Quick to Pass Judgment
“Hey Sowhatiff, Sorry I missed your barbeque.”
Those were the words that started what I now call the best and worst of times in my relationship life thus far. I met AC three years ago through a friend. AC was new to the city and my friend thought it’d be nice to introduce him to some folks. Around that time my roommates and I were planning a Memorial Day barbeque, so it made sense to invite him to come through. I didn’t expect him to come, but was a little disappointed when he didn’t show up. I’m not exactly sure why. Anyway, he blamed it on work, and we exchanged a few pleasentries via email and that was that…for about two weeks.
Our groups of friends started hanging out after work and on the weekends. AC and I exchanged emails back and forth whilst we “worked” during the day, text messages after work, and had long phone conversations at night. As we started to learn more about each other and how much we had in common, the tone of our conversations and interactions began to change. We started to like each other. In most instances, this wouldn’t be an issue.
I’m sorry, I’m flirting with you and I shouldn’t because I’m spoken for. Its been a rough relationship but I’m still in it.
At this point, disappointment set it something real, but I, a woman of upstanding moral principle, knew what I needed to do. Draw the lines in the sand, keep things in perspective, and keep it moving. Sounds simple enough right? The two of us acknowledged that the tone of our conversations needed to change, and that we respected our respective positions, and so we would be as friends going forward.
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Just friends. We should have stopped talking altogether at this point, but I had enough plutonic male friends to know that friendship was very possible. We talked about everything from the day-to-day dealings of our lives to the desires for our respective futures. We challenged each other intellectually, learned about the pains of our pasts, laughed a lot, and cried a little. In 4 months, we shared more with each other than we shared with most others before. The chemistry was unexplainable. There was no sexy-talk and very little physical touching. Only the emotional kind. Eventually I learned the latter was the more risky for all involved.
I started to fall for him before we shared our first kiss. More kisses followed and the relationship got even more complicated. Take a guess why. At this point, it was over for me. Between my feelings for him and the guilt I felt for loving someone else’s man, I was a mess. I felt like I owed her something. I labeled myself a terrible person for caring about this man and for having him care about me. But didn’t I deserve to be loved?
When people talk about the “other woman,” she is always painted as this plotting, menacing, deliberately enticing creature who preys on unsuspecting men in overly healthy relationships and says “to hell” with the women they are happy with. As someone who has been “that” woman, I can tell you, no the hell she isn’t. If anything, I spent more of my time feeling like hell than enjoying the love that could never really be. Before you go passing judgment on the “homewreckers” consider a few things first:
A lot of times, the home was wrecked before she got there.
AC talked about the issues in his relationship. At first, I spent my time encouraging him to fix things with his boo. Eventually, the signals got crossed, he got to have his cake and eat it too, and I spent my time wishing I could be all the things she wasn’t. In the end, we all lost. In this case, as in many others, that house would have burned down whether I lit the match or not.
People assume too much.
Five years ago, if you would have told me that my deepest love to date would have been with a man I could never call mine, I would not have believed you. Why? Because I thought I was above falling in love that way. And yes, many women manage to skirt this type of situation, but that doesn’t give any of us the right to turn up our noses at someone who didn’t. You don’t know what brought them together. You don’t know how or why they connected.
I’m not saying that cheating is okay. I’m not saying that falling in love with someone else’s boo is ideal. However, ish happens. Think about your last (or current) love. Did you fall in love on purpose? Did you plan for the chemistry to develop the way it did? Did you plan for it to begin or end the way it did?
I know there are some women who, like snakes in the grass, are looking to do dirt. However, “the other woman” is not always of that variety. When I think about my time with AC, if you can even call it that, I often ask myself if I would do it again. I always come back to “Probably not.” (I’m also not traveling down that road again though.) Yes, it was wrong for many reasons, but I gained so much. I learned so many things about myself, what love can be, and how unpredictable life is. I could post entries for days about that phase of my life. But for time, privacy, and space purposes I will keep writing about the woman I have become since.