My Relationship With My Affair Partner Was Doomed. Yours Probably Is Too.

I recognized he was being pushy, but I excused it. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? I couldn’t say so myself.

I didn’t intend to embark on an affair when I met the man who would become my affair partner. Though I had filed for divorce from my husband three months earlier, I didn’t plan on meeting someone for whom I’d eventually leave my husband. My husband had betrayed me, and I’d filed for divorce, but then he’d told me he’d make it right, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let him. I was lost and navigating new terrain, and then I met a man.

The affair began with sharing. Overnight, he became a delicious secret, someone with whom I could share things, real things I told myself, who could listen to and validate me. We didn’t even touch until I left my husband, but if you tell your husband, “We can work it out,” while texting another man, “If I was single, would you date me?” you’re a cheater. What mattered was that, when it came down to it, I continued to let my husband think there was a chance when, as soon as I met my affair partner, there wasn’t one at all.

I’d previously judged people who cheated on their partners as weak-willed or constitutionally incapable, but then I became that person. After I left my husband and started dating my affair partner, I faced the question that haunts many: Can an affair ever lead to true love, or is it always doomed to end in heartbreak?

I left my husband on a Tuesday, and my affair partner and I had our first date on a Sunday. He told me he could cook dinner for me at his place, and this made sense: having just left my husband, I was aware it wouldn’t be a good look to be seen out in public yet. While I drove to his house, I chatted with a friend on the phone who asked me if he was handsome.

“No,” I said.

My husband was good-looking in a clean-cut, prep school boy kind of way, 5’8”, stocky and muscular, with a mop of brown hair and green eyes — an all-American boy. My affair partner looked like he spent too much time in a tanning bed. He was bald and hefty, his clothes rarely seeming to fit his body, as if his mother had dressed him in clothes he’d one day grow into.

“What do you think will happen?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This is a rebound, right? Do those ever last?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But maybe you guys will be different.”

The stats for affairs relationships aren’t promising. They’re very unlikely to last after the “main” relationship or marriage has ended. Dr. Jan Halper found that only 3% of the men she studied went on to marry their affair partner. If the relationship with the affair partner does result in marriage, it’s 75% likely to end in divorce. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking I’d somehow be the exception, but I’ve more often than not been the rule.

I parked in front of his house, a 1920s red brick bungalow with a screened-in porch. I breathed in deeply. I hadn’t been on a first date in ten years, and my skin prickled with nervousness. Will he kiss me? What will I do? I breathed in again, collected myself, and walked to his front door.

He opened it before I was even halfway up the walk. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

I walked up the steps, and he drew me into his arms, planted his mouth on mine and shoved open my lips. I squeezed my eyes shut and paid attention to his tongue, lolling and cumbersome in my mouth, like a slug.

From the moment he kissed me, I knew something was off, but I couldn’t guess what. I felt at variance with myself and how I believed I should feel. I thought I should be excited we had finally kissed but instead I kept thinking how his tongue had felt like a slug.

After we’d kissed, I followed him inside and watched as he cooked us dinner: flank steak with russet potatoes. We chatted casually, trotting over topics we’d covered before, like how I felt after leaving my husband and what I knew about the next steps in the divorce process. With our meals eaten, he took our plates and set them on the kitchen counter before taking my hand and leading me to his living room couch.

He kissed me again in the same brutish way he’d done before and then said, “We could move this to the bedroom.”

I could see the open door of his bedroom from where I sat. The bed was made. It would have been so easy for me to stand up and walk to the bedroom, remove my clothes, and let whatever happen — happen, but I knew I didn’t want that. Not now at least.

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“It’s just right there,” he said.

“It is right there,” I said.

“Sheets are clean,” he prodded.

“No,” I said again.

I recognized he was being pushy, but I excused it. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? I couldn’t say so myself. When I left, I continued to feel uncertain, and I found myself thinking, Am I just fooling myself?

The heart can overlook any manner of defects, physically or personally, but it can’t be fooled. It was only a matter of weeks before I started to see my affair partner for who he was all along, a poor match. He was arrogant and mean-spirited. He lied constantly about things that mattered and things that didn’t, and after being married to and having left one liar, I couldn’t stand being with another one. So it ended, just like so many other affair relationships.

True love can’t be built on the back of a betrayal. My affair relationship helped me finally decide to leave my marriage and, once it had ended, allowed me come back to myself. The shame and guilt of doing what only “weak-willed” people do made me want to do better and be better, and the first step in that process was in learning to love myself again.