'I waited years for a married man to leave his wife until I heard the famous three words.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

This article originally appeared on The Thinking Other Woman's Substack. Sign up here.

Twenty-six years ago, I joined a group that would prove to be very significant in my life.

I was interested in the subject matter, of course, thinking it would be easy to become a published author with an actual audience.

The other reason I joined was, as a young woman who was always heavier than other people my age no matter what I did, I thought it was my best shot at finding a like-minded person to date. And there were two of them in there, great guys who just shone like they had a light over them.

The trouble was … they were both married.

We all listened for years as one of them complained about his wife. We were assured that as soon as the kids were old enough, he was getting a divorce.

The other guy was suddenly widowed after his wife had a heart attack. Two months later, that guy asked me out. I had a hard time believing it was ever going to work. Surely, that guy was on the rebound, even though he'd been widowed. And he was twenty-one years older than me.

Four years later, we were married. Less than five years after that, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and two years later, I was a widow myself at age forty-five. Before he died, my late husband let it slip that the other guy, the one who was still married, had revealed he was attracted to me several years prior.

Wish he hadn't done that. As soon as I knew that, I was off to the races.

Watch: What is an emotional affair? Post continues below.

Seventeen Lessons.

Life had been pretty tough. My mother was mentally ill, and I grew up as the kid with the kick-me sign.

My father died suddenly in a plane crash when I was twelve. The money from the lawsuit should have sustained us, but the "adults" in the family squandered most of it by the time I was eighteen, leaving me to get through college and professional school on loans I should never have had to take out.

But I did have to, because I needed to escape home and my mentally ill mother, and I needed a profession that would enable me to supply my own home and car without relying on anyone else.

Add a car accident and two major surgeries with no health insurance, and you get nail-biting financial worries in a high-stress career with miserably long hours and no support.

Unfortunately, growing up the way I did left me with no social antennae and very little confidence, and my working life was fraught with struggle for many years. That was why these guys stood out to me.

They seemed like great guys, friendly, smart, with good social skills, who were effortless successes in their professions, while I had done nothing but struggle in all of the above.

Lesson One:

Such is the making of the Other Woman. People see her as a cruel, heartless homewrecker, but in actuality? Most of them are sad, lonely, painfully needy little girls inside.

Girls who had bad home lives growing up, bad relationships after that, and in my case at least, were the girls who got hazed by everyone else in school and spent those formative years alone and friendless.

They've never, ever felt loved and good enough, so they go for someone else who doesn't feel loved and good enough and think the two victims can salve one another's wounds and make a go of it. Who else would ever understand either person?

After all, all the guy talks about is how bad his marriage is, right? And most of these guys are full-on successful at life in a way that makes everyone believe they've got it all together.

Fools you every time.

Lesson Two:

As a former "other woman" who's run a publication about infidelity some five years now and heard from women who know even more third-party women, one of the major things I've learned is that the extramarital affair is full of contradictions.

Sure, there are some heartless homewreckers out there.

Some of them are the cheaters and some of them are the third parties. But, in the vast majority of affairs, the cheating parties defy the stereotypes when you look closer at all that really happened, and the only commonality is pain.

And pain and fear overrule common sense at every turn.

When it comes to affairs, pain and fear overrule common sense at every turn. Image: Getty.

The next time you're tempted to exclaim, "How could they have done that?" or to proclaim in all your eminent wisdom that it doesn't matter what was going on or how bad whoever felt, they just should've-should've-should've done things differently, take a look at what I just wrote.

Pain and fear overrule common sense at every turn.

Especially when the childhood was bad, the trials are long, and good role modeling in childhood was in short supply.

Lesson Three:

The married man never leaves his wife.

Hell, NO.

F**k, NO.

Hell to the f**k no, he will NOT leave his wife for you.

He isn't going to leave his wife, AT ALL.

Out of at least a hundred infidelity stories I've heard that were non-Hollywood, non-celebrity cases, I can count three where the guy actually left and the affair relationship turned into a stable marriage.

In all three cases, the cheated-on party was an addict, a full-on domestic abuser, or had diagnosed mental illness, and the person cheating had to get out, taking the kids for their own safety.

Lesson Four:

Those are the affair relationships that have some faint prayer of working out.

Those are the only affair relationships that have some faint prayer of working out.

Lesson Five:

The other ones? These men (usually it's a man) all have two things in common:

They deeply, deeply love their wives and especially their children and feel completely responsible for their happiness. They cannot leave the marriage and live with themselves, and at the time the affair begins, they are all very angry with their wives.

The sad thing is, a good number of them have good reason.

Lesson Six:

Here's the thing: IT DOESN'T MATTER.

It doesn't matter how bad the marriage is or how neglectful the wife is.

It doesn't matter that they only have sex five times a year or haven't in eight years or how she treats him in public or private or who started the problems or that she's refusing marriage counselling even after being asked, even if she's been asked due to some severely troubling behaviour.

Lesson Seven:

This is what the mistress doesn't understand. It does not matter what's going on in the home.

It doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter what he (or she) is telling you they want.

But you cannot tell a besotted mistress this. Good grief, I was a student astrologer, and even when the charts were strongly telling me This Was Doomed, I couldn't accept it.

I was so wounded from childhood and so desperately, painfully needy for the outcome I envisioned, it felt like any other outcome was dust next to that, and therefore, what I dreamed of just had to happen.

Which is why nothing you say to the besotted mistress is going to make even so much as a dent.

Lesson Eight:

The only way three parties who end up in a third-party relationship are capable of learning anything is through painful, painful, searingly painful experiences.

That's the only way the husband and wife learn what's wrong with their marriage and that, yes, they actually have to work if they want their family to also.

A man who complains about his marriage does not have it all together. Image: Getty.

It's the only way the mistress learns that no, she can't rescue anyone, and even if it looks like she does, that still will not lead to the relationship she envisions. Because the guy still has a lot of hard work to do, and she cannot make him do any of it.

(Most of the time, she will not even do her own. Neither will the cheated-on spouse.)

Lesson Nine:

A man who goes around complaining about his marriage in public does not have it all together.

He looks for all the world as if he is advertising his availability and is champing at the bit to go. This is what fools the mistress and keeps her hanging on for months, years, and yes, in some sad stories, decades of her life.

He is complaining in public about his marriage.

Do. Not. Believe. A. Single. Word.

What ends up happening is once you give these men what they say they want, they are confronted with the actual possibility of leaving home.

Then they realise how deeply attached they are to the home, their children, and their wife, and if keeping their home and family together means accepting they will never have sex again, these men will do it.

If it means living out an empty roommate relationship, forever, for the rest of their lives, so be it. That's better than their kids never speaking to them again as they struggle to comfort their crying mother, the shame that will be heaped on their heads from friends, family, and church, and the reality of living in some tiny apartment all alone and not seeing the kids every day anymore.

Not to mention: The Finances. That alone forestalls so many divorces I think the rate would be well over 50 per cent if it didn't cost people so much to get divorced.

The fact is: it takes these men months, years, and yes, in some sad stories, decades to accept that that is truly how they feel. And that whole entire time, the mistress/es dangle, until he severs the ties enough to be capable of finally discarding them.

And it's a cruel and heartless discard. You don't want to be on the receiving end of that three-way call with the wife after ten years of falling on your sword for a man.

The longer the affair goes on, the more time these men have to think about it. And think about it.

And then the affair partner starts to hear the famous three words: "As soon as …"

Depart now, please. It's all over.

Please note that my guy started out with the words, "As soon as," long before I even married my husband.

That should have been my clue to forget about him, and for many years, it was. But all I had to do was be widowed and miserable, and … please reread Lesson Two.

Lesson Ten:

Sadly, the mistress has "A Dream" she believes will result in "Happy Ever After," and it's just too painful to give it up.

Typically, she's from a hard-scrabble background, and she has nothing else, which is why she hangs on and waits so faithfully.

But the cheater? The cheater has a whole life they're terrified of losing.

Lesson Eleven:

The living instant you hear the phrase "as soon as …" give it up.

Give it up right then.

It will make your life a lot less disappointing.

Lesson Twelve:

Married men who are ready to leave their wives file for divorce. Married men who don't?

These people do not believe they deserve to be happy to begin with, and certainly not after they've cheated and everyone knows about it. Their entire self-worth is wrapped up in how everyone else feels about them. So, either way, you're doomed.

Especially in the cases where a sick wife is being cheated on. That is never going to work; he feels too guilty.

He's going right back. He will never leave her.

Lesson Thirteen:

Therapist Jeff Murrah has shared the dismal statistics of how many affairs actually become marriages here:

The best thing to do is, believe these statistics. You are not the lucky ten percent. Cut your losses now. Do not waste two, five, ten years of your life as I've seen cheaters and affair partners do.

Ladies: We know that men are sexist, lookist creatures. Even the fat, ugly ones think they deserve nothing less than a Playboy centrefold. You will have a much tougher time on the dating market having aged ten years.

Leave this person to his mess — he's going back anyway, whether the wife wants to work on the marriage or not.

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Lesson Fourteen:

And this is the truth no one wants to hear, and I've taken many rotten eggs for it over the years. Yet it is the truth, and I will say it again:

The cheated-on spouse is always complicit in what's happened to their marriage.

Whether they themselves grew up with an abusive or narcissistic parent and picked out someone just like dear old mum or dad, whether they picked out a "nice guy" they could run over and bully into silence, then they never found out how unhappy he was until he up and ran off (temporarily — it's always temporarily!) with a mistress, or whether the spouse listened on and on to complaints about the relationship and just pooh-poohed them off for years and was finally grateful when the complaining stopped; the "innocent" party always has something to do with what's happened.

Nobody wants to hear this. Everyone throws rotten eggs and accuses anyone who dares to say this of "blaming the spouse."

Nonetheless: Two people got the marriage to the point where someone was willing to cheat, and two people are going to have to accept responsibility for changing their parts in that.

And, spouses? When your formerly complaining spouse goes silent about all the things you've wished for years they would just shut up about (because they're really not that bad and you know you have a "good marriage?")

That's not a good thing. That's the announcement: Your spouse has given up on you.

And a good number of spouses who quiet-quit their marriages will end up cheating.

Who cares what should happen?

It's what does happen.

Lesson Fifteen:

An affair derails years and years of everyone's life and ends up wasting that time.

Unless the two people who are staying in the marriage — and they are, no matter what!

Unless those two people dig deep and change the problems between them and the problems within themselves, all three people are going to come out of the other side of the affair older, in a later stage of their lives, and with significant loss of hope.

The last time I heard from my ex-affair partner, he didn't sound happy. The wife had insisted on marriage counselling years before, then refused to apply herself and acted like she didn't really want to be there.

No substantial change had occurred, and the last time they'd had sex coincided with the end of therapy.

That was nine years ago.

Essentially, what they did was spend a lot of money convincing friends and family they had repaired their marriage, then went back to things as they were before the affair. While the guy stalked me online some seven years, he worked himself into true acceptance of his situation and then decided the whole thing was silly and embarrassing and so was I. The last thing he had to say about it was that he was transitioning into being a caretaker for his family.

Only now, he had fully accepted that role, and anyone who challenged it was going to be shut out and completely slapped down.

This is what ninety percent or more of all cheaters do, by the way.

It just takes them many years to accept their limited marriage and their limited role in it, and most of them will continue to use the third party sexually until they can make the transition.

Me? If I had started dating again a year after my husband passed away instead of throwing myself at this guy, I can't guarantee my life would be any better right now. I was forty-five and overweight. And we all know the first thing a guy will do is check out a woman's body, and if you don't immediately make his dick hard, they will tell you inside of three minutes you need to lose weight, and that will be it.

But at that age, I was bereft and sad, but I was also proud of myself. I had taken care of not only two elderly handicapped relatives that fell into my lap, but also my late husband as he died. I had helped him finish his last book. I had done all this while still working and handling various brain tumor-related crises on three hours' sleep.

I also felt excited and hopeful once this guy let me know he was interested. I had the energy and hope (and the time, and the ten minutes one workplace was from the gym, and the younger body that didn't get injured every other week) to exercise and eat better and meticulously count calories and plan every little bite and lose thirty pounds.

I was still stupid enough to believe I could be successful writing.

I was the youngest, thinnest, happiest, and most hopeful I would ever be.

That was the time to start dating.

Instead, I felt so sorry for this guy and so bound to him and so sure he was special and it was meant to be, I set out to prove my loyalty instead.

Lesson Sixteen:

Don't do that. You will get spat on.

Your love, your devotion, your willingness to do anything for this married person, will only get you spat on. Will only earn you their abject contempt. Stay long enough, and your married person will hate you. Guaranteed.

When I started with mine, he once typed me his fantasy. It was:

I want to wake up in the morning next to someone who makes me think "Thank God I'm alive so I can spend another day with this woman."

He typed me, I can't believe how well you understand me. He said I was his total package.

Come on. Be honest. You know this marriage will never, ever break up. Go back to your family. And you, there? Drop the married person. This is nothing.

When you're told things like that, it's incredibly hard to believe he will take it all back someday and spit on you. It's incredibly hard to believe you haven't found your One True Love. Where did the person who said and wrote those things go?

Back to his family.

Is he (or she?) married? Then he (or she) will take it all back one day and spit on you.

It's not a place you want to be. It is not what you deserve. You have a lot to give. Give it to the right person. Somebody married who is saying, "As soon as, as soon as …" is showing you right there, they are not the right person.

Listen: The celebrity cheating story Mamamia Out Loud needed to unpack. Post continues below.

Ten Years Later

Ten years later, I am almost sixty years old. Youth is over. Middle age is over.

Life always moves on. The group I met so many accepting people in is over. Friends have moved on, moved away, become Trumpists, died. You can't go back in time. The happiest times in my life are gone.

I am elderly. I now live in a body that can't do much of anything without getting injured.

No longer young and stupid, I see the publishing industry for what it is: Of the famous, by the famous, for the famous, and nobody else has any chance of making a living at it.

If you are a person of mediocre talent, as I am, you have no chance of ever being noticed at all amongst the sea of AI and E. L. James wannabes. I've watched people who were once making five figures a month on Medium and crowing about their success as writers crash and burn and almost throw themselves off bridges.

This is not a hopeful scenario, especially when you as a writer can't even get arrested speeding, much less attract a livable following online.

I knew I was throwing my life away. But, I was also doing a lot of research and work. I read and learned tons about attachment theory. I learned tons about why things happened the way they did. I told myself I'd wait, since I was too sad to date anyway and I was profiting from my time.

Yet, when I'd learned all I could, the young stages of my life had all passed. I'm in the stage now where people are on their way down, when all the good stuff that was ever going to happen is over. All that's left for me is old age, decline, and the nursing home.

If I known I was just a phase for this guy, and I had thrown the married guy over and just gone on dates, who's to say what might have happened?

(But it never would have, of course. We third-party relationship people don't learn anything except the hard way, remember?)

I sit here now and know that I have very little ahead to look forward to. At least I'm finally in a job that pays well, I'm finally retiring debt, and I have job security. That's something.

If you dump the affair now and get yourself into counselling to work, really work, on your marriage, you could spend the next ten years, and the rest of your life, incredibly happy and fulfilled.

If your idiot spouse says no, you could work enough on self-esteem to divorce them, weather the idiot comments from family, meet someone who will halfway meet you, and spend the next ten years incredibly happy and fulfilled.

(Mine didn't, but he adjusted and is fine with where he is now anyway.)

If you understand this man or woman will never stop fence-sitting and is only using you, no matter what they say, you could go out and start dating again.

There's no guarantee you will find someone better, but if you dedicate yourself to someone who's only using you, as I and many other women of my acquaintance have done, you will end up like me.

All I have is the ability to write this piece only a few people will see. If it turns even a few people away from their affair and back to their marriage or their life … that's about all my life has had to offer.

Lesson Seventeen:

Ultimately, an affair is a crossroads which gives three people the chance to change their lives.

Sadly, most of them never will.

Sign up to The Thinking Other Woman's Substack, here.

You can read more of this author's work via Medium.

Feature Image: Getty.