Tinder and Blind

We often hear about the women or men in relationships being cheated on, but what if you’re the other woman? How do you deal with knowing you’re embarking upon a one sided affair? Will you always be second best? Or what if you don’t know you’re seeing someone who’s taken?

At drinks last night after a particularly long day, a friend and I had a few stories about ‘the other women’ between us, not least because we’ve both been there. Two hours and the same amount of double gin and soda’s later as we left she said I should write a post on this very subject. All the anecdotes below don’t contain real names because I don’t fancy getting sued.

Story one was about a girl called ‘Amber’ who had been dating a guy for a couple of months. She had slept with him and he was a bit shady in general, so after a bit of standard social media stalking, she found out he had a wife. Not only was he married, but the wedding was two months earlier, meaning he had only been married for a month when he slept with her.

Now, morally, my inclination would be to tell the wife, to save her from a potential lifetime of cheating. Girl power and all that. Then we discussed the repercussions of telling her.

This would destroy her world, everything she’d built up to since she met the man of her dreams, shattered in one fell swoop. And who’s to say the wife would even believe Amber? At the end of the day, women believe what they want to believe, even ignoring friends and family.

We wear rose tinted glasses when we’re in love or we’re blinded by it, and without hard evidence we choose to believe the person (we think) we know, and of course love. It’s only hindsight that makes us realise what idiots we’ve put up with.

If this bride were a friend of hers then she would obviously have known she was married to the guy, but in my opinion that’s even more of a reason to tell her. Or just use common sense and don’t get with your friends man, like duh.

We agreed that in this situation, Amber was best to leave well alone and cut contact from the rat. The wife would find out eventually if he made this a habit, rather than come across as the ‘psycho other woman’ who ruined an early marriage.

Another double gin and soda ordered and we discussed another story we knew of and asked ourselves some questions on how we would deal with it. This was a puzzle.

What happens if a guy was in love with a girl, let’s call them Ben and Emma. Ben was really, truly in love with Emma, but she was somewhat unobtainable, however Ben still held out hope that it could work out, so for convenience he hooks up with a girl he knows to fill the void in the interim all the while keeping it from Emma, yet telling Emma she is the love of his life and other sentimental garble that men say when they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Emma eventually found out about the other woman. So then does that make Emma the other woman? Apparently Emma asked Ben about it and he confirmed that it was a random hook up because he wasn’t in a position to know if it would work out with them or not, and he would essentially drop his current beau for Emma because he loved her. So this is the awkward situation. Morals vs ease. Emma saw how quickly Ben could brush off a girl he’s with, so she definitely didn’t want to be with someone who treated a girl like that, but for female empowerment, is it the same as the last story?

My friend and I had two arguments to this story. I said if they aren’t friends then the new girl would just think that Emma wants to swoop in there and steal Ben back, even if that is absolutely not the case, this is where the rose tints come into play again.

So then should Emma just walk away and leave them to it, maybe his love would grow for the new girl and they can live happily. Or should she give the new girl a heads up so she’s not second best to Ben? In my opinion absolutely no girl should come second best to a guy they’re meant to be with so surely she deserves to know? Or maybe not?

Now for me. I saw a guy once who had a girlfriend, I didn’t know he was in a relationship and we even had mutual friends who thought he was single. Luckily though, Lu (the girlfriend) messaged me and asked me about it after noticing an innocent photo on Facebook. A woman’s intuition knows no limits, and she instinctively knew something was going on. I was gobsmacked when I found out he was in a full blown relationship, and I was for once, the other woman. I felt awful and suggested we met up. We did, and turns out he had great taste, because she is now one of my best friends. She is in a new amazing relationship and she’s a friend for life. Without me telling her the gory details of her ex and I’s relationship, she would never have known what a rat he was and maybe not have moved on. This is the epitome of female empowerment and I’m still so proud of how we dealt with that. A lot of girls would have fought over the man, or the girlfriend would have blamed the other woman, even if she, like I, had no idea he was in a relationship.

When I brought up my example last night, my friend said it was different to the Emma and Ben situation because Lu had contacted me first, so it didn’t seem as though I was trying to break up their relationship, because I had no idea about it!

So I guess there’s the difference. It’s a minefield. I know that I would want to know if I was being played, but many girls like living with rose tinted glasses, mainly because they’re terrified of being without.