How I Feel about the ‘Other Woman’
Not all ‘other women’…
Shit, I don’t want to do this. When I tell you I really don’t want to write this story, I mean it.
Unfortunately, I woke up this morning at 6:30 am and my brain was already dictating it for me, and now, the subsequent feelings are stuck in my chest, and I don’t see them going away until I do this.
So here it is.
When I found out my partner had had some sort of affair (details then fuzzy), my first reaction was not anger at either party; just sadness and a need to understand.
My experience was both helped and hindered by the public nature of the affair’s unraveling. Everyone I worked with knew about it because they’d both been coworkers and the place we worked leaks gossip like a sieve.
My partner, suddenly jobless (and in his mind, friendless), and without the dignity and integrity that he’d until then carried, was a wreck, unable to talk with me about it.
This meant that each new potential revelation — or was it just uninformed gossip? — was ready to gut me every couple of weeks because I wasn’t able to get a narrative from the source.
When I say he was unable to talk about it, I mean it quite literally. I’d ask him a question and minutes of silence would pass. I’d…
