Dear Bel,
My problem is one that’s so common and happens to many people every day – a truly passionate and meaningful love affair. I’ve been married to Joe for over 25 years. We have three children, two teenagers, one under ten. Joe is a good man with a respectable job. He pays the mortgage and utilities. I work too (same line of employment) and am a doting mother and home-provider.
But the marriage broke down a long time ago. We hardly ever have relations, and live more like flatmates than husband and wife. There’s structure and stability and the children are content – always my priority.
Over a year ago, I met somebody I thought could be met only in dreams or novels. His name is David and he turned my world upside down. He is everything Joe isn’t. He talks to me, buys me beautiful items, rings me daily and makes me laugh. He is also a very good lover.
The sex is phenomenal and it has made me more alive and happy than I’ve ever been. I cannot go through a day without contact with David.
I wasn’t totally honest with him in the beginning. Due to the nature of my work and some complexities around it, I told him I was divorced.
I hated doing this but didn’t have a choice at the time. Lies always grow – but recently I at last confessed the truth. Obviously, it wounded David, because he wanted to marry me. Now, even knowing the truth, he still wants to.
If anything, this complex situation certainly tested the strength of his love. What’s more, it has made our love for each other more powerful and fierce and I am no longer frightened of him leaving because of it.
But David did observe some behaviour patterns of mine which he found suspicious and hurtful. He says it makes him feel like ‘a dirty little secret’.
As for Joe, I haven’t told him about David fully, and he believes he is a friend, but I am sure he has some suspicion.
There’s structure and stability and the children are content – always my priority. But over a year ago, I met somebody I thought could be met only in dreams or novels
Every time I see David (one night a week I can stay over at his), I tell Joe I am going to a certain health centre and spa. He believes me but I feel bad.
Meanwhile, I tell David I am living two lives and can’t help that. So we just go on. But it is so exhausting sometimes and makes me yearn to be free and answer to no one. How do you manoeuvre in this tricky situation?
There is a song called Torn Between Two Lovers which I like listening to – as it is about me. David is content to go on like this as long as he has me in his life, but nothing lasts for ever. Can we go on like this? Can it work?
Amy
Bel replies: How many people reading this are in the middle of an affair? How many will identify with this heart torn in two? And how many others, probably victims wronged by an affair, will condemn what you are doing?
Whatever the responses, it’s clear you are in an agonising position that could certainly go on much longer – but which will inevitably end in tears. Whose tears? Probably yours, if not everyone’s, at some stage during the unravelling of this mess.
I’m sure you must think I am being uncharacteristically negative, but I promise I’m realistic rather than judgmental. I have been in a very similar situation to the one you describe – and can remember the euphoria, doubt, stress, fear, longing, pain and guilt of decades ago as if it were yesterday. Even the memory is exhausting, as well as full of regret.
As you point out, this problem is very far from unique. Illicit love has caused ecstasy, suffering and death for centuries, and inspired great art, too. Your mention of the song prompted me to look it up.
Torn Between Two Lovers (performed by Mary MacGregor in 1976) is addressed by the sinner to her innocent partner: ‘There’s been another man that I’ve needed and I’ve loved/But that doesn’t mean I’ve loved you less… There’s just this empty place in me that only he can fill.’
You’ll remember, though, that the singer begins her confession by telling her partner, ‘I love you.’ However, you seem to imply you no longer love the father of your children. Or is it that you love him in a prosaic way? I’ll return to that point shortly.
Meanwhile, David might identify with Billy Paul singing Me And Mrs Jones (1972) about an affair with a married woman, when they ‘both know that it’s wrong’ but can’t stop because the passion is ‘too strong’. Similarly, he’d also understand the yearning in Clarence Carter’s Slip Away (1968).
So many songs – representing how much passion and pain? One of my all-time favourites is At The Dark End Of The Street (James Carr, 1966) which provides a stark reminder of the lovers’ fear of being found out, as well as the moral burden of the affair: ‘We have to pay for the love we stole.’
The sense of wrong-doing is pervasive – the clandestine nature of ‘undercover passion’ (Stevie Wonder’s Part-time Lover, 1985) leading to the guilt in Unfaithful by Rihanna and the self-disgust in Taylor Swift’s Illicit Affairs: ‘What started in beautiful rooms/Ends with meetings in parking lots.’ Yes, it’s a very old story – and one that can have many chapters, as some women have discovered when they have an affair with a married man who promises to leave his wife one day.
You know quite well that I can’t advise you. On the one hand you have your responsibility to the ‘good man’ who trusts you and the children you share. It doesn’t sound as if you think leaving them is an option, no matter how in love with David you are.
Incidentally, this is where I do express a judgment, because I have no doubt that breaking up a marriage causes some (or much) damage to the children. A seven year old with a stressed mother may sense more than you realise. And the children come in a ‘bundle’ with their father, don’t they? There’s no escaping that.
If you did decide to follow your heart and leave Joe, would David want to take on your children? And would Joe allow that? Yes, tears are inevitable.
Joe clearly knows something is wrong. Meanwhile, David says he will have you on your terms, but how long will it be before he resents being the ‘dirty little secret’ and finds somebody else? Then you will be heartbroken.
Yes, this affair could ‘work’ for quite a while. But I do know at what cost – and can only ask you to face up to the fact that the ‘manoeuvring’ is hell.
My family is furious about a funeral date
Dear Bel,
I’d like your opinion on this subject, which is bothering me a lot.
My mum passed away recently. The next day my sister-in-law gave me the dates when her two children – my niece and nephew and my mother’s grandchildren – are on holiday. But now the date for the funeral coincides with the nephew’s holiday.
I accepted the date because I didn’t want my mum lying in a mortuary longer than necessary. Now I am getting abuse from my sister-in-law telling me that I am an ‘effing bitch’.
Please give me your opinion.
Sara
Bel replies: My opinion follows soon – but in the meantime I have to ask: Why, oh why, do you people do these things to each other?
Sometimes (full disclosure… often) I read through problem letters with feelings of despair that teeter on the edge of anger.
I’m so frequently confronted by an issue within a family which could cause horrible conflict for years and years – and yet which seems to have been entirely avoidable. That is – if people had been really thoughtful.
I am so sorry to read that you have lost your mother so recently and understand that at such a sad time making arrangements for a funeral can be a terrible
burden. That could be the reason for making mistakes and hurting feelings. Yet to be generous and find a ‘reason’ is not always to make excuses.
When your sister-in-law speedily gave you the dates when her children – your brother’s children – had booked their holidays, she did so knowing how important it is for them to be at their grandmother’s funeral.
She was being efficient and fully expected you to understand why. After all, it would mean a lot to your brother to have his family there at his mother’s funeral. It is the right and proper thing.
Yet I fear you failed to understand that and I cannot understand why.
You say you ‘accepted’ the date you were offered, even though we do have choice in these matters, and you knew it would mean excluding your nephew.
Funerals are rituals that allow the living to say goodbye to the dead. I’m sorry, but your late mother would have no sense whatsoever that she was ‘lying in a mortuary’ while your brother would certainly have the sense that his son was deliberately being excluded from paying respects to his grandmother and finding some sort of closure that she had gone.
That process is an essential part of maturity.
Your sister-in-law has no right to abuse you – but is there any way you can revisit the date and allow your mother to rest in peace without a family row that spoils her memory?
And finally…
I threw out Dad’s old cap, but all the love remains
Throwing away my father’s old cap caused a pang. Yet it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be.
The truth is perhaps more painful. I had forgotten I’d clung to it – which makes me reflect that sentimentality can be meaningless.
Dad died in January 2021 and it was I who packed up all his good clothes to give to the charity shop for our local hospice, Dorothy House. It had to be done.
But the well-worn, corduroy flat cap was not fit to donate, so I thought I’d take care of it as a memento.
Then we moved my mother to our place, dismantled and sold their home, and took care of her until her death just over a year after Dad’s.
His cap disappeared from sight and memory until last week when I was deciding which sun hat to take on holiday and found something at the back of the shelf.
‘What’s this greasy old thing,’ I thought? Then, I stopped short as I cradled it in my hand. Oh, Dad. I put it on my chest of drawers, moved it, then realised there’s nowhere for it now.
I treasure my photographs, and other things of his, but hardly need an old cap to remember the father who was always so good to me.
So it has gone – while all the love remains.
I won’t be here next Saturday. We are having a week away with my daughter and her family – leaving the house and dogs in the care of friends. I hope to be able to relax.
Over the past eight weeks, an unbelievably sad and complex issue concerning somebody I love has consumed me, body and soul. And that, my friends (I add sadly) is why I’m ‘qualified’ to write for you.
