How I Rationalized Cheating With a ‘Married’ Man

I always assumed I’d never be capable of cheating with another woman’s man.

After all, I’d never cheated before, even while dating longterm a man to whom I was not particularly physically attracted.

I wasn’t that kind of person, I told myself.

Until I was.

We Both Rationalized Our Cheating

We met, fittingly, in a bar.

I was bartending at the time, and he was chugging beers faster than I could pour them.

At first I thought he was slow or brain-damaged, because he didn’t really speak, just mumbled shyly one-word responses.

Then one night he sat down with his buddy, whom I saw nudge him and say in a low voice, “Come on. Don’t be shy. Talk to her.”

I’d felt touched. How cute and sensitive, I thought, before deciding to ignore him.

A few nights later, after closing up the bar, a group of employees and regulars congregated around a bonfire on his property. He sat next to me. We sat silently, and I felt an profound peace radiate from him into me.

When he dropped me off at my home, he didn’t say a word, just put my hand in his and looked at me while I looked back.

The next week, he showed up at the bar again. As he paid me for his beers, I asked him if he was in a relationship.

“Not technically,” he responded after a guilty pause.

I knew what that answer really meant, but I chose to play dumb.

I would soon learn that he wasn’t actually shy at all, at least not when drinking. He was a man’s man, a ladies’ man, and the life of the party. He wasn’t dumb either; he was uncannily street smart, imaginative, and an Encyclopedia of interesting anecdotes.

Then, of course, was the simple fact that the sexual chemistry felt electrifying. I’d never experienced anything like that before, or since. Somehow, it became easy for me to justify satiating my lust with him.

I reasoned with myself that I didn’t need to feel so much guilt because I was single. I wasn’t the one choosing to cheat.

As far as he was concerned, his situation was unique. His longterm live-in girlfriend, with whom he shared a house and beer business, had moved three hours away for a lucrative job. As a result, he felt abandoned.

I rationalized possibly hurting her by convincing myself that she had most likely moved as a way to escape the relationship. (Admittedly, this thought scared me a little.)

Either way, at the very least she must have expected him to cheat given the circumstances, right?

What’s more, as I told a friend who voiced her objection to our dalliance, he wasn’t actually married, just in a domestic partnership.

“No vows were said before God in their relationship,” I said, much to her dismay.

I made sure to add that his kids — two beautiful teenage girls — were the product of his first marriage, not his current lady.

My rationales, however, couldn’t sustain our doomed relationship.

Our intense but short-lived initial fling fell apart as quickly as it began, but it never totally ended.

It would’ve, if I hadn’t ‘checked in’ from time to time. That’s on me.

‘Rational me’ knew he was bad for me, but ‘emotional me’ couldn’t bear to go too long without assuring myself he was real.

‘Rational me’ saw him as not the type of man I would let raise my daughter due to his uncontrollable drinking and anger issues. ‘Emotional me’ refused to let go of him completely.

She Caught Us in Bed Together

I’d ended our dalliance years before we were caught in bed together. Well, for the most part.

I was drunk and completely alone — my daughter with her grandparents’ — the night before Thanksgiving. He called asking to come over. Normally, I would’ve ignored him, but that night, loosened up by red wine and rattled by a string of recent traumas, I welcomed him.

He charged in like a bat out of hell, seeming manic and very drunk. I endured a quick and uninspired coitus, and afterwards he wrapped his body around me, clutching my head to his chest as if he were terrified of something that I couldn’t see.

I was so unsettled that I couldn’t sleep. I eventually wriggled out of his desperate grip but could only sleep in spurts, awakening with anxiety and a mind buzzing with questions.

Where was his girlfriend? Wouldn’t she wonder where he was? Didn’t he need to wake up and go home?

A few minutes after dawn, she showed up.

We Tried to Date to Save Face

She promptly kicked his ass out, taking their home, his truck, their dogs. He was sleeping on the couches of friends’, homeless.

Truth is, he really had no one to blame but himself, having cheated on her with a string of different women throughout the years.

Still, I was plagued with guilt for the part I knew I played in their breakup. I felt partially responsible, even though I knew I was just another pawn in his games with her, and in his desperate quest to forget how much he hates himself for being a drunk, a cheater, a deadbeat.

I knew he was drinking like a fish, blowing all his money, and screwing strippers. His darkness scared me. I wanted to make it better somehow. Late at nights when I’d rather be asleep, I laid on the phone with him, desperately trying to make him laugh so that he wouldn’t be so sad.

“You think I don’t know I’m broken?” He cackled to me one time. “I know I’m broken!”

Still he tried desperately tried to make me his girlfriend. He didn’t want to be alone.

Sometimes, the way he looked at me made me think that maybe he really did love me. Usually, however, I felt used, like I was meant to play a part so that he could feel better about himself. I didn’t feel wooed. I felt like a babysitter. Multiple times a week, he would call me screaming that his car had been stolen or towed. In reality, he was so too drunk and disoriented to see straight.

Each time, I would calmly explain that he just needs to eat and sober up and then try again. Each time, he would erupt in fury with me. What’s more, this type of behavior happened sometimes multiple times a week. I became increasingly overwhelmed.

“I can’t be your mother,” I told him more than once.

Still, I made time for him when I could, especially after he learned that one of his best buddies — a gay former escort — was most likely dying of AIDs. His friend had been one of one his anchors after the fallout of the breakup.

He plunged right back into deep mourning— he had encouraged his friend to lead an unhealthy, partying lifestyle with him in the months leading up to his sudden health issues.

“You didn’t know he had HIV,” I reminded him, hoping to assuage his guilt.

During those few weeks where we feared his friend would die, he would come to my place and sleep all day in bed next to me while I typed away at my remote job. Curled up and trembling, his pain was palpable.

“I need help! I can’t do this alone!” He finally admitted.

But by May, over six months from the traumatic breakup, he was still non-functioning. He was unemployed, having neglected to seek new work after his construction project ended. Instead, he was drinking incessantly at the bar with the money in his pension account.

He told me once as I complained about his behavior, “I know I’m a burden to you. I feel it.”

When he asked to borrow money from me while he waited on his wire transfer, I lost it.

It was the final straw.

He knew very well that I was broke, unemployed, and a single mom. (Yes, I lived at home with my upper-middle-class parents, but that seemed besides the point.)

Something ruptured inside me.

“Fuck off,” I texted him before blocking his number.

I felt used, unseen, tired. I was a single mom raising a daughter and truth is, I didn’t want to carry his burden anymore.

He showed up at my home two days later, looking destroyed.

I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye, mumbling to my feet that I didn’t believe that his request for (drinking) money was a “joke,” and that I didn’t want to see him for awhile.

He looked so devastated that I unblocked his number and showed him.

“See? You can still contact me. But you crossed a line. We can’t be together anymore.”

He turned and left. I breathed a sad sigh of relief.

Months later, I haven’t seen him since.

…

I did text him not long after to tell him that I couldn’t bear to watch him kill himself through drinking any longer. He didn’t respond.

Truth is, it’s both rattling and deeply curious to me how he suddenly ghosted after half a year of hounding me every hour of every day despite my pleas to give me space.

He does, however, occasionally answer the phone when I call, which I do from time to time to see how he is, and to tell him that I do miss and care about him and feel upset by how things ended so abruptly and badly between us.

He tells me good news, which seems to actually be true.

He’s no longer unemployed, having begun construction work on a house. A couple months later, he tells me that he has started his own construction business with his friend, my neighbor. He sounds like he is telling the truth. I begin to think that perhaps hurting him with the truth about his actions has propelled him to finally make positive changes. I breathe a sigh of relief.

A few weeks later, on another call, he tells me that he’s met somebody and he’s serious about her. I wonder if he’s lying to get me to stop checking in on him. I’m surprised that he could land somebody in his broken state, but then I remember how charming some women find him.

I can’t help but feel bitter. “I hope you treat her better than I was treated,” I tell him, half-holding my breath for an apology that never came.

Though we haven’t spoken since, I often wonder if the new black truck outside my neighbor’s home (his new business partner) belongs to him. I do drive-bys and lingering strolls, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

Sometimes when I miss him I look back at diary entries. They serve as a stark reminder of just how trapped and scared I felt while trying to to both help him and protect myself.

What I’ve Learned About How Humans Love

We loathe loneliness; we are suckers for connection, love, sex. Some of us are truly compulsive about it.

Truth is, we can move on and know somebody is wrong for us, and still be haunted by dreams of them.

In my case, guilt and shame is inexorably tied into our time together, and that alone feels like divine karma.

On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to regret knowing him. What worries me is my seeming inability to move on mentally. Perhaps, in years to come, this broken stage in my life will make sense.

If this work resonated with you + you’d like more, consider buying me a coffee @ https://ko-fi.com/psychkush. If you’d like to read more about my affair, check out the pieces below!

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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