Patrick and I began our relationship with what almost everyone would class as an affair. We’re not proud of it. We don’t condone it, and you’ll never find us recommending it. We can say things like, “we didn’t mean too”, and “we didn’t realise it was happening until it was too late”, and though those sentiments feel true for us, and we can explain our situation, and how it happened, they don’t take away the hurt we caused our ex-spouses, or the difficulty that comes with ending a marriage that has children involved. Cheating is never okay. We both consider it a deal breaker, whichever side of it you’re on. In short, don’t do it. EVER.
In a lot of ways. We got lucky.
Affairs don’t often end in relationships. The ones that do, break down pretty quickly, drowning in trust issues and damaging insecurities. There’s the classic notion of, “if they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you.” The ones that get past all that and marry, have a higher divorce rate than first marriages. Affairs don’t typically end well. At all. We can’t quite pinpoint when our emotional affair started, because it took a long, long time for anything physical and concrete to happen, but it was around 6 years ago. And we’re still here, madly in love, raising our kids, with a baby of our own, planning and dreaming about our life, and in a more stable relationship than a lot of couples we know. We are the rarity.
We are the friends who fell in love, who risked everything, who left our marriages and got so damn lucky that it worked out. It’s been hard. Really. Hard. In the first year, it was almost “this isn’t worth it hard”, but for a pair of adulterers, we were ridiculously committed to making it work. We worked hard …at everything… but also. We were lucky. We were lucky that it was with each other. We were lucky that we had a tight friendship foundation to start. We were so lucky that our intuition about each other had been right. We took a massive leap of faith, and we worked. When everyone said, and a few wished, we wouldn’t. We did. We are the rarity.
Painting The House Pink 