THE UNPLEASANTLY ACCURATE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE AS A MISTRESS - DEEP THOUGHTS

A relationship where she can't go out to meet her friends because the man is too paranoid or she can't communicate with him freely since his...

• You may invest in your lover like he is your boyfriend, but to the rest of the world, and in all ways that matter, you are single. If people ask: no, you’re not seeing anyone. You have no date for the Christmas party. He cannot pick you up from surgery, help you move, be there if your parent dies, or answer your phone call at the end of a terrible day. If you are in an accident and land in the hospital, he can’t race to your side. It may be days before your “boyfriend” even finds out.

• You will tailor your life to his schedule, keeping your entire Sunday free just in case he can get away. Gradually this will make you resentful, pathetic, or both. The longer you do this, the more he will take for granted that you’re not going anywhere.

• You probably are thinking about him way more often than he thinks about you. He will tell you that you are all he thought about while he was with his family at Disney World. No, you weren’t.

• Your friends are going to get sick of listening to you and picking up the pieces.

• You think you know the “real him.” You don’t. His wife knows the real him. She knows the man who yells at everyone in the house when he can’t remember where he put his keys. You know the guy with no domestic obligations, who arrives for an afternoon of recreational sex with a woman who sends him scorching text messages and buys lingerie just for him—but who doesn’t have to deal with his moods and keep his household together.
  
  Affairs are like vacation relationships and (to some extent) long-distance relationships: It will be a long time before you see the person at his worst, in his natural habitat. His wife is the one who hands him the trash when he gets home every night, and it’s easy for him to associate her with drudgery and responsibility vs. the man he fantasizes he is.

• His feelings for you, and the sex, are falsely intensified because they’re illicit and risky.

• The backstory in which you are finding moral reassurance probably is fiction. When humans desire things that we know are wrong, our brains do acrobatics to justify it. Most cheating men (and women) arrive at the same predictable narrative: He and his wife are more like brother and sister now. He probably was never in love with her, because he didn’t know what love was. She just doesn’t get him. (The problem is likely that she gets him too well.)
  
  Those rationalizations are abstract and supposedly unfixable. They let the mistress feel that she is saving him from a person who is stealing his life (despite his entering every stage of that relationship of his own volition!), when in fact she is giving him an excuse to not face problems in his primary relationship.

• If you are outed, the social fallout may be much worse for you. Aside from sexist double standards and the lingering belief that men “can’t help themselves,” mutual friends and family always rally around the existing couple. Don’t put it past an enraged wife to contact your family or employer.

• You will be manacled by the sunk cost fallacy. Every time he agrees to leave his wife and doesn’t, you will fall apart again. But you’ll also stay. Because you’ve already invested too much to “get nothing out of it,” and what if you give up right before he was finally going to leave her? The emotional threat of losing him will activate your attachment system. The reassuring rush of makeup sex will replenish your resolve.

• You are probably not the woman of his dreams. Maybe he has told you that you are—he’ll be as romantic as he has to be to keep the sex hot—but if he’s not plotting his egress, it’s more likely you’re just the most attractive, convenient outlet for sex without strings. I have met the side pieces of many successful men, and rarely are they the supple vixens one envisions when hearing the word “mistress.” Often they’re overeager frumps without dignity, and I promise you if these men were officially on the market, in many cases they wouldn’t even be seen in public with these women.
  
  Some cheating guys eventually get the divorce and then cut it off with the mistress too, because they figure out why to tie themselves down again after walking through hellfire. Why not play the field?
  
  My former co-worker waited THIRTEEN YEARS for her lover to “finally tell his wife.” At last, he told his wife. And then he told her.

If He Does Leave His Wife for You

• You may not get the man you held out for. An amicable divorce can be brutal. An acrimonious divorce can destroy a man emotionally and financially. If the demand for a divorce came out of left field, then his wife would insist on marriage counseling. Since he cannot work on his marriage while cheating, he will have to refuse what seems like a very reasonable request, or else lie to a therapist for eight weeks while his wife falls apart.
  
  The man who is left at the end of this may be a shadow of the one you fell in love with. He will be consumed with guilt and doubt, left with a big stick to beat himself up with every day. Guess who gets to be there for that?

• Almost no one will be rooting for you as a couple. If his kids find out you’re the reason he left their mother, likely, they’ll likely never accept you. Mutual friends of the former couple probably will turn on him, and those who don’t may blame you and not want to socialize with you. Your friends who know the backstory will not like or trust him.

• You already know he’s an accomplished liar. The longer you were together, the more lies he told. It’s a reflex. What are you going to do when he tells you he’s working late again, go ahead and eat dinner without him.

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