L, emailed confession

Helena,

I am in love and having an affair with a married man.

I was in a semi-abusive marriage for 17 years. My husband was hot and cold, up and down, horrid and wonderful. He started having affairs within a year of us meeting. I accepted it, because to me, the hot and cold was passionate, and I honestly believed that no one would ever want to be faithful to me. 

He was eventually diagnosed with bipolar, and continued to have affairs - as his illness plunged us into financial ruin with his lack of work, drug use, and out-of-control spending, things got worse. He would have affairs with anyone or anything. Women, men, people of any age, level of attractiveness, fat, skinny....there was no rhyme or reason. I took every deception to heart. Each affair was further proof that I was not enough. Not supportive enough. Not pretty enough. Smart enough. Engaging enough. Skinny enough. Sexy enough.

I don't know what my tipping point was - one day, I was sneaking a look at his phone and saw that he was sexting and exchanging naked photos with yet another woman. And.....nothing. I just didn't care anymore.

What I did next, though, was baffling.

At this point, I had not had sex in about 5 years. With the help of a friend, I placed an ad on Ashley Madison. I just wanted to see if I actually could have sex. It had been so long - had I forgotten how? Was my husband right - maybe I was undesirable to all men?

I started kissing frogs. I had met about 6-7 men at this point - had an initial meet and greet, made out with them in a car parked in the corner of a lot with crushed Burger King cups and other flotsam floating across the cracked asphalt. It was exhilarating. It was also kinda yucky. Until I met B [initial changed to protect anonymity]. 

B was married, of course - he was [more than 10 years] years younger than I, with three kids, aged 6 to 6 months. Raised in a very conservative religious family, he was a virgin when he married at 24. Very soon thereafter, he started to have intermittent affairs. From the beginning, he said, his wife was just not that interested in sex, and, according to him, it just wasn't a good match physically. Although she's a pretty girl, he had a difficult time wanting to have sex with her. It became more pronounced after kids, of course. Story as old as the hills. He loved her, but was not in love. 

After being cheated on and lied to for almost two decades, one would think that I would have had an ethical problem doing to someone else what was done to me - and I did at first. The first six months was a roller coaster.

The first time we met, B promised me that he'd never fall in love with me and warned me to not fall in love with him.

That was almost two years ago.

As best we can, we've cobbled a life together. He hired me to work for his company, so we have shared goals. He's the most supportive, encouraging human I've ever had in my life, we are deeply and passionately in love, and although we don't always agree on work issues, we always work together. 

I have exceptionally dark times. I'll never have an open life with this man. I'm lonely a lot. He's as helpful as he can be, but the bottom line is that I lack a life partner. We both lead double lives - me having to explain why I'm not interested in dating to everyone who wants me to get back in the game after finally having the strength to leave my husband; and him pretending to the world that his home life is perfect. I'm the lone single woman at the few functions I still go to, and women with whom I used to be cordial now look at me askew, as if I'm prowling their self-important, overweight, balding husbands. 

And I do struggle daily with the obvious ethical issues. I'm doing something that would cause B's sweet wife an immense amount of pain. Armed with the knowledge of who her husband really is - someone who loves her but who was never in love with her, someone who has cheated not once but at least four times, someone who is building a life with another woman - I wonder if it's worse for her to know or to continue living in the dark. I would never do anything such as get in touch with her, though I troll her regularly and stare at the family photos she posts, wishing it was I holding the hand of my lover's children. Wishing I could just step into her place.

Our lives become more entangled every day and I don't know what the future holds. I'm scared to live the rest of my life basically alone, and more scared to live the rest of my life without the man who is the most powerful love of my life.