I Had An Affair With My Husband’s Best Friend
From reading the title, most of you have already formed a judgment about me. And that’s fine. I’m not here to condone cheating by any means. In life, we tend to look for clear-cut “good guys” and “bad guys.” But sometimes, in situations like these, where there appears to be a clear-cut “good guy” and “bad guy,” there isn’t. At least not until you hear the whole story. So I ask you to stay open-minded.
The story of my affair actually started ten years prior to it, when I graduated high school and began dating my would-be husband. My boyfriend had two good friends from his high school days with whom he spent most of his leisure time. When we began dating, I also joined the picture. I guess most men like to keep their dating life and guy life separate but not my naive boyfriend. I began to hang out with the three of them palling around to stores or playing D&D or just hanging out. It wasn’t long before the problem of combining dating life with guy life became apparent. Both of my boyfriend’s friends found me attractive and because I always felt like an ugly duckling, their flirting was addictive.
I never dated in high school and had no offers. I was shy and backward and very, very quiet. Nobody ever got to know me. My husband-to-be was my first boyfriend and that was a big mistake as well. We were told we needed to date around but that only upset us. Did this mean all first relationships were doomed? What if you ended up dating your soul mate first? You see, I loved my husband-to-be then. I was also his first and he was already nearing finishing his undergraduate degree when we met. We had both had that feeling we were unlovable and would never find a somebody. When we began dating it was magical, as new relationships always are. I may have innocently flirted with his friends, but I only had eyes for him. At least, in the beginning, I did.
But it wasn’t long before we were fighting because I had become unable to part with him in the evenings. The pain of separation was so intense that I began to self-harm. I had never felt unconditional love before, so I became woefully attached. My mother was a control freak with her own set of issues and my father was not the loving type.
When I fell in love it rocked my world. I felt happy, happier than I had ever felt in my entire life. Nothing could compare. Not past Christmas mornings or birthdays or proudly coming home on the bus with a straight-A report card. It was like a person who had never before tasted anything sweeter than a strawberry tasting straight sugar for the first time.
I was immediately hooked. I wanted to be with him all the time and tell him everything about myself and learn everything about him. That, too, was a mistake. Once you’ve told each other everything there is no more mystery between you. You sit at restaurants with nothing to talk about until your food arrives.
We made so many mistakes in our relationship it began to look like a post with nails sticking out of it in all directions. Even if we pulled the nails out, there were still the holes left. The post was no longer pure, untouched. And most of those nails were my fault for wanting to love my boyfriend in the only way I knew how. I had been the dog who patiently waits for its owner’s return. But everyone told me that wasn’t love. It was infatuation and I became obsessed with finding and knowing real love, true love.
It frustrates me that there aren’t more words for the term “love.” Love can mean SO many things. Brotherly love, parental love, romantic love, true love. But what is true love? Could it be a love that can only exist between two people so inexplicably meant for each other that it never gets nails in its post? That’s what I believed.
But my “love” at that time was so toxic that I had to go through the process of unloving my boyfriend. And lo and behold, I became successful. Instead of crying my eyes out when he had to leave me, I was ready and willing to leave him when the time came because I had severed the bond I had with him. I had forced myself to no longer care as much about being with him. But leaving him for good was out of the question. I still needed him. It would still be too painful. I just no longer loved him. He thought I had matured but I had only taken my neurosis to the other extreme.
My husband’s best friend — we’ll call him R — suffered from depression and constant rejection from women. When he first met me, he thought I was attractive, but felt nothing more. It wasn’t until over a year later, the evening before R left for an Air Force base stationed over 3,000 miles away, that he fell in love with me. We were standing around my boyfriend’s car in R’s parents’ driveway as the sun was setting. It was an awkward moment, since my boyfriend and R didn’t know what to say or when they’d see each other again, and it lingered. I felt the pain in both their hearts.
I was staring at the hood of my boyfriend’s car when I looked up briefly and caught R’s eye. It was a split second and I turned away, embarrassed. Something about it felt surreal, as if something invisible had passed between us. As if we had spoken more to each other in that millisecond than we had for the past fifteen months. But I brushed it off and thought no more about it. But for R it was the half-second that took him from, “Yeah, she’s attractive and I’m a little jealous,” to “Oh, my God! This is the woman of my dreams and I can’t live with myself now!”
He saw the love in my eyes, the caring and sadness I felt for both him and my boyfriend. He had never seen anything like it before, not in any of the other girls’ eyes with whom he tried so desperately to seek love. Not in his current would-be girlfriend’s eyes. She was, in fact, the very reason he was leaving. To get away from her uncaring eyes.
But the night before he is to leave, he finally finds love. He had found in me a Divine Soul, a Kindred Spirit, an Angel Of Mercy if you like. But I was his best friend’s girlfriend and out of reach. He tried to deal with the turmoil within, but the cold isolation of his new home did nothing for his depression.
He broke down and confessed his feelings to my boyfriend and then to me. At that time I was flattered but did not believe that it was real love. How could he love me? He hardly knew me and I hardly knew him. I knew he loved classical music and wrote poems and was somewhat depressed. But not much more than that. He did intrigue me, but when the four of us would get together, he was often quiet and we’d never had a chance to speak one on one about anything substantial to ever really get to know each other. And, at that point, I was still in love with my boyfriend. I hadn’t tried to kill my “love” yet. So the topic was swept under the rug and forgotten by all … except R.
I said R intrigued me because I knew he suffered from depression, but I didn’t know the extent of it or the depth of his soul. My own depression began around the beginning of my college career. I had chalked it up to school stress for the next five years but, when I graduated, it worsened. It made me believe I was ugly. It made me believe I was unlovable. Even if my boyfriend did say he loved me, he couldn’t really love me.
And, boy, did I test that love out. I pushed him to extremes trying to get him to hate me, to give up on me. I was trying to prove I was unlovable. Only a person who really loved me could withstand all these tests but all the tests in the world couldn’t prove it to me. We should have broken up. We did many times, but always got back together. It was always my fault. I’d get so mad that I would end things, but then feel regret and pain afterward and come crying back.
I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me — it’s a book, check it out — described me perfectly. That ostensibly simple phrase defined me so well. I was always in conflict within myself. I had no idea what was wrong with me. My emotions were all over the place. One minute I loved him with all my heart and the next I hated him with all my guts. I assumed, as any depressed person does, that I was plain evil, a waste of space, of life, worthless. I’d wish I was never born and cursed my parents for having the sex that conceived me. I wanted to die all those years. I used self-harm to cope. I was trying to lay bare on my arms the pain that was in my head. I think I was crying out for help.
In those days I self-harmed to punish myself. I self-harmed because I needed to be punished for having these “bad” emotions that were out of my control. If I was having these emotions, then it meant I was bad. I didn’t understand at the time that it is how you react to your emotions and thoughts that counts. You see, I acted on every emotion. They controlled me. It never occurred to me that I could control them.
So yes, I believed I was evil and needed to be punished, or, at least, that’s what my depression had me convinced of. But there’s more than one way to self-harm. Harming my body wasn’t enough for my depression. It wanted to harm my spirit. A year after college I was scared and at a crossroads. Should I marry my boyfriend or not? Common sense said, “No, you don’t love him,” but fear said, “Yes, because you cannot take care of yourself financially.”
The degree that took me five years to complete was in art, but I could no longer stand art. Five years of living in an art tunnel had burned me out. I could no longer do art, not that I believed I ever could anyway, and, as time passed and I didn’t, it only got harder to get back into. However, I had acquired other interests while in college. Like science.
But that would require a whole new degree and would mean living under my parents’ roof for another four to five years while I finished my degree. And that was not happening. I was not getting along with my mother. But I was in such poor financial straits at the time there would have been no other option. My depression convinced me I couldn’t take care of myself. At twenty-five, I was a failure, and I was about to follow in my mother’s footsteps.
My mother married my father as quickly as she could just to get out of her controlling parents’ house. She had a self-sustaining job as an elementary school teacher but in those days “good girls got married before leaving home.” Her father sat her down and drained her of all confidence that she even could afford to live on her own. My mother never got the chance to live on her own and she was bitter about that. It carried over into daily life. My home was always a tense one. My parents rarely showed affection for each other and I came to believe this is how you are meant to live.
My situation was a bit different but also the same. I’d had the chance to live on my own. Before my last year in college, I got an apartment and spent a year after college living with a girlfriend out of state. I worked only minimum wage paying jobs, so I wasn’t saving any money. When I moved back home, after my adventurous year of trying to “rediscover” myself, I was so broke I couldn’t even afford to split an apartment with another girlfriend.
I had to stay home and, desperate, I took a job at a local distribution center. The work was demoralizing for a college graduate. I called this year my “lost year.” And, when I got myself mixed up with an internet pyramid scheme in my frantic search for ways to make money, that only succeeded in locking me into paying $100 a month for the next three years, it was the tipping point.
My depression had me convinced I couldn’t take care of myself, so I gave up on myself. I told myself I wasn’t marrying my boyfriend, who had just finished his graduate degree and gotten a well-paying job, for financial security. I told myself that, but I knew I was lying. I told myself I wasn’t going to be happy either way so I might as well make him happy and marry him. And who else would ever want me anyway?
When R had confessed his love for me 6 years earlier, I hadn’t believed him. He had confessed too soon. But as the years passed and I had deep philosophical conversations with him — intelligent, in-depth conversations I rarely had with my boyfriend who was tired of “thinking” in his free time (he was going through the long, exhausting process of obtaining a Ph.D.) — I began to find R even more interesting than I had previously. I even came to believe I would have dated him if we had met first.
However, he was always out of the question since he was my boyfriend’s best friend. I couldn’t come between two best friends who had been best friends long before I came onto the scene. I couldn’t be that kind of girl. Even if my boyfriend/husband-to-be and I had broken up for good, he would be out of the question. Besides, he had gotten over me. He now had a girlfriend.
Shortly before our marriage, the four of us were hanging out in R’s apartment. My husband-to-be and the other friend were leaving to get food and asked me if I wanted to come along. If I had stayed, I would have had my first chance in seven years to be alone with R. The problem was I was determined in my mind that if I did ever find myself alone with R, I’d ask him for a hug because he just seemed so sad, like extra sad in the days leading up to my marriage. So here was my chance. But I blew it because I knew my husband-to-be would find out (I could never keep a secret from him) and could refuse to marry me. And I needed him to marry me. I let the fear win out. Since then, I have ceaselessly speculated what would have happened if I had chosen to stay and ask R for that hug.
Shortly after our daughter was born almost three years later my husband and I and his two high school friends were all together in a park walking the track. I decided I would reveal my secret “theory.”
I had developed a little theory after marriage that was something, maybe, to look forward to, although, of course, I knew the probability of it actually happening was nil to none. I liked R then and was a bit sad the flirting had stopped but understood also that it had to. To this day I do not know why I felt the need to say my theory out loud. I guess I only said it because I assumed it’d be laughed off and forgotten about. R had obviously moved on. He was now married and had a kid on the way, too.
My theory was this: after my husband dies — if he dies before me — and after R’s wife dies — if she dies before him — then R and I will finally be together in the nursing home.
But it wasn’t laughed off. At the park that day, we had another strange encounter that was reminiscent of the driveway scene nine years previous. R’s demeanor completely changed and he became much more talkative and attentive. He said he also had a theory and his theory was that if he would be having a boy — he wasn’t — our children would fall in love with each other, and he could live vicariously through them.
Now that right there should have told me something. But it wasn’t the theory that I found odd. It was the moment we both said the word “lesbian” at the same time that threw me for a loop. R was saying he wouldn’t mind if his daughter turned out to be … lesbian. I remember turning to him and thinking “What is this? What is happening? This is the eye thing all over again.” We had begun an email correspondence just before and, after that day, it kicked up a notch. As you can rightly assume, he confessed to me, in an email, that he was still in love with me after almost nine years. This time was different though. This time I wasn’t just flattered. I was floored.
Nine years to keep a secret this big for the sake of the other person — he believed I was much better off with his best friend — was too much for me to comprehend. The sheer amount of time floored me. Nine years. Nearly a decade. And, at that time in my life, a decade was an unfathomably long time. Time shortens as you age, and a decade now isn’t quite as long as it used to be.
I couldn’t believe I was worth all that pain and suffering … in solitude. This. This was it. This was true love if I ever saw it. I’m a completely hopeless romantic. Constantly searching for that love. That one love that transcends all others. The love that nails can’t penetrate.
I fell in love for the second time in my life. And the feeling was intoxicating. I had missed it for so long. After I had killed my love for my boyfriend, I had felt nothing. I was numb. I was empty. I felt I had to kill a part of myself in order to love him in the “correct” way. And so, living with a mind of extremes, I stopped loving altogether. I stopped caring about myself. I felt all I deserved was pain and suffering. So, my depression made sure that would happen. It locked me in a cage of my own doing, where I’d remain the rest of my life.
And I would have been complacent and willing to stay there if not for that confession. That confession released me. It released me from not wanting happiness though, not the cage. Now I wanted and felt I deserved to be happy. I was a worthwhile person. I was worth loving in secret for nine years! R’s confession not only brought back feelings of love and a feeling of wholeness again (the part of me that had died came back), it brought with it feelings of self-love. The only problem was, when I was depressed, I had made choices that would imprison me so I would never be happy again and, I had figured, I would never want to be, so what was the big deal?
I didn’t keep it from my husband for but a few days before breaking down and confessing I was developing serious feelings for his best friend. He was surprisingly cool with it at first, because we had a new baby daughter and all his concerns were focused around her, but that changed very quickly as our emotional affair progressed.
At first, R and I wanted to do the right thing. We thought of divorce, but R’s wife was Indian and threatened to take his newly born daughter away to India if he left her. And he would have let her, because the guilt was too great. And I truthfully had no desire to break up two homes with new children in them.
We tried to remain friends, friends who could “help” each other through each of our own depressions and the stresses of being a new parent. But over the next four years, it escalated until we finally broke down and made our emotional affair a physical affair. We tried though, God, did we try to keep the friendship as platonic as possible with our raging emotions and hormones. The fact that it took four years must tell you something of this.
Perhaps the fault was not in the physical acts themselves, but in continuing the emotional affair that led to them. But breaking it off was out of the question. There was no way I was going to give up the precious gift I had found. I was unable to do the obvious right thing without feeling bitter about it.
And there was the problem. How was I supposed to not feel bitter? My bitterness would have carried over to my everyday life. It would have made me a bad mom, an unlovable mom, a mom who’d make her daughter feel bad for having ever been born. Even if I never said anything, she would know. They always know. I guess I should have dealt with my bitterness. I should have looked at what I did have in life, a husband who loved me and a wonderful daughter. But I wasn’t able to. I just ... wasn’t able to at that time.
I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place. Neither choice was acceptable. If I stayed away from R, I’d be bitter. If I stayed in contact with R, my husband would be upset and we’d fight. And fight we did. There was no love in the house those first four years of my daughter’s life. There was only hate. The emotions were so high that I couldn’t even break away from the fighting when our daughter would make “stop” signs. I feel the worst about that. I couldn’t control my emotions even for her whom I claimed to love with all my heart. But I hated my husband. I hated him to a degree that I wasn’t even sure if I’d be sad if he died. I let my hate for my husband win out over my love for my daughter and that’s the real tragedy.
I was mad. Real mad. Why had the universe done this to us, to me? Why had it made us two ships passing in the night over and over again? And why now were we finally seeing what had been in front of us this whole time? Now that we were unequivocally locked tight inside the cages we had both made for ourselves — married and with very young children — were we finding out about each other’s feelings? When it was more than a high school friendship that would be destroyed, but our own children’s lives?
I know why. Fear and denial bred from our despair. We both were in denial that we liked each other despite numerous moments that should have made it clear. R had feared rejection if he said anything again. Besides, he had already said something and had been rejected and it harmed his friendship with my boyfriend for a time. And at the one moment that could have changed everything before I married, I chose to let fear win me over and missed out on finding out. Likely my asking for a hug would have made a crack in R’s defensive denial wall and he would have confessed before my marriage. I still believe there’s an alternative timeline out there where I’m living that other life.
I believed I was being punished for my weak will. I was never able to fully pull out my rotten tooth of a relationship and suffer through the pain of a breakup for a few months but R, whom I now admired, had managed to keep his secret from me for years, despite the pain it caused him, until my “theory” in the park that day broke down his resolve to die with that secret. Both of us depressed, lonely souls searching for love were like magnets. It was unavoidable and unstoppable.
Things got dark during those four years leading up to the dam breaking. My husband refers to those years as “The War.” He even came down with a severe case of OCD because of it. I almost ended up killing myself at one point. My daughter had to endure endless fighting that scarred her. We came very close to divorce.
But after the day I was knocked off my high horse and could no longer lie to my husband, admitting we had taken it to the next level — the worst day of my life — he forgave me and R. My husband is a very forgiving soul and I know many would never be able to. I know I got lucky. He knew I didn’t do it out of spite. He knew I didn’t do it to hurt him. I had just fallen in love. I wasn’t the enemy. I was just as much a victim as he was.
I believed R and I were victims of depression and circumstance. In fact, we were where we were because we had tried so hard for years to do the right thing: him keeping silent and me not wanting to break up a friendship. We were broken people. The revelation had crumbled our resolve. I maintained for years that we did the best we could with what little emotional resources we had. There were no enemies. There rarely are.
As I revisit those times by writing this I do feel more and more guilty and ashamed. I write to release the pain. I write to understand myself. I write to gain a greater sense of control over what I did. I write to figure out exactly why and how it happened.
Because I was never one to believe I’d ever have an affair. I was not that kind of person. But I did just that. I did something only a “lowlife” would do and I realized we all make mistakes. We’re all human. I look upon cheating spouses with more empathy now. I don’t know their whole story. I don’t know what led them there. And I’m hoping with my story I can do the same for someone else.
If you’ve ever made a huge mistake in your life, you may forgive yourself. You are only human. There are no enemies or “bad” guys in life. Just people doing the best they can with what they have. If you’ve never done anything bad in your life and you never do, then you may throw your stones at me, but you’re probably not human. And if you say, Well, I’ve never done anything that bad, be aware that life can sometimes throw us curveballs, put us in impossible situations. You have no idea what the future holds for you or what you’ll end up doing. I certainly didn’t.
I would have never imagined I’d have an affair and I wouldn’t have with anybody else. It wasn’t a fling. It wasn’t with some stranger to fulfill a basic carnal desire. And that’s what my husband understands and why he’s forgiven me. Cheating isn’t in my nature. It could have only ever been with his best friend. I know it makes it sound worse, but it’s not. It’s better because it took something as intense as a nine-year-long secret to make me cheat. Nothing less would have.
But now I must live with the consequences of my actions. The four of us do not hang out anymore. I did not get to see R’s little girl grow up and now he has a son, too, whom I have never met. I haven’t seen R in over a decade. If we hadn’t taken it to the next level, simply kept our hormones in check, we could have at least seen each other at least once a year. I miss those days the four of us hung out. It pains me they are forever gone and it is all my fault.
You might think: if enough years pass, can things go back to being normal? But there is no more going back to normal. The atomic bomb of our affair has decimated the land. I’m not saying I shouldn’t suffer. Suffer I have and rightly so. I had some PTSD from the day it all came crumbling down for a long time. And after more than a decade, I am finally coming out of my fog and realizing just what a shitty thing it was I did. But I was a different person then.
I’d like to think I would be stronger now. My relationship with my husband has greatly improved over the decade, and now I am finally at peace. But I can never take back those years of hurt and pain it caused him and my daughter.
I spend more time than I should, thinking of where I’d go if given the chance to go back to any one point in my life. Time has not changed that. Only to when I’d go back keeps changing. At the end of college, I would have gone back to the beginning of it. After I got pregnant I would have gone back to before I got pregnant. After R revealed his feelings, I wanted so badly to go back to that pivotal night in his apartment. Now, with a grown daughter, with whom I’ve bonded, and a more calm and peaceful marriage, I just wish I could go back in time and stop myself from saying, “I have a theory.”
