Feeling Guilty About Not Feeling Guilty: Confessions of the ‘Other Woman’
— Guest Contributor
I have few, if any, moral qualms about being the Other Woman.
Three years ago, the first time a taken guy made a move on me, I got the hell out of there. Okay, I drunkenly made out with him for about a minute, and when he tried to move things to the bedroom, then I got the hell out of there. I told myself — and my roommate, to whom I somewhat-gleefully recounted the incident the next day — that I was simply not willing to cross the line of sleeping with someone in a committed relationship. But even at the time, alternate explanations invaded my brain, particularly that I had not shaved my legs that night, felt self-conscious about it, and had used morality as an excuse to not take my pants off.
However nominal it might have been, at least I made a case for morality back then. Lately, my decision-making process regarding taken men has been more along the lines of, “How likely are we to get caught? And if we do, what are the consequences for me?”
Recently, I found myself drinking with a close friend whose girlfriend was (you guessed it!) out of town. To be clear, he and I were not courting danger by hanging out. There had never been any sexual tension between us. We were (and still are) buddies. The plan was to catch up over lunch, and then I’d head to a party in the city, and he’d go home to get some work done. But lunch turned into a bottle of wine in the park, which turned into whiskey and YouTube at his apartment, and then suddenly it was 3 a.m. and we were naked in bed, casually picking back up on our conversations from earlier in the day, except in pillow talk form. No fuss or guilt, at least not on my end, just an affectionate goodbye hug a few hours later and a joke about how maybe we shouldn’t mention this in the group chat.
He was open to infidelity, I needed to get laid, the risk of exposure was pretty much zero, and we hit our Drink Number, which I previously did not believe was a thing. Simple.
Also recently, two handsome, charming, and, unfortunately, married men have pursued me at work. I’ve repelled their advances not thanks to a strong moral compass or empathetic concern for the women on the other side of the “marriage” equation, but because offices are cesspools of gossip, and I prioritize my professional reputation over sex. Again, simple.
It’s become like plugging numbers into an equation, the results of which range from “DANGER ZONE” to “Whatever. Get yours, girl.”
This worries me for several reasons.
For years, I have maintained a half-joking mantra that “people are the worst.” Is this where that catches up with me, by lowering my expectations of myself and others? How will that kind of cynicism about human nature sabotage my future attempts at genuine, committed intimacy? Has it done so already?
It is worth noting that in none of these cases has the girlfriend or wife been a friend of mine. If a friend’s boyfriend were to make a move on me, I would nail him to the fucking wall, and not in a fun way. Of course, this has its own implications: What does it mean that my morality is biased in favor of people I care about? Is that even principled at all, or just playing favorites?
On top of that, with more and more people my age entering into committed relationships, moving in together, and getting married, does that not make my odds of participating in infidelity higher, simply because there will be fewer single men in my social circles?
Does my dispassionate, intellectual approach to what should be an emotional issue indicate a deeper problem? Narcissistic Personality Disorder does run in the family.
But let’s not go there quite yet. I have enough to think about.
