Duty before love

Yesterday I had a ten page letter from a close friend who lives a long way away in the north of England. Let’s call her Amy. Despite radically different backgrounds, education and class, we have been writing to each other for twenty-two years now, and we meet when we can. We tell each other practically everything, and we have acted as each other’s confident and shoulder to cry on for longer than I can remember.

Amy is wonderful, a kind and caring woman, hard-working and devoted to her four children whom she has raised single-handed because the four different respective fathers disappeared into the ether at the mere whiff of the phrase “child support”. Amy has had a long and passionate relationship with a beautiful, gentle guy of her own age, called Charles. He is her best friend. They grew up together, were childhood sweethearts and went their separate ways after finishing school, as kids often do. Twenty years later, she bumped into him, and the friendship re-started. It quickly developed into something else…lust became passion which became love, and most important of all, never forget that overwhelming friendship which bound them together so many years ago when they were children. They have been seeing each other for nearly eight years now and love each other very much.

Of course, the problem is that Charles is married. He has two kids and is a devoted family man. He doesn’t love his wife (so he tells Amy), their marriage is dead, in name only, for the sake of the children. Amy has put up with this for the last eight years, suffered through it, tolerated the wife’s jealous rages (and accompanying death threats), the pain, the ripping apart of the soul that comes with a love triangle like this. She is in perpetual emotional agony, craving with every fibre of her being to be with Charles. She believes his promises that he’s going to leave his wife, that he has only stayed with her for the children’s sake, that his snatched and secret nights with Amy are the only time he loves, the only time he feels alive. It is Amy he loves, he promises her. They will be together soon. She just has to wait that little bit longer.

I have had fortnightly letters detailing her love and trust for Charles for many years. His kids are now grown up, and have left home. But still he does not leave. He is still promising to be with Amy, making up different excuses each time (the latest is because his wife would take all his money….well, duh! That’s what divorce involves luvvie!) But Amy’s love is blind, and total. There is only Charles. He loves her and worries about her. They email and text all the time, and have snatched moments when they can. Eight years later, she is still waiting for him, and nothing has changed.

Now you’re going to say : why don’t you tell her to move on? Start again with another guy? Amy has no shortage of male admirers after all. Well, God knows I have tried to tell her, more times than you’ve had hot dinners, that he’s never going to leave his wife. She never believes me. She just thinks I am plain wrong, no matter what I say.

Any idiot can see Charles is never going to leave the wife. Why the hell should he? He has it all, a woman at home to look after him and give him a comfortable life, plus the illicit forbidden passion on the side, the devoted mistress (which is what we call the “other woman” in the UK) who can give him the emotional thrill that is missing in his daily boring grind. He loves them both of course, because it’s perfectly possible to love more than one other person. And I’m sure he feels guilty enough about Amy, he doesn’t like to see her suffer. He’s a decent and caring guy, and a good person. But he is torn between duty to his wife of twenty years, and desire for the new life with his mistress. Should he be true to himself and his desires, and be with Amy? After all, doesn’t he have a right to be happy? Why the hell shouldn’t he leave his wife? Be a fool for love? But what about duty? He is consumed by guilt, desire, and in the end he cannot choose, so he does nothing, and remains miserable.

This story is as old as the hills. Statistically, the hard fact is that in the UK 95% of partners never leave their husband or wife if they have an affair. Believe me, I speak from experience, although this was a long time ago now.

The problem is, which I discovered (and the reason I refuse to have affairs nowadays, other than the fact that I’m devoted to Rich!) is that there may be a real moral issue here. What about the innocent wife who has remained devoted and loving to him for so long, and who knowingly suffers the humiliation and torture of knowing her husband has a sexual relationship with another woman? Presumably the guy still at least likes and respects his wife, and has had many years of companionship and love with her, so what right does the “other woman” have to break that up and cause such emotional pain? In my experience (considerable, unfortunately), the husband often re-writes the history of the marriage in his own mind, ruthlessly excising happiness and companionship from memory, in order to rationalise the hurt he wishes to inflict.

Another point, and I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble here, is that nobody has any “divine right” to happiness, no matter what the new-agey self-help books say. If more people realised that, and if everyone stopped thinking of “me-first”, then our society might be a nicer place in which to live. In this particular scenario, the husband and mistress are just being selfish, and causing emotional wreckage and carnage that will mentally scar all parties for life.

Speaking from the experience of being “the other woman”, I learned that defining myself through selfish sexual desire actually resulted in such all-consuming guilt, that it threatened to destroy the person I always believed myself to be. So I got out, even though it was painful. I changed, became “true to myself” and true to what I knew was right. And as a result, I respected myself a hell of a lot more, and I would like to believe I became a better person.

It’s a pity I can’t communicate that to Amy.



Warm fuzzy on-camera chemistry courtesy of Syd and A.J.