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The Married Man I Had an Affair with Is No Longer Married
Why would I care one way or another, though?
I knew, even as I heard the news, that it shouldn’t matter. That it didn’t matter.
Because I didn’t want him, that’s the thing. I hadn’t wanted him for a long time. I had ended my affair with him. I had my eyes opened to his toxicity and his narcissism and I firmly ended it. I ended it years ago. I blocked him on any possible platform he could contact me on, and I set up an automatic email reply on my email accounts so that if my ex-lover were ever to reach out, he would get an immediate, brief, and curt message reminding him that I had ended our affair and asking him not to contact me ever again.
I did the work. I got therapy to work out why I had been attracted to someone so destructively cruel. In time, I was lucky enough to reunite with my husband and we rebuilt our marriage, step by painful step. And it’s been worth it. It’s been lovely.
And you see, I knew the whole story all the way through, now that I was outside of it. Of course, I did. Because it was a classic. An embarrassing cliche from start to finish. But whatever: I had ended it, hadn’t I? I’d cut it off with no sequel.
The dullest of stories, it had been, too. The man I cheated with had had affairs before…
