Open Letter to My Wife's Lovers

(This is not a happy piece. I am in fact very depressed today, but it felt good to write this)

"Pat" is a pseudonym I am using for my wife.

Bruce, Gabriel, Son, Frank, Stephan and possibly others:

I am writing you as part of my attempt to heal from the pain of the end of Pat's and my marriage. The point of this letter is merely to inform you of the damage and pain your actions had and will continue to have on Pat, me and our children as long as we live.

You all have children, you are all married or have been. Please think about your own wives and children as you read this and imagine what it would feel like if this had happened to you, your little kids. Think about this as you kiss your wife or make love to her, think of this as you hug your children.

Try to imagine what it is like to have to reinterpret 18 years of memories, those of nearly my entire adulthood. In part because of you, my children will grow up without a normal family. My life, as I knew it, is not only over, but never existed. I was living in a lie you helped perpetuate, a fantasy existing only in my mind.

Pat's violation of the trust I deliberately extended to her is of course the main problem. I knew she had "crushes" on you, but took her lies at face value when she assured me there was nothing going on. I was happy to give her the freedom to "flirt" with you and feel beautiful and wanted. The main guilt is hers.

You are nonetheless complicit in her deception and also responsible for the end of our marriage. You enabled Pat's bad choices and encouraged her to do things which destroyed her life along with her children's.

You helped destroy any trust which might ever exist between us, Pat and you tainted the happy memories of my youth, exposed them for the screenplays they were. You knew when you were dating her that she was married, most of you had at least met me. Son, you knew my children well. Many of you shook my hand, smiled at me and said it was nice to meet me, and then proceeded to sleep with Pat. Despite knowing me you chose to sleep with my wife, in later years the mother of my children. You understood the risk you were putting her at, in case I found out, but you didn't care enough about her or me or my children to refrain from doing so. One of you gave her genital herpes, since you didn't even care enough about her to use a condom all the time.

Collectively, you took from me something that did not belong to you. You stole my wife's time, libido, affection, passion and energy. You introduced The Big Lie into our marriage which set up a barrier to emotional intimacy between us. You helped establish a pattern of behavior in Pat where she went looking outside our marriage every time there was a problem or she was unhappy. When Pat began sleeping with you, she largely stopped having sex with me, actively denying it to me for months at a time. You were more fun, more exciting. She never had to balance a checkbook, pay the mortgage or raise children with you. I could not compete. She never had any real sexual interest in me after that.

You went on vacations with her, had secret romantic getaways with her, went out to eat with her, had nice relaxing times, afternoon naps with her. All this as I watched the kids and dogs so she could date you without having to deal with the trouble of domestic life. I helped pay for airfare so she could see you.

You could say "well if it hadn't been us, it would have been others". You would be right right, but it was you.


Bruce: You cost our marriage the most. You were the first, you were with her the longest, at a very critical stage on our marriage, 4 years into it. All that time she spent with you she was not with me. You enabled her first to set up a life-time habit of lying, deceit and betrayal. You took the most passion, time, and energy from our marriage. Pat was desperately in love with you and spent two years vainly pursuing your affection. Her first "kinky" sex was with you. You probably gave her herpes. You are the reason I recently had to reinterpret one of my most cherished memories: A rare moment of physical passion while on spring break in Florida. It is no longer a brief reconnection between us, made possibly by a respite in the living hell my life was, it was because you weren't available and I guess she needed to have sex with someone. I miss my old memory, I hate you for playing a part in stealing that from me. You were young, but that does not excuse your selfishness. It cost Pat, me and my kids tremendously.

Gabriel: You are perhaps the most culpable. You were an adult when you slept with Pat in grad school and again recently. You are the reason I found out about Pat's cheating: she checked her email on my computer and left it up. At the top was an email from you with the subject line "I've got tickets!!!!". You have been divorced before, you knew exactly the pain you were putting Pat and our family at risk for. You knew better. You nevertheless chose to meet her in Spain, then when you were done satisfying your curiosity, told her you weren't interested in any kind of a relationship with her. Your use of Pat cost us our marriage and all of us our happiness. My favorite picture used to be from 1994(?) of Pat returning from a conference in Florida. I had met her at the airport with flowers. She was holding those flowers and petting our little dog, smiling, happy to be home. In actuality, she was happy because she was madly in love with you, and had just spent several days hanging out and having sex with you in a fun, relaxed environment. I miss that old memory too. That was supposed to be me having fun and relaxing with my wife, not you.

Son: I don't know exactly what to say to you. You knew my kids well, they trusted you. Yet, you began an affair with a woman in Vietnam to adopt a child. Have you no sense of decency? You pulled yourself out of Pat to answer the door when Tina knocked on your room door and stood there with your erect penis exposed as you spoke to my 11 year-old girl. You were perhaps too high and drunk to know what you were doing and this may have thus been unintentional, but you did it nonetheless. The first image Tina will ever have of a man's erect penis will be yours, not her boyfriend's or husband's. She had to listen to you and Pat fucking in the room next door for a long time, both before and after you exposed yourself to her. That is how she found out her mother was cheating on her dad. She held that secret for over 6 months, racked by misplaced guilt and shame at what she *thought* was going on, but didn't want to believe, much less say. She said she thought it was her fault, somehow. I hate you for damaging my child. Think about someone doing that to your child as you hold your baby. You now act as though nothing happened. What are you going to do when your wife finds out? Do you think she will understand what you did with Pat and to Christina? Do you know what it is like to have to try to defend your cheating wife from an 11 year-old girl's accusation of being "a whore"? Since last summer Tina never wants to return to Vietnam. How does one do what you did? What kind of person is even capable of thinking of doing something like that? I am at a loss for words to express the anger I feel for what you did to my girl.

All actions, even those borne of a desire for happiness are not equally moral. Taking something from someone (my wife's time, libido, passion) or exposing them to a risk (STDs, divorce) to make yourself happy is a profoundly immoral act. I don't know what religious or morals beliefs you claim to have, but there is no moral code I can imagine which makes it ok to steal, cheat, lie, and hurt. You have dishonored yourselves and hurt at least one person you perhaps claimed to care for at some time, or maybe you didn't. Perhaps you are all just users of people. I don't know you well enough to assess that.

You will now need to live with the consequences of your actions, as do we all. Perhaps you don't care. You will never meet me (again), never see my kids (again), perhaps not even Pat. You can live the rest of your lives and forget what impact your choices had on our lives. I hope you are unable to do so.

I understand your culpability because I too had an affair with a married woman: a sexual encounter with someone I was very much in love with. I understand how it happens. I also understand how guilty we "other men" are. I knew precisely what I was doing and the risk I was exposing my lover to. I knew I was taking something not mine, that I was acting selfishly to fulfill some perceived need I spent quite a while justifying (she really wasn't happy, her husband was not meeting her needs). I had a right to be happy, and if it meant ruining someone's marriage to be happy, hey that's life. I deserved happiness. I was lucky, as was my lover, because we weren't found out. You were not.

I'm guilty as hell.

So are you.