The Other Woman

name: Sarah
topic: I love my married man. Why won’t he stay with me? He is MUCH BETTER than my husband. Does anyone else feel like this?

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I may have shared previously that my husband’s ex (known as BQ) is…well…insane. But that’s beside the point. The real tragedy here is that BQ has transferring her issues and psychoses to her daughter, my step daughter, who is twelve years old and a semingly normal girl on the surface. But Em has had issues and breakdowns over the past 2 to 3 years where she accuses her father of numerous things stemming from her belief that he abandoned her, her sister, and her mother. While we’ve tried talking her through her concerns and also sought counseling, more recently Em has reached the apex of sharing her mother’s psychoses. We feel troubled and helpless at this point because each time we feel we’ve made positive progress with her, she has another meltdown. And always around holidays and birthdays. To give you an idea, below is a series of text messages to her father this Christmas Eve. These messages came out of the blue because things had been relatively normal for the months leading up to receiving these. We can only attribute the initiation of these messages as a result of her mother and her sister being together for the holidays. Typically all hell breaks loose when these two women are together because the girls (Ce is 14) are exposed to an inordinate amount of negativity that involves rehashings of all past events in minute detail . Why can’t women let go and go on with their lives? Why must they wallow in helplessness and self righteousness?

Text messages received on Christmas Eve. What should we do?
- dad i love u i didnt mean it but i dont want to go on the vacation. i love u.
- dad. just pay mom or leave her alone u got 3 cars while she has an old one that can break down at any minute. we downsized houses a lot and u got another million dollar house. u made mom call jin li whenever shr has to go to the docter. u loved her for 20 years and this is sick. please just let my mom live without her having to worry if we’ll be in new jersey tomorrow. love u.
- how come ur not paying for us to stay in our home.i know whats goiing on. ur killing mom. jin li is especially killing mom. i have no desire to go on vacation with u. ur evil. this isnt u and i dont believe this is. but ur going to kill her and i will never forgive u.
- u kno2w exactly what ur doing to mom and ur eventually going to kill her. u dont even write ur own emails u sued her five times.
- answer me dad. why are u killing my mom.

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From time to time, by following the sexual and emotional escapades of married celebrities, we are reminded of how common and frequent extra-marital affairs are. So much so that latest statistics indicate that in this country 45-55% of all married women and 50-60% of all married men had an affair while in a committed primary relationship (Atwood & Schwartz, 2002.) If we consider unlikely for all cheating people to be married to one another, then we can infer that cheating affects approximately 80% of all marriages in the U.S.! Additionally, recent trends indicate that, under the age of 40, women’s rates of affairs are getting very close to men’s, closing the gender gap.

This is a departure from a more traditional profile of the cheater as typically male, middle age, sex-starved, looking for excitement and adventure and needing to be made to feel young and attractive again, preferably by a much younger woman than his marital partner. Not that this profile does not exist any more, but it does neither exhaustively describe nor explain why people cheat in a society where sexual mores have become more relaxed and open, and where women are as likely as men to act out their emotional and sexual fantasies .

Other changes in patterns of affairs have to do with the way in which today people connect with one another. The increasing use of the Internet as a social network creates a whole new set of opportunities, and threats. The fact that about 35% of all divorce litigations cite internet affairs as the cause of them attests to the widespread use of the Internet for this purpose. People get in touch with one another after years of disconnection, or they anonymously connect with others in ways that create new virtual networks. About 70% of the time people spend on line is allegedly used to visit “chat rooms” or sending/receiving e-mails. The vast majority of interactions in chat rooms are of a romantic nature (Adamse & Motta, 2000.) Because all this was unheard of just a decade ago, we are just beginning to grasp its importance and its effects on intimacy and love.

One of the astonishing differences between romance and sex in cyberspace and in real time is that more than half of all men and women who engage in cyberspace romance and sex believe what they do is not adultery. I believe this contributes to lowering the threshold between thinking and wishing to have an affair on the one hand, and carrying it out on the other. This belief, in fact, by lowering one’s inhibitions and reducing guilt, increases acting out emotionally and sexually.

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