Before I go into this, I want to make a couple of caveats. First of all, I am single AF. I am not dating anyone and I am certainly not dating a married man. I am not condoning people who step out on their marriages to cheat. I am also not supporting single women or any woman for that matter who targets a known, married man in order to seduce him. I just observe and write what I see.
Between the ages of 7 and 9, my father started seeing another woman, a younger woman. This as you would imagine contributed to a great deal of strife within my family. My father, like many older men who chase younger women, did not back down. He flaunted this woman among his friends, took her with him to special occasions, and started supporting her financially.
After a few years of experiencing this, my mother reached her breaking point and left him.
My father did not miss a beat. He quickly married this woman, had another set of kids and they lived “happily” ever after for a few decades.
To this day, my mother still has a grudge against my father. He hurt her deeply. In addition, he hurt us, their kids. At the height of their bickering, my father decided not to support us financially, the kids he had with my mother. He stuck with this for decades. Additionally, the few times we would visit him, he would be verbally and physically abusive. After a while, we stopped visiting.
I am not going to talk about the pain that I felt and still feel, watching my father raise a whole new family and support them. I am not going to talk about the pain of financial neglect and of how difficult life was for a number of years. What I will say is that life is long and a lot of the unfairness he meted out to us has been reversed. He has also, received his own degree of pain.
What I wanted to talk about today is the other woman not just the one in my family, but as a concept overall.
When I was growing up, the “other woman” was something to be despised. She was supposedly a jezebel, a single woman who deliberately targeted a married man and seduced him. She was a mistress, an object of scorn. Women who were “other women”, were women you stayed away from. Women who were “other women” were bad women, who if caught in the act of seduction, needed to be beaten, hurled abuses at, etc.
As an adult, I have found that it is actually more complicated than that and I am going to state some uncomfortable truths.
Let’s get into it:
· The other woman is not always the one who chases the married man- In my family’s case, my dad was the one who chased this younger woman. I know because my dad shared that information with me. This is actually quite common. Any woman who has been on a dating app or even any social media has been hit on by a married man. Now, the men might not claim at first that they are married. They may claim that they are separated or divorced. Some will flat-out lie and say they are single. They do this deliberately because they know that most single women, once they hear a man is married, would refuse to deal with them. So these men obfuscate their true status, woo the single woman, get her to fall in love and by then she’s in deep. I say this for those who keep thinking all single women chase or desire a married man. Expand your thinking, please. I have tried to debunk this previously here. As an aside, I also recommend that all single women do their due diligence on any man they come across, because if you don’t, you may end up being an unintentional mistress.
· It’s not always a single woman that’s the other woman– A married woman could be the other woman. I remember listening to an acquaintance many years back in a social group that we were both a part of, share how during her first marriage, she fell in love with a coworker, who was also married and left her marriage for him. They both ended up marrying each other. She justified it by saying that she and her first husband got married too young. I guess her justification was valid, but all I wanted to do at that time was throw my glass of water in her face. I felt so sorry for her first husband. I was also pissed because people are more likely to consider a single woman a seductress and a married woman, “safe” and in this case, as I’ve seen on quite a few occasions, it was the latter.
Most men don’t finish up one relationship before starting another.
· Some of your mothers were other women- Related to the story of the acquaintance, some of you reading this right now have mothers or are related to people who are or were the other women. Some of your parents are on their 2nd, 3rd, or more marriages. Some of you have friends that you know are dating someone who is taken. How do I know this? Most men don’t finish up one relationship before starting another. They overlap women. A dirty secret of life is that life stages do not fall into neat little boxes. People fall in love at inconvenient times, to inconvenient people. People also change. What once worked for them no longer does.
· Some of your favorite celebrities were “other women”- Leann Rimes had a whole husband when she started seeing Eddie Cibrian, who was married. Julia Roberts was dating Benjamin Bratt when she began seeing Daniel Moder who was married. Swizz Beatz was married when he started dating Alicia Keys. Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott were both married to other people when they started seeing each other. Kelsey Grammer was married to Camile Grammer when he began seeing Kayte Walsh. The list is endless.
· Sometimes the marriage is better with the other woman- Another inconvenient fact of life is that sometimes, marriage is indeed better with the newer partner. Recall that acquaintance that I wanted to throw water on her face? Guess what, she has now been in a marriage with her coworker paramour for a longer period than her first marriage. The celebrities I mentioned just above? Still married. My dad’s marriage with the other woman lasted longer than the one he had with my mom. The only reason it ended was due to her passing away. As much as it pains me to admit, my father was better suited with his second wife than he was with my mom. Let me explain. My dad wanted an uber-submissive wife. He and my mom were pretty much peers and even though my mom respected him, submitted to him, and never cheated on him, she wasn’t one to let him pull wool over her eyes. My mom is brilliant and highly educated. She questions things and that’s something that my dad couldn’t really handle. The younger paramour? The exact opposite. She was nowhere near my dad’s level and was easily impressed. Whatever my dad said was law and she would not question him. That pleased my father greatly. This meant less strife coming from him. For her, she was happy with the immense financial support my dad provided, so no strife came from her end. The result? Bliss.
· My mother is happier single than being married- My mother’s life- after a few rocky starts- thrived after leaving my dad. She is very content. She is one of those people that I suspect is truly single at heart. I know my mother wanted kids and marriage. She loved being a mom and loves each one of us. But if I’m being honest, marriage was constraining for her. My parents had some incompatibilities and those incompatibilities predated their marriage. They loved each other of course, but there were arguments. Additionally, she had to subjugate her desires for my dad and fit into a very tight role. Since the breakup, she has decided to remain single. Men are just “too much trouble” and she likes running her life the way she wants.
Essentially, this “other woman” concept is not always as straightforward as society would like it to be. It is relative, complicated, and depending on the society- Islamic or Polygamous- ALLOWED.
Life is complicated and love is very messy.
It may be time to reexamine this concept.
Note: Everything asserted here regarding celebrities is alleged based on celebrity websites and Wikipedia.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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