August 26, 2025
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. (I can perhaps be forgiven for that, given the fact that I was young and stupid. And the only sources easily found about the career in those days were the Wow! Rags to Riches! stories about that one runaway success every five or ten years who hits the jackpot with their first novel after being on the breadlines, or some such nonsense.)
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 this 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 tumor, 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.
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.
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.