Single Women and Married Lovers : San Diego Group Meets Weekly in Effort to Ease ‘Pain’

Lisa, 49, who manages a law office, demands monthly payments from her married lover “to make up for the time that he can’t be with me.” She vows to end the relationship this year if his marriage continues.

Cynthia, 44, a local leader in investment services, accuses her married lover of sitting on the fence about his marriage and angrily gives him tweezers to pull out the splinters. When he responds too slowly to suit her, she leaves him.

Toni, 46, a successful businesswoman, sees her longtime lover only once every five weeks because he lives in another town. She accepts his refusal to leave his wife. “I can’t (make him) change his life,” she says. “Only he can change it.”

Betty, 28, starting her career, deeply loves the married man she recently became involved with, who is 13 years older. She plans to avoid pitfalls by listening to the older women.

Lisa, Cynthia, Toni and Betty, who asked that their real names be withheld, are among eight single women who meet weekly to discuss their experiences with married lovers. Experts say their support group may be the first of its kind in the nation.

Psychologist JoAnn Bitner, who organized the group last September, acknowledges that she has had an affair with a married man.

Bitner, 50, an elder in the Presbyterian church, said she became involved with an old college friend while looking for solace at the end of her 15-year marriage.

A licensed marriage and family counselor and a Ph.D. in psychology from United States International University, Bitner said she reveals her personal situation to “establish my credibility as a sane human being who is responsible, and who has the ability to be non-judgmental.”

Bitner said that when she announced plans for the group in a local newspaper, she received 70

phone calls, almost all of them positive. Seven of the calls, she said, came from single men having affairs with married women. She may start a separate group for them.

The psychologist says the response is not surprising. San Diego State sociologist Thomas Gillette says various studies, starting with Dr. Alfred Kinsey, show that among single women 35 to 65, 15% to 20% are involved with married men.

These women, she said, need a place to talk without being judged and to get support for decisions to continue or leave their relationships.

“These are people who are in pain,” she said. “ . . . They’re not a happy group of women gleefully destroying people’s marriages.”

Interviewed in her Hillcrest office recently, Bitner said the “other woman” may serve an important social purpose.

“(She) often holds the marriage together,” Bitner said. “ . . . If the man didn’t have an emotionally caring person on the outside, he would have to leave the marriage because he couldn’t stand the loneliness or the problems.”

Bitner said only 25% of the men involved with single women leave their wives for their girlfriends.

“They often do not marry the girlfriends,” she said.

” . . . She gets assigned the guilt for having broken up their marriage so he can’t like her and then it frees him to marry someone else.”

Little research has been done on the taboo relationships between single women and married men, but available data shows a dramatic unavailability of single men for women 35 to 65, the psychologist said.

“I’m sure most women would be much less eager to stay so long in the relationships if they had somewhere else to go,” she said.

Bitner said a 1985 study by Ohio State sociologist Laurel Richardson argues that the undersupply of available males results from three factors: the higher mortality rate among men, their greater tendency to remarry after divorce and their preference for younger women.

“In 1985,” Richardson wrote, “for every 10 women between 40 and 49 years of age with a college education, there are only three (available) single men who are older and better educated.”

Richardson, who extensively interviewed 55 women who had or were having long-term relationships with married men, said the females seldom sought married partners. The relationships developed accidentally and were tender and loving in the initial secret years.

Women busy seeking identity or professional growth often preferred involvement with a married man to a more time-consuming relationship with a single one, she said.

They usually became so emotionally involved, however, that they lost control over the relationships which “end up benefiting the man more than the woman.”

Keeping control of their lives is a common theme among the women who hold animated discussions in Bitner’s group from 6 to 8 p.m. each Thursday. Paying $50 a month, they meet in a converted medical center just west of Balboa Park.

The group members who were interviewed showed little remorse about hurting their lover’s wives.

” . . . Everybody I know kind of comes down to . . . that the marriage is in trouble before you came along, and they’re lacking the intimacy or it wouldn’t have happened,” Bitner said.

” . . . If a man is having an intimate marriage . . . then no one can get into that. . . ,” Bitner said. “Maybe this is too broad a statement, but I don’t believe anybody could be truly intimate with more than one person at a time.

Bitner said that the relationships start strong, but that a decision about continuing must usually be made after two or three years.

“While you’re doing it you have to be able to live in the present and not worry about the future. . . . And most of us can do that for two or three years and then the relationship has to change,” Bitner said.

” . . . The nature of things you do in the beginning of a relationship are involved around sex and affection and excitement and learning more about one another. But then you have to kind of start doing things together and making a future and kind of building something. . . .”

When the couple can’t build, Bitner said, relationships crumble. Cynthia, who works in investment services, reached this point after joining the group last fall.

“The good times are wonderful . . . ,” she said during an interview in her high-rise San Diego office. “You cram an awful lot into short periods of time. . . .

“I had a great deal of difficulty accepting the fact that I was having an affair with a married man. You know, I hated it. I hated waiting for phone calls. I hated all those things that are part of it, not being able to make plans,” she continued.

After she joined the group, Cynthia said, her boyfriend, who works in the same business, “fell off his white horse. I began to feel that here is a powerful man who can’t get off the fence (about leaving his wife).”

When her symbolic gesture with tweezers failed to nudge him, she told him the relationship was over.

Lisa has not used the group to end her relationship, but she has warned her lover that she will stop seeing him unless he leaves his wife this year.

She said her boyfriend sees her daily, loves her four grown children, takes her to the city’s finest restaurants and plies her with gifts.

But after spending most evenings at Lisa’s elegant house, he goes home to his wife.

Lisa, who was married 23 years, says she misses the togetherness that a husband provides.

She said her lover told her initially that he had left his wife and broken up with his previous girlfriend of 12 years. By the time she found out that he had lied about leaving his wife, she was hooked, she said.

“I try not to think of that aspect of it, that he lied to me. Because he still protests that he’s going to--you know the message. That I’m the love of his life. The most beautiful girl in the world. And that he is going to leave her and marry me and we will live happily ever after.

“And that’s what the group did for me. It helped me be very comfortable with where I am. And what we have is a Catch-22. You cannot go out and find a new man while you’re with the man. And you don’t want to give up the man until you find a new man. How can you do it? I tried it (to find a new man) and it was terrible.”