My Husband’s Mistress Won Me Over
I went chasing the rabbit and unmistakably fell into the hole.
Giselleflissak | Canva I was rushing up the street completely on autopilot not paying attention to the path I took. I did not hear the world around me. My heart was pumping in my throat, increasing the pressure in my head, and blocking my hearing with throbbing. A combination of intense fear and anger overwhelmed me, shutting down my senses and my reason. I should have drawn a few deep breaths, and connected to my heart, but the fear won. I was propelled in the direction of her house, determined to confront her. Now.
My husband, who had left for a walk about an hour before, was approaching me from the opposite side of the street looking pensive and content. He adopted this new habit of going out for a walk almost every evening since he had told me that he was not happy with me anymore.
“I put the kids to bed,” I said, passing him by. “I have some business to take care of.”
He nodded; a bit perplexed, refraining from asking questions, he continued towards our home. I was wondering if he could see my fury but judging from his lack of interest in my sudden departure from home, the internal turmoil did not show on my face.
I reached her house in record time, and with my heart pounding out of my chest, I rang the doorbell. She opened the door. Maria was a beautiful Dane with clear blue eyes, her long dark hair framing her milky white angelic face. Our children went to the same school.
Seeing her made me realize that the object of my fury was a human being. The internal hurricane went mute and I could hear again.
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“Hey, how are you, come in,” she invited, like it was the most common thing to see me at her doorstep, although I had never stood there before.
I refused politely, forcing a smile: “Hi, I need to talk to you, could you please come out?”
Strangely, even though we did not know each other well, entertaining a cordial hello-how-are-you school-parents’ relationship, I did not need to insist. She put on her sneakers and stepped out. We started walking.
“Are you seeing my husband?” a bomb dropped out of my mouth. No small talk. I did not think — my ego was in charge.
A few seconds passed and no explosion. She did not seem surprised or offended. She was calm: “No, I am not seeing your husband,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I insisted, “Have you talked to him today?”
“No,” she repeated, “I have not. I am not seeing your husband.”
“No, I haven’t…” her reply echoed in my head and her composed attitude completely took me aback.
I knew what I saw just before leaving the house. I went over it again in my mind. I caught a glimpse of a messenger conversation happening a few hours ago that was still open on my husband’s laptop: “Call me,” he wrote, “I miss you. I will come by your house and if you can sneak out, I have something for you.”
It was addressed to her and it sounded far too intimate for two people who were on a respectful school-parent relation basis — unless he knew more than one Maria in this place which we had recently moved to.
Sometimes we see what we want to see, but for what perverse reason would my mind invent a story like this? The words I saw on the laptop triggered the alarm in me created long ago by a painful experience. An old wound stung open and my heart rate went through the roof. Our past sometimes influences our reactions in the most insidious ways.
“Could have I imagined these words? But I saw them clearly on his screen!” I was shouting to myself silently.
And there she was, walking by my side, denying gently, “No, I have not” with such calm, confidence, and empathy.
I was so confused. Was I paranoid? If she was lying, she was doing it so well, as if she had been practicing the art for a long time. I felt strangely drawn to her wanting to understand whatever was going on, so we kept strolling for a while.
The night fell slowly, crisp and clear. The streets were empty like they usually were after dark in our neighborhood. The trees and all kinds of bushes and garden fences started blooming, releasing their subtle scents into the night, making our walk fragrant and comforting. The familiar choir of birds that you could hear at dusk in the late spring, when the evenings started getting longer, was performing too, backing up our conversation with a soft and almost happy ambiance music.
She told me how she loved her husband and how he had been neglecting her in the past few months. She had doubts about him cheating on her because he would go out not saying where he went and would not come back for hours. That sounded too familiar. She felt lonely and lost. Her husband was her first and only great love. They were together forever, since high school. She came from a dysfunctional family, and he was the one who saved her, she confided in me.
“I don’t even like your husband,” she said, “I mean, he's not my type at all.”
“What?! This is BS,” I thought. Marc was handsome, and I knew women liked him. Maria’s husband came nowhere near mine. But there was no accounting for taste.
She was in love with her husband, she repeated, looking at me with her teary blue eyes, the choir supporting her from above.
Drained from my intense emotional experience and perplexed by what I had seen on my husband’s laptop, or maybe just imagined, I forgot about my pain and listened, completely absorbed in hers. Our potentially cheating husbands brought us close together that evening. We parted ways hugging and promising to be there for each other.
“What weird hole in the ground did I fall into tonight?” I was thinking to myself, letting my feet take me back home.
I noticed that the bird choir stopped, and it sobered me up. Could she be this manipulative, shamelessly lying woman with such a perfectly innocent demeanor? Was she gaslighting me? I decided to trust her. It was a far less painful option. She seemed so genuine. I couldn’t be cheated on twice on the same day.
When I arrived home, the door of the guest bedroom that my husband had been occupying for the past month was closed. There was a sliver of light at the bottom indicating that he was in and not sleeping. Hesitating a second in front of it, I took the stairs down, brushed my teeth, and curled under the cover on my side of our big empty bed. The house was perfectly still, and I fell asleep dazed and confused.
Sleeping on it did not bring the proverbial clarity the morning after. It took weeks to understand. A beautiful, neglected woman happened to fall for my husband’s advances on his way out of our marriage. So, yes, she was lying to me.
Weeks later, I confronted her about that too. About lying to me, I mean. I was hurt and furious, even called her names… And then apologized. It was myself I was angry with really. In the meantime, however, in between the two confrontations, we were friends. And I believe our friendship was sincere, a weird kind of female solidarity.
Although it would have been so much easier to hate and blame her, Maria was not the cause of my divorce.
My briefly intense relationship with my husband’s exit mistress helped me reconnect to my heart and my needs. It made me examine all the circumstances that led to my divorce only to realise that the reasons were within me. And within him. Nobody else.
Radical responsibility for my half of our story and how I show up in the world was a painful but profoundly healing path to take. As a result, I am more whole now than I have ever been.
Aleksandra M. Killy is a brand strategy and communications expert, passionate about our relationships with ourselves and with others. She is a yoga and meditation practitioner, as well as a trained non-violent communications facilitator.