The Other Guy

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed that I’ve barely said anything about the guy my wife had an affair with. I’ve mentioned him several times but have provided almost no details about who he is or how they met, and I certainly haven’t communicated any of the anger that I’ve felt towards him. Now that I’ve decided to do a few blog posts on the detailed story of our affair though, I’ve reached the point that I can’t really continue unless I start to give details about the other guy and my interaction with him.

They met through a mutual friend, a woman who shared his same profession and he had known for a long time.  He’s seven years older than my wife, in his early 50s when they first met, but he has no kids because of infertility issues in his longtime marriage.  He was still married when he and my wife started texting each other regularly but was separated when the physical affair started and divorced by the time I found out about everything.  He had at least one affair with a married woman before my wife, but that’s a fact I didn’t learn until later.

He had been out of work a considerable amount of the last few years of their marriage.  In his defense, he does work in an industry that was significantly effected by the downturn in the economy, although he did curiously find work almost immediately after he could no longer rely on his wife for financial support.  After his separation, he moved to an apartment just one town over from ours.  That gave him plenty of time and opportunity to conduct an affair and put him close enough proximity to be readily available for my wife.

To this day, my wife and I disagree on one point.  By the time the affair ended I had obviously generated a considerable amount of animosity toward this guy (although not nearly as much animosity as I would generate a few months later), and I considered him more guilty than her in the affair.  I absolutely respect her desire to take full responsibility for her own actions, and I’ll admit that I was probably deflecting a considerable amount of anger and blame toward my wife on to him.  I still stand by my rationale though that she risked everything in this affair while he risked nothing.  She had a family and children who’s lives were on the verge of complete devastation. She was the one who had to consistently lie and work out logistics anytime they wanted to meet. Her life, and the lives of so many other people around her, had the potential to be forever altered as a result of this affair, while he had absolutely nothing to lose.

I often wondered how he felt when she left for home after one of their dates. Did he feel guilt that he sat there worry free while she was dealing with the stress of the lies that she would have to tell when she arrived home? Did he ever think about the anxiety that she was enduring to lead her double life? This affair was not an equitable arrangement between the two parties. She undertook most of the work and assumed all of the risk, while he simply enjoyed the benefits.  She willingly agreed to that arrangement, but that didn’t justify his apparent eagerness to take selfishly take advantage of it.

You could certainly argue that I shouldn’t have been worrying about him at all but should instead have been focused solely on my wife who obviously had the power to completely eliminate him from our lives. Affair partners rely on that cliché to help justify their actions and escape their consequences. She and I had months in front of us confronting the pain that we caused each other, and she would not be able to escape the impact of any of her actions. He also needed to answer for his transgressions though.  It was time that he heard from me.

I assumed that he had long ago written me off as any concern, choosing to view me as a simplistic caricature defined my nothing more than the negative traits I’m sure my wife had been focusing on.  He needed to see me as an actual person, a husband and father who had spent years supporting his family and who was now desperately working to save it. Of course, he couldn’t act without the cooperation of my wife, but she was steadily taking responsibility for her actions and working with me to atone for the pain that she had caused. He needed to understand that he was not committing a victimless crime, but that his actions had direct and inalterable consequences on others.

My first communication with him was a text message I sent after intercepting their e-mail exchange.  Rather than remaining content playing the passive role that I had been until this point, I was now actively working to save my marriage and my family.  He needed to understand that he was a direct enemy in that effort.

It’s time for you to get out of my family’s life. Please do not contact [Wife] in any way, whether it be text, email, phone, Facebook, or in person. My wife is going to focus on her family now.

I didn’t receive a response to that message, and I didn’t expect one.  But I wasn’t content being completely ignored, and I followed up with an e-mail that provided some more detail.

I sent you a text message a few days ago but didn’t receive a response.  That doesn’t surprise me since I acknowledge that’s a rather awkward message to respond to.  I wanted to make absolutely sure that you received my message though so I’m following up with this mail.  I’d appreciate at least an acknowledgement that you’ve received it and an agreement to my request, but I admit that I won’t lose any sleep waiting for that.

[Wife] and I are facing some significant issues in our lives and in our marriage.  If we’re going to achieve the life that we want both for ourselves and for our children, we need to confront those issues with honesty and integrity.  Your presence in our life in even the slightest way is detrimental to [wife]’s ability to focus on the healthy relationships that will help her achieve the long term happiness that she deserves.

As I said in my text, please do not contact [Wife] in any way.  I understand that you will be back in [our state] before leaving to [his new state], and I hope that you will be completely nonexistent to my family during that time.  I assume that you’ll be back here at some point in the future, and I’m under no false illusion that there aren’t a multitude of ways for people to communicate remotely.  But I hope that you will show respect toward [Wife], me, and our children by refraining from any kind of contact with her at any time in the future.

I understand that you’re dealing with your own personal life issues, and I sincerely hope that you are able to solve those issues and find your own happiness.  While you may feel that your relationship with [Wife] is in your best interest, it put her long term personal well-being and that of her entire family at significant risk.  That’s a risk that we can longer afford, so I ask you to have the integrity to deal with your issues and live your life completely independent of my family.

I did receive a response to this one, but it was a little underwhelming.

Got your message.  Will reply sometime tomorrow as I’m traveling.

I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when I didn’t received that promised reply the next day. In fact, it was a couple days later that they met each other at the coffee house.  The mail that I sent him in response to that incident clearly showed that I was no longer interested in being polite.

It may be that you forgot about that reply, but it appears obvious now that you are simply continuing your cowardly pattern of avoiding personal responsibility for the consequences of your actions and a complete disregard for those who get hurt by them.  Throughout this relationship with [Wife], you have continued to selfishly allow her to risk everything important in her life for you, while you risk absolutely nothing.  You have threatened my future and the future of our children, while you risk absolutely nothing.  As long as your desires are met, it doesn’t matter whose lives gets destroyed.  If you have the slightest respect toward [Wife] and her relationship with her family, then it’s now time for you to finally show some integrity and go away, completely and for good.

While it was an entire month before I received a response to this mail, that response had even a greater impact that he probably intended. It appeared that he was trying to argue that the relationship was appropriate, his actions were completely altruistic, and my suspicions were a result of my simplistic views of marriage and relationships (at this point he still thought that I was naïve enough to believe that sex wasn’t involved). If that was his intent, then he failed miserably. If his goal was to anger and confuse me as much as possible though, then he achieved it quite well.  It took over a year before I understood that mail and his motivations behind the affair.  That mail and its analysis though is going to need its own post.