When my affair began, I had no idea it would become what it did. I’m sure that’s how it is for most people who fall madly in love with their affair partner.
At the time, I was still living with my husband and had just started very seriously thinking about leaving him. I was trying to think through what that would look like and determining if I was ready for that. Leaving is hard, even when you know it’s the best thing for you.
My affair partner was also married, but his marriage was seemingly ok at the time. When we started talking, he realized that someone was missing, he just couldn’t quite figure out what. He just knew he found it with me.
During our very first conversation about what we were both expecting from this new interaction, he told me he couldn’t fall in love with me. He wouldn’t let himself. He has 2 kids and did not want to break up his family. He had a lot to lose and I understood that. I remember thinking all I really wanted was to act on this crazy sexual chemistry we had. I had never felt anything like it with anyone and was dying to know what it would translate to.
Though I don’t think I wanted to admit it to myself at the time, I knew I would fall in love with him. I had had this ridiculous crush on him for almost 4 years at that point. We had previously worked with each other (through different companies) on almost a daily basis, and over that time, I’d already become smitten with him. The more I got to know him during the affair, the harder I started to fall.
If you missed parts one and two of my affair story, read them to catch up on where we’re at.
When I told him that I was falling for him a few months later, his reaction left something to be desired to say the least.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No you’re not. You can’t be.”
But I was.
I ran out after that and he proceeded to call me 16 times to try and apologize for his shocked reaction. Needless to say, neither of us expected it to become what it was. He realized fairly soon after that that he was in love with me, too. We were terrified, but we couldn’t stop. Neither of us anticipated how serious things would get or feel.
We hadn’t had sex at that point, but the tension was through the roof. He had given me my first partnered orgasm a week earlier, and then another, and another. But two weeks after that, we finally crossed that line, and there was truly no looking back in my mind.
Though I had originally intended on this to be a quick fling to get it out of my system, it never ended up that way. We both had a new found obsession with pleasing each other, which was amazing, but our true connection lay outside the bedroom. Which is ironic, because we never had sex in a bed.
The real reason we couldn’t stay away from each other was because we LOVED to talk. I think because we both felt so unimportant and neglected in our marriages, it felt phenomenal to have someone be so into you and want to give you all of their attention. We could talk for hours every day and never get sick of it.
Our longest phone call was just under 8 hours, but most of them were between 3–4 hours. We talked while we were both at work with our AirPods in, working while we’d chat and acting like we weren’t if someone came up to us needing something. We did this often, working while talking. Just to feel like we were together.
But once we got past the love issue, a new issue arose. Or, didn’t.
After we started having sex, he could no longer stay hard with his wife.
This became a big issue pretty quickly and she assumed that either he was no longer attracted to her, or that there was something physically wrong with him.
His attraction to her had diminished quite a bit since realizing how neglected he felt in their marriage, but he thought his issue was caused by guilt. We had only had sex a handful of times at that point, but had been seeing each other for about 5 months.
I knew it was really bothering him, so I agreed we could stop hooking up. It was probably better for me anyway, since it seemed like I was falling hard and he was doing his best to avoid letting his feelings get stronger.
We set up one last meet up in February 2023, and while we partly tried to build it up and be excited, we both felt very depressed about it. It felt like an ending neither of us were ready for.
After that day, we stopped speaking for 3 weeks. For our entire relationship, that was the longest we’d gone without speaking. Today (and every day hereafter) is now officially the longest we’ve gone without speaking.
Those 3 weeks were hell. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I constantly felt like something was missing. My heart was completely broken.
I had felt like this man was my person. Once we really got to know each other, everything about us lined up. We both felt like we checked all of each others boxes with what we had always wanted in a partner but sort of settled for with our spouses. We talked about how we both had thought it wouldn’t get any better than who we married, and sometimes you have to make compromises because everything else is good.
We also have a 16 year age gap, so there’s no world where we could have met and it just worked out. He got married when I was still in high school and lived on the other side of the country.
It all felt too good to be true. And it was, because he was married.
Technically I was too, but I had found a place to move and had been sleeping in a separate room from my husband for a while. In my mind, my marriage was over and I was just waiting for the paperwork.
He broke no contact at that 3 week mark to check how I was, but quickly realized he shouldn’t have because nothing had changed. That was always the theme for us, nothing had changed.
We went back and forth like that every few weeks until June when his wife confronted him about how he’d been acting and the distance between them. She was very suspicious and even showed up randomly at his office on a weekend to see if there was anyone there. I still have the voicemail he left me after she left that day saying “thank the fucking Lord you weren’t here”, because I very well could have been.
She asked him if he wanted to get separated, and my heart soared. It felt unbelievable that there was a chance their marriage was ending a month after I had moved out. He seemed to realize how unhappy they both were and I let my hope get the best of me.
He was honest with her that his feelings for her had changed. He was no longer in love with her, but wanted to go to therapy to try and resolve their issues. They had only been in therapy 6 weeks when this conversation came up, and he told her (and me) he wasn’t ready to leave yet.
He told me wanted to give it more time. If he left without really trying, he knew he’d regret it. He broke my heart that day, and still kept me on the hook after that.
We would sometimes write letters back and forth. Since that was what started our relationship, it became our thing. In the letter he left me in June, he told me if things didn’t change by December/January, he would have to do something. He didn’t want to keep going like they were going. They were both unhappy, but both committed to trying.
I told myself I could wait 6 months. That I’d wait any amount of time for him. And I really needed to work through my own marriage ending and get my own shit together before I could be with him anyway, so I felt like it worked out. I knew it would be a lengthy process for us to be together.
We never completely stopped talking throughout those 6 months. We’d either run into each other, he’d call, email me, leave a letter on my car, or I’d reach out to check in. We couldn’t stay away for too long, it was always less than 3 weeks between each touch point.
Then, it was December.
Hanukkah was about mid-December this year, and as we’re both Jewish, he had planned to leave me a letter on my car with a little gift. However, when he stopped by to drop it off, he didn’t realize I was still in my car on the phone.
Whenever we saw each other in person, it was like we lost all will to try and walk away. It felt so good just to stand in each other’s presence, it was all we wanted to do. But of course, he told me the same thing: nothing had changed. He still didn’t know what he wanted to do, stay or go.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
At the end of December, I decided I wanted to start fresh in the new year. I wanted to be done with the up and down of this emotional roller coaster we were on. Me telling him that was the tip of the first domino before it brought the whole house down.
The last month and a half of our relationship after that was more of a roller coaster I think than all the previous 17 months had been, and is full of so much detail it requires it’s own post.
I wanted it to be a clean ending, but I guess that’s not really what happens when you end an affair. It’s never neat and tidy, it’s always going to be messy and there’s always going to be heartbreak.
