, without any thought of the consequences, I arranged to visit my brother for a week so I could spend time with Gillian. It wasn’t too difficult, as Julie didn’t think anything of it. I think she quite liked the idea of a week at home without me.
It was wonderful seeing Gillian again after so many years. We’d spoken often on the phone and she had sent me a photograph of herself, but actually seeing her was very exciting for me. She still had the same slim figure she had always had and those same long, sexy legs. But it was immediately apparent that the dynamics of our relationship had changed. Whereas before I had made all the decisions and Gillian had followed, now, it was reversed and I was following her.
At first, things were a little tense, but we quickly became comfortable together and after a couple of hours it was as though we’d never been apart. We talked for hours about everything, from the past, through the present, and of our dreams of the future, a future which, it seemed to me, that we would inevitable spend together.
On the second day I was there we booked into a hotel. Gillian was nervous, as I would have expected her to be, but that tension, too, quickly dissipated and our love making was the most wonderful experience I could ever remember. I was totally in love with her, far more than I had been when we’d been together all those years ago, and that night we both spoke of our undying love and agreed that some day soon we would be together.
And the rest of the week was equally wonderful. We walked through the parks and talked and just loved being together. But the week flew by and it was time for me to leave. We agreed to talk to each other often and start putting our plan to be together into action. I told her I loved her more than ever and of my regrets at losing her when we were younger, and promised never to make the same mistakes again, and I was totally sincere, I thought she was perfect for me.
On reflection, I overreacted and tried to make up for earlier errors by making new ones. I didn’t see it at the time, but Gillian, I believe, saw me as being somewhat weak and clingy.
She never said as much though and it was only a while later, after I’d returned home, that I started to realise that Gillian was not as committed to our plan as I was.
She tried hard to let me down easily, but I guess I persisted too long and eventually she told me straight that the plan wasn’t going to happen. She was very apologetic and said she hadn’t meant to lead me on or hurt me, all the classical stuff.
Nothing could be further from the truth than that old saying that goes ‘sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. Her words did hurt me, deeply. Having spent so many years hoping to find something more to life, then finding Gillian again and feeling the love I’d been seeking for so long, only to have it disappear in the proverbial puff of smoke was devastating for me.
It seemed to me that if I couldn’t get my life together with Gillian, who had such a similar background to me and who had so much in common with me, there was no chance of ever finding anyone I would be comfortable with.
At that stage I should have gone back to my wife and made the marriage work, made myself love her, the only person in the world who cared about me and loved me. But I was so far down that even that didn’t occur to me and I wallowed in self-pity and dejection. Heartbreak is like mumps, it’s painful when we are young, but it’s much worse in middle-age.
Gillian and I kept corresponding, mostly by email, but she made it clear that she wanted a friendship and nothing more, something that I couldn’t really cope with, and our correspondence probably made it more difficult for me to come to terms with the situation.
Heartbreak is a powerful and serious mental and emotional condition and the best way to heal it is to talk to someone about it. Keeping it all bottled up inside can extend the healing period enormously. Unfortunately, the only person I could talk to about it was Gillian. I could hardly tell my woes to Julie and expect to receive a sympathetic ear and I would get very little, if any, sympathy from any of our friends. I hadn’t shared my secret with anyone and couldn’t start now when it had all gone wrong.
So I continued to tell Gillian that I loved her, trying to convey the message that I loved her as a friend, but we both knew that I wanted more than that and it made her uncomfortable as well as me. The need to talk about it was overwhelming, however, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop corresponding with her and dreaded losing touch with her altogether in the misguided belief that one day she would see that being with me was right for her.
We nearly lost touch after about a year when Gillian said she was trying to make a fresh start and it would be better if we stopped talking, at least for a while, so that she could “take stock”, whatever that means!
I was beginning to get on top of it all and get on with my life and I didn’t hear from her for a while but in a weak moment I mailed her again one day and we started talking again and more or less settled into being the friends that she wanted us to be, albeit from a distance. And a couple of months later, for reasons I can’t fathom to this day, we got together again for a week of illicit love-making and lust.
This time she made no promises of a future together, it was purely a short affair and there was nothing more than that implied or expected. To this day I don’t know why she did it, I could only guess that she was going through a low spell and wanted to spend a bit of time with someone who adored her and would boost her confidence and morale. It did set me back a bit though, but it was wonderful being with her again and the sex was nothing short of amazing.
Although I knew there was no future for us, I still loved her and once again it was difficult to make myself believe that we would never be totally together. It got easier when we did the same thing again a few months later and I found that time had healed most of the wounds and I was OK again and could actually live quite comfortably being the “friend” that Gillian wanted.
Of course, we were never normal friends, more like occasional lovers. We couldn’t visit each other at home or meet for a coffee or do normal things like that because neither of us wanted our respective spouses to know about us, but we talked often and could discuss intimate things that I couldn’t talk to anyone else about, so I got a lot of satisfaction from the situation.
The occasional sexual liaisons we had were a double-edged sword, while they were wonderful and very gratifying when they were happening, they were frustrating when they were over and they made me want more than I was ever going to get.
We talked about why we did it, getting together from time to time for a few days of passion, and neither of us could explain our motives. Not to each other anyway, but I’m sure we both knew it was partly lust and partly a final grab at our lost youth.
After each time we had one of these little flings I told myself that it would be the last one and I would get on with my life without her as she had done without me. I would go home to Julie and make her happy and that, in turn, would make me happy. But it never worked out like that as much as I tried.
As time went on Gillian and I grew further and further apart. She was doing exceptionally well in her job and was moving up the corporate ladder and I got the feeling that she felt that she was leaving me behind.
So, once more, I decided to really make the effort to get over her completely and give my marriage a chance to work well again. I still had Julie and she still loved me and looked after me despite the lack of care and attention that I gave to her.
She never said anything, but I’m sure she knew of my affair with Gillian. And still she stayed with me and tried hard to keep our marriage alive and well.
And just when I thought I was getting back on track I met a girl at work, by coincidence, also named Julie, and we struck up a friendship that quickly moved on to something more. I had never been good at reading the signs, but with Julie they were so obvious that even I couldn’t miss them, there was a spark between us.
We went out together a couple of times and I found that I could talk to her more easily than I could talk to anyone since Gillian. I told her all about myself and she told me about herself and her marriage and divorce and about her love for her children and I found out that having someone to talk to was something I had needed terribly for a long time. Despite the presence of my wife and children and the friends we had, I had been lonely, and Julie gave me companionship and understanding.
I never told her all about the troubles I made for myself or about my affair with Gillian, but I told her of my unhappiness, which sounded to me very pathetic and just like the archetypal married man trying to get a younger women to bed.
But Julie understood, she had been married and had children and then been divorced, so she knew of the hurt that comes with these things. She was also very weary of starting a new relationship of any kind, and especially with a married man, so she insisted that our relationship was purely platonic, even though we agreed that there was sexual tension between us.
I’d learned many lessons from my affair with Gillian but not enough to prevent myself from falling for Julie. She was such a kind, gentle and loving person and the most young-at-heart person I had ever known. She was also beautiful and very sexy.
So, as hard as I tried not to, I fell in love with her. Not like I had with Gillian, with so many unrealistic aspirations, but I loved her nonetheless. And she loved me too, also without any expectations, and eventually our relationship became sexual.
She was far wiser than I was and we discussed the many issues involved. Julie worried about my wife and her feelings and felt enormous guilt. She hadn’t meant to sleep with me, she told me, and now believed that she was an evil and immoral woman for having an affair with me while I was married to someone else.
And it was this that made her end our relationship not very long after it had begun, despite me telling her that I would get a divorce and we could be together. She actually told me that if I got a divorce she would never talk to me again, so that was the end of it. We stayed friends however, and still saw a lot of each other and talked about our personal triumphs and troubles. And because we had been so close we could discuss our more intimate thoughts and feelings.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyse what happened to me and where I went wrong and why, with both Julie and with Gillian. And I’ve tried hard to find out what it is I actually want. Julie proved to me that it wasn’t Gillian that I wanted. In fact, I realised that it wasn’t anyone, I was in love with the concept of being in love, and capable of being happy with anyone as long as I loved her and she loved me.
She didn’t even have to be beautiful. Neither Gillian nor Julie was beautiful at first sight, but both became beautiful in my mind when I fell in love with them.
The thing that initially attracted me to Julie most was that she knew how to be happy. Her life had not always been easy and there was sadness and tragedy in it, she had a failed marriage that had hurt her badly and she had lost family members who had been very close to her. But each time she overcame the hard times and found happiness again. Not with material possessions or wealth, she had few of those, but with her children and her dogs and her life in general. I’m not sure if I was a slice of happiness or another tragedy in Julie’s life, but more than likely I was merely an insignificant little mistake that was soon forgotten.
Very few people, from my experience, seem to know how to be happy. I wonder if happiness can be learned or if natural ability is required. Gillian doesn’t know how, I’m sure of that, and I certainly don’t, I’m even more certain of that.
I think I might mentally be the legendary wandering Jew, wandering around all my life searching for something that isn’t there and regretting mistakes I made earlier in life that I can’t change. Or that’s how I was. Now, just maybe, I am learning to be happy. I love my wife again, we don’t have the crazy, romantic love of teenage books but a more mature friendship and I now have a respectful appreciation of her that I should have had all along. I am conscious of what she has put up with and I’m glad our marriage came through it all intact. Thanks entirely, I must add, to her and her perseverance and love and genuine maturity and intelligence, all qualities that I lack completely.
She stuck with me through thick and thin, for better or worse, and there was no shortage of thin and worse, so if I can’t be happy with her now, then surely I am totally incapable of being happy at all. I have everything I could possibly wish for, a loving wife who cares for me above all else, two great children who love me, a roof over my head and food on the table.
So why have I taken this crazy trip around the houses to find happiness, when it was here at home all the time? I’m still working on that one, I don’t know the answer yet.
But, somewhat miraculously it seems, I am happy, some of the time anyway. Not deliriously happy at all times, that would make everyone around me nauseous, but quietly contented. And that’s probably what long-term happiness is.
It’s not the happy ending of fairy tales, I haven’t completely gotten over the belief that there must be more to life than this, but I am learning to want what I have rather than tearing myself apart trying to have what I want.
Hopefully it’s not an ending at all, but a beginning.
I often think back on the affairs I had and the men I had them with. Some were good, others were not, but most were somewhere between. The actual act seldom lived up to the anticipation and each affair left me feeling low. My self-esteem went up and down more often than a roller coaster ride. My success at work and the offers I received, even a couple of proposals of marriage, built it up, and then the aftermath of each affair brought it straight back down again. But I couldn’t stop going back for more, I guess I was desperately trying to keep myself from getting old while searching for something that wasn’t there.
The strangest thing for me is that I led this secret life for so long without my daughters knowing. I always prided myself in the fact that my daughters and I had such a close relationship, we were best friends, and yet I had this other life that they never knew a thing about. I’m glad they didn’t, but I’m sad that I had secrets from them.
Nina met and married a very nice French man and went to live in Paris where she eventually had two adorable little French children. I made numerous trips to that romantic city and, although I never saw as much of her and her family as I would have liked, we remained emotionally as close as ever.
I got a huge shock one day when Patty came to visit and told me that she and Raymond were a couple. I must have turned very pale, but she was so excited with her own life that she didn’t notice and Raymond had obviously never told her of our indiscretion all those years ago.
Their relationship blossomed and after a year or so they married. At the wedding as I danced with the groom we agreed that we would both take our little secret to the grave and they made such a lovely couple and were both so very happy. And so was I, he had grown into a wonderful, loving man and adored Patty.
Vernon was deeply hurt by our divorce and never fully recovered. Two years after we divorced he was diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the bowel and within six month he was gone. I felt a great loss at his passing. Now that it’s all in the past I can’t believe that I couldn’t get my life in order and keep our marriage going. One of the biggest regrets of my life is the pain that my selfishness caused to the people I had loved.
As for me, I had two relationships after that fiasco on the boat, one lasted almost a year and the other is still going. Brian is a divorcee too and we are very comfortable together. More comfortable than exciting, I have to say, so I am actually back where I was before it all started.
A few years ago I got a call from Patrick. He was about to turn 65 and retire from work and he told me he felt that he had to talk to me once more as it felt like his life had started with me in it and we’d popped in and out of each other’s lives ever since and he didn’t want our relationship to end on a bitter note.
His call gave me mixed feelings. The last time we parted our relationship had been rather strained and since then we had both been too stubborn to talk to the other. I had become involved with a man and didn’t have time for Patrick and had rather brushed him off, and I felt deep regret and guilt about it.
Patrick and I spoke a few times on the phone and I still had a soft spot in my heart for him. In fact I even suggested that perhaps we should meet and see what happened. But he laughed and told me it was never going to happen as he was very happy with his life and was not going to go through all that again. It seemed that every time one of us wanted the other, the other wasn’t available. I still think of him with affection and regret and often wish things had been different and we could have stayed together from the start.
It’s still difficult for me to understand why I was so obsessed with men for so long. I enjoyed the excitement and the sex and the adventure, but the affairs were very stressful for me, at least the earlier ones. I found it difficult to reconcile the double life I was leading and I worried about the risks I was taking of hurting and perhaps losing my family.
Perhaps it was just that when opportunities arose I chose to take them when I should have turned my back. Perhaps it was purely that I loved sex, surely that didn’t make me totally immoral and irresponsible. I never forgot my responsibilities and made every endeavour not to allow an affair to come between me and my family. At least, that is, not until the girls had grown up and left home. But I think it went far deeper than that. I had, I believe, ingrained in my mind, the belief that my life could be better than it was. This is true of most people, it is the often mistaken belief that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill.
Of course this is seldom the case and while we always feel that everyone else is better off than we are, a wise person finds happiness in what she has rather than what she wants. And, as for love, which I believed was the holy grail of my life, well, love is like the sound of a train in the distance. It sounds romantic and wonderful and it’s easy to believe that it will take us to a lovely place where we will be eternally happy. But when we get close to it we find that it’s clumsy and awkward and it takes a lot of work to catch it and to keep it.
I’ve never been a religious person. My parents said they belonged to the Church of England but I don’t remembering them ever actually going to church and they didn’t encourage me to either. So although I’d like to have a God who would look after me and take care of all my problems and my future, I’ve always found it impossible to believe in a religion that is based on revelation requiring faith rather than logic.
I have, however, developed a strong interest in the different religious beliefs of the world and it has always fascinated me that so many highly intelligent people could disagree on whether or not there is a god or which god is the true one.
Consequently I consider myself agnostic rather than atheist although my beliefs have become more atheistic as I’ve grown older. In times of tribulation, however, I hypocritically sometimes ask for God’s assistance, not in the belief that He will somehow put things right, but in the hope that I will see my life in a better perspective or something like that.
It has never worked in the past, and it didn’t this time either. So rather than a listening god who answers my prayers, I believe in the laws of nature. If we break one of them, nature will repair it, often at our expense.
If there is one thing I strongly believe, it is that humanity cannot destroy our planet. We can pollute the air until we can no longer breathe, or we can even turn it into a nuclear wasteland, but nature will always restore it to its original pristine condition. We can destroy all life but the earth will survive and continue without us and life will start again, as it did after the last ice-age. It might take a thousand or even a million years, nature has no time restrictions, time is merely a man made concept.
This belief has led me, in recent years, to realise that human life is not as important as we think. People come and go all the time, millions of people are born and millions die every year and the world goes on. Even species come and go and surely a time will come when humanity becomes extinct and a different species tops the pile.
I don’t have much time left now, last week my doctor told me I had cancer of the bowel and would be dead within two years. Death does not grip me with fear and at times I actually find myself quite looking forward to it. When I’m dead I will no longer exist and neither will the heartache of recent years, so for me it will be something of a release.
The last few years have been fraught with heartache and pain caused, in the main, by Gillian’s indiscretions. I know she had a number of affairs, even though she only admitted one of them. Her deceitfulness and lies caused as much pain and stress as her transgressions because while I knew she had had affairs I didn’t know if they were continuing.
When the truth is unknown, speculation is rife. And speculation has no limits or boundaries. A small occurrence in truth can become a major incident when speculation takes over, and my mind mulled over what had happened and quite probably enlarged the whole issue right out of proportion.
From the first time I realised that she had been unfaithful I never managed to defeat the doubt and mistrust. Perhaps I could have, if she had told me the truth. Perhaps then I could have put a line under it and moved on, but I still don’t know the truth so I can only continue to speculate and the water hasn’t passed under the bridge, it is still swirling around beneath my feet.
I didn’t want Gillian to leave, I would have forgiven her everything, if only she had come clean and told me the truth. I have always loved her and always will and life has been very lonely since the divorce.
There has not been anyone else in my life since the divorce, apart from our girls of course, who have been wonderful daughters to me even though I don’t see very much of them as they are so far away. But they have shown me their love and that has got me through. Actually, there was one woman, I was so lonely one day that I visited a massage parlour and paid to have sex with her. She was nothing like I had expected, she was a lovely, vivacious girl named Sheryl, although I don’t suppose that was her real name. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but the experience left me depressed and unsatisfied, Sex for its own sake is not special, it shouldn’t be given, taken or bought, but shared and accompanied by love and respect. Only then does it become the most wonderful experience that nature has to offer.
Looking back at my life I have many regrets and if I had the chance to do it over I would do a lot of things differently.
When I look at Julie and the life I now share with her I feel sadness about my affair with Gillian because of the hurt it caused. But at the same time I can’t say that I totally regret it. I had needs that weren’t being filled and, being an imperfect human being, I strived to fill them.
It’s easy for me to justify what I did like that, and I know that I would feel differently if the boot had been on the other foot, but I can’t imagine not having been close to Gillian, still today she is a huge part of my life and my memories, and I will always love her. It doesn’t retract from the love I feel for Julie and for my children, I love them more than ever. Love is an unlimited commodity, my heart has enough to go round and then some to spare. It would be a sad world if we could only love one person at a time. But it is sad that love can cause so much pain and misunderstanding.
I can’t decide whether I would have been happier married to Gillian than I am now with Julie. There was a time when I envied her husband. He seemed to have everything I wanted, a wonderful wife and two beautiful girls. Later on I felt sorry for him, his wife was having an affair with another man. I would have hated being married to Gillian only to find out that she was sleeping with someone else, just as Julie must have hated the fact that I was sleeping with Gillian. And I can’t help wondering if I was just one of her affairs. If that is the case, I’m glad I was one of them and I sincerely hope that Gillian has found the happiness that I have.
Of course, if I had married Gillian my two sons would not be around and I can’t imagine that, so my mind could go round in circles for ever trying to decide where I went wrong and where I was right. One thing for certain though is that on one would have loved me as much or been as loyal as Julie has been, and for that I feel truly lucky.
Still today I talk to Gillian occasionally. Nothing more than a chat a couple of times a year. She divorced her husband, or he divorced her, I’m not quite sure, and she lives with another man. She seems relatively happy although she did suggest that we get together again.
It’s strange to me that for so long, practically all our lives, we have been in and out of love with each other but never got the timing right, when she loved me I ran away, and when I loved her she ran away. We gave each other a lot of pleasure over the years, but we caused each other a lot of pain too.
Now, in my twilight years I am happier than I deserve to be. I can’t say that the romance has returned to our marriage but we have a grand daughter now and she is wonderful, I have never felt so much love in my life.
If I was to give any advice to my children it would be this: try to want what you get rather than trying to get what you want. I know I’m not the first person to say this, and my children probably already know it, but it is valuable advice anyway.
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The autobiography of a frog (coda)
Can a frog become an eagle
can he break his earthly bond
or is this another hopeful hop
that ends up right back in the pond?
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World Copyright © 2006 Charles Harris
