Affair Got Going With Help From All Sides

Infidelity, Lynda says, “just isn’t a part of my being.”

Still, it’s part of her life.

The affair was her husband’s, not hers. It’s over now--she’s sure of that--but the pain is still there. Sometimes Lynda wonders if it will ever be gone. But she says the betrayal was “an experience that has forever changed my life.”

Last Saturday, we heard from people who were unfaithful. Today, Lynda speaks for those who’ve been betrayed.

“The beginning of my story is as trite as the ‘happily ever after’ wrap-up to a fairy tale,” wrote Lynda, 40, who lives in Orange. “I never thought my husband would cheat on me. Not possible! Unthinkable! I never suspected.”

Last July, Lynda discovered she was mistaken. “We had been out and the answering machine said we had gotten four calls. I replayed the messages, which were all fairly innocuous and generally said, ‘Sorry we missed you; had a great time at your party yesterday.’ But then, and I don’t know why I did it, I kept on playing back messages beyond the first four on the tape. My husband tried to stop me, but I wanted to hear the older messages.

“That’s when I heard HER voice tracks on my Phone-mate.”

Lynda and her two children from a previous marriage had been gone the week before, and the words on the machine made it clear that while they were away, “my husband (had) played house in MY house with the owner of the voice. She slept in my bed, used my closet, ate in my kitchen, swam in my pool, walked my dogs. . . . The shock of discovery . . . was physical, like a blow to my body.”

The children, who were standing nearby when Lynda played back the tape, were shocked too. At 10 and 12, they didn’t quite understand what the problem was, but:

“They had never seen me hit him before. I wanted to kill him. . . . The battle raged. I told him to get out--even called her on the phone to come get him. He refused to go.”

After that, he began to cry. “He let the whole story out,” Lynda said. “We were up all night.”

The next morning at 7, he called the other woman and told her it was over. Lynda was listening on the extension phone.

For the next few weeks, she said, “I kept setting up situations in which he could go to her if he wanted. I tested him. If she was so important that he was willing to put all that we had together on the line, then he should go to her. Only he never wanted her.”

Lynda acknowledged that “I’ll never really know what got his affair started. He’s told me much about it, but that is based on a retelling after the fact.

“She was/is a vice president in an Orange County company. Divorced, three teen-aged kids. Professional career woman. My husband, although not technically in a reporting relationship to her, was her hierarchical subordinate. . . . She arranged for him to be included in some projects that took him away from his paper shuffling. They worked well together. . . . The work time became after-work drinks.”

Finally, Lynda said: “She came into his office one day and told him she was in love with him. . . . Then she set about getting him. There were the little yellow notes on his memos that said, ‘Do this for me and I will grant you sexual favors.’ She left her business cards in his desk with big red lipstick kisses on the backs. Then one day, he says, she asked him to lunch. Only she didn’t drive to a restaurant, but to her house. She was the main course.”

Meanwhile, Lynda said, “I was working long hours, not paying attention to my family. I joined a women’s soccer team, and that kept me busy. I wasn’t doing anything with my husband anymore; I quit being available. He was going through a big career crisis and needed someone to talk to, and I said, ‘I don’t want to be bothered.’

“He kept telling me he wanted to get close again. He sent me flowers. For my 40th birthday, he arranged a romantic weekend for us in San Francisco. When he told me about it, I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not going to do that. I have to play soccer this weekend.’

“I just wasn’t hearing the signals he was sending. He thought I didn’t love him.”

Lynda did notice that her husband was going to work early, losing weight, dressing nicer. Lynda’s husband confessed that he had been “telegraphing” to her: “He told me that he left tracks all over the place, hoping to get caught so he could get out” of the affair.

When that first stormy night was over, Lynda and her husband had made up their minds. “We were committed to stay together, because there is a great deal of depth to our relationship that even this violation can’t obviate.”

The following weekend, they went away together to a nearby resort. “We started doing the things that made us fall in love in the first place. We were together every minute. We started car-pooling to work together. We went on long walks, lots of lovemaking and talking things out.”

And they got counseling. “That was the thing that saved our marriage. We both agreed that we loved each other. We had to learn the skills to talk about (what had happened).”

Still, for several months, “we were on a relationship roller coaster of emotional highs and lows,” Lynda said. They took up smoking again, started using tranquilizers. “There was no peace.”

By then, Lynda had taken what she considered a necessary step. “I had to get new bedding and towels--her presence in my most intimate space was such a violation that it had to be redressed.”

She considered retaliating and made a mental checklist of men with whom she might have affairs. “I even set up lunch dates with them,” she said, “but that’s as far as it got--lunch. I just didn’t have it in me.”

One problem was that no matter what Lynda and her husband did to repair the damage during evenings and weekends, “he and she still worked together in an uncomfortable, untenable situation.”

Lynda started getting mysterious phone calls at work, telling her that her husband and the woman were in a meeting together. The woman sent dead flowers to Lynda at her office and had them delivered in a hearse.

The day before Lynda and her husband left for a second honeymoon in Hawaii, live Hawaiian flowers were delivered to her desk--with a card that said, “You know it’s not going to work.”

Finally, Lynda’s husband had to find another job to get away from his former lover.

And Lynda’s own job performance “suffered so greatly . . . that I was relieved of my rather substantial responsibilities and ultimately transferred to another unit. I lost all faith and belief in not only my husband but also myself. My children suffered incalculable and unknowable emotional damage, not only from the fear of our impending separation, but from my inability to relate to them or give them anything for several months.”

And now, Lynda said: “I really hate my husband for what he did. I really hate myself for being so blind and allowing our relationship to get so ‘plain vanilla’ that he strayed. And I really feel sorry for this other woman. She thought she could get a married man to leave his wife for her. . . . There are days when I wish I could have gotten him to leave--clean break.

“But I really like him a lot. He’s my best friend. We always did have a dream of growing old together, and I still see us doing that.

“Have I forgiven him? Over and over and over again. Can I trust him? No. There will always be doubt in the back of my mind.”

Readers

Have you been unfaithful (or betrayed)?

The file is still open on the subject of infidelity. Join the discussion and tell us your story.

Were you the “other woman” or the “other man”?

Infidelity has more than two sides. We’d like to hear from the third side of the triangle. If you were the one with whom a married man or woman crossed the line into forbidden territory, tell us your side of the story.

A step removed

In fairy tales, stepmothers are wicked and ugly. In real life, stepparents don’t always get the intimacy and respect their “real” counterparts do. If you’re a stepparent or a stepchild, tell us how you feel about the barriers that keep you--or them--from blending into the family.

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