SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I know how you feel because my STBX husband's girlfriend looks like a toad- literally. i mean, her overbite is so bad it looks like she's holding a lime wedge in front of her teeth after a tequila shot. I wonder how he even glanced her way. I mean, I was featured in playboy magazine ( sorry for bragging) . She is a barista and i'm a nurse. She makes minimum wage while I make 2x his salary! I guess our men need to be with women who are totally beneath them to feel superior.

but i know how disturbing it feels to be betrayed for an ugly woman with obviously no standard. I guess they always do affair down. If it's any consolation, we're not alone. Maria Shriver, Elizabeth Hurley Sandra Bullock, Elin Woods, Halle Berry, Sienna Miller, and Princess Diana have all been betrayed for ugly women and to this day the whole world still wonders what's wrong with these men!

don't give her too much credit for the affair though. I mean she must just be desperate to get attention from any man at all, and your spouse with even lower standard was that one man (sorry...) I think he deserves more name calling than that woman. She did not promise you anything, but he made a lifelong promise to you to be true to you. You need to hold him accountable for his actions, not just shift it to this pathetic desperate woman. Besides, if the letter is too long, she'll just throw it away or delete it, or if you rant too long, she'll just walk away or hang up on you. Forget her and realize that you're beautiful, a better person than her & that you wouldn't stoop so low as she did as to have an affair with a married man. You can hold your head up that way.

I called her and told her that I had initially taken pity on her because I felt bad for her being an ugly fat girl with no self-esteem who sought to make herself feel better by leeching onto any dick that paid her any mind.

Because there's no guarantee the next woman you cross will be as measured in her response as I was.

Calling her up and calling her a fat and ugly girl is not a measured response, and is certainly not going to solve the self esteem issues you seem to think is at the root of her participation in your WH's affair.

Try to figure out why she angers you so much. What you learn will be really useful to you.

[This message edited by Edie at 10:02 AM, May 3rd (Saturday)]

Edie, this is true, but i meant comparatively measured considering the other options I had contemplated briefly. The first time I spoke with her, I kept calm and was able to get some information from her. She was not unapologetic, but maybe a little flippant about the situation. When I saw she had texted my husband after that (a work related text that he did not respond to), I lost my cool and said what I said. I instantly regretted it because taking cheap shots at her made me feel worse. I felt nasty and irrational and I had no way of knowing if my words had the desired effect of hurting her feelings or if they just made me look like a crazy, vindictive bitch. Since then, there has been absolutely zero contact and she hasn't reached out to him in anyway. She has a boyfriend she's trying to work things out with apparently and doesn't seem interested in my husband at all (and vice versa). I try to forgive her in my mind, but I get angry sometimes because it's not like I was a stranger to her. We were friends on FB, she had been to my home with some of his other coworkers, she gave my son gifts that I wrote her thank you notes for. I can't help it - sometimes it galls me.

[This message edited by Thella at 4:44 PM, May 3rd (Saturday)]

First of all, I'm so sorry that like the rest of us, you are here because your H chose to betray you! That was one of the hardest things for me to accept...that my H CHOSE to betray me! I did the very same thing you are doing, I obsessed with HER and put the majority of the blame on HER! And yes, she DID pursue my husband and many times over the 8 or 9 mos.it went on, he did turn her away (they both say they had sex only 2 or 3 times).My H has said from the beginning, that he puts the blame on himself, because he COULD and SHOULD have said no and wishes now he would have. Our story is much like yours, we grew apart and had zero communication. I am in IC and my counselor advises that I do write or journal as we call it, and write as many letters as you want to her, however DO NOT SEND THEM! She (counselor) says that all it will do is empower them and that you should never let them see how the A has affected you! We are 8 mos. out (even though the A happened 25 years ago, I just found out 8 mos. ago)but I can tell you that for me, the obsessive thoughts with HER have diminished over time and I am realizing more and more just how pathetic she really was/is. AND how proud of myself I am that I did not resort to having an A just because we had problems in our marriage. I had more respect for myself than that! So now, I am regaining my self confidence I have always had, but lost since Dday. Hang in there, stay strong and know that many of us have had/still have, MANY of the feelings and emotions you are going through. Sending hugs and prayers for you and hoping you can R if that's what you want.

You are right on track. It takes time and you are allowed your rage. It WILL go away as you move to pity and indifference for the OW.

Just imagine the torment she lives in her own skin everyday to be so easy and needy just for an ego boost. It really is heartbreaking.

Don't let anyone set your pace to recovery, it will come when you are ready.

Making yourself crazy to forget her will only add to your stress. It is all just a matter of time.

Thank you to everyone for the kind words and insightful advice.

Edie, I keep coming back to what you said about thinking about why I'm so angry at her. In some ways, I think I am projecting my own insecurities on her. Not to sound vain or conceited, but I am a very attractive woman and I'm also very witty and intelligent - all traits which have won me my fair share of male admirers throughout the years. However, this was not always the case - As a child, I was always described by my parents as sweet and funny and intelligent - but never pretty. I was a little chubby at points and still painfully remember every comment my parents or classmates ever hurled at me regarding my weight, whether it was well-meaning or mean-spirited. When I was thirteen and the extra weight disappeared, I still didn't feel pretty and if a boy paid attention to me, I wondered if he just wanted a hook-up and would cast me aside afterward. When I entered college and now was what most people would consider unquestionably beautiful, I still never really saw that in myself. Maybe sometimes, when in a good mood or if I saw a photograph of myself, but in the mirror, I'd focus on my flaws and starved myself down to a size 0, feeling depressed and miserable and disgusting whenever I put on a few pounds and began to approach a size 2. So much of my self-worth was rooted in how I looked and how I compared myself to other women. So when I found out about the affair, even though neither my husband nor the other woman loved each other or pursued each other beyond the one-night-stand they both viewed as a mistake, I felt threatened and viewed her as a usurper, someone who dared to cross me and put herself above me. I saw that she was overweight and not particularly beautiful and so I attacked those traits, because those were the insults that had always been most hurtful to me. I realize all of this and also know that no matter how many times I call her ugly or fat, my husband obviously didn't find her that disgusting or we wouldn't be in this situation. I say these things to convince myself they're true, to convince myself I'm better than her.

But all of that is superficial. The real reason I'm better than her is because no matter what my insecurities, even in my moment of lowest self-esteem, I never sought to build my self-worth through sex or through male attention and I would never stoop to hurt another person by doing so. Even as a kid, I would never even kiss a boy if I knew he had a girlfriend b/c I would never want to be a willing participant in someone else's sorrow. I know she is unimportant in the grand scheme of things and in my marriage, but honestly, that's why I fixate on her and that's also why I'm trying so hard to let it go.

First off, enjoy your writing style. However, I am sorry for the pain that the subject matter brings to you and which brought you here to SI to write to complete strangers about your pain in such an eloquent manner.

Second, your d-day is a little over 6 weeks ago. Of course you are obsessing and directing most of your anger at OW. Normal and actually kind of predicatable. I wasn't really angry with FWH until at least 5 months after d-day.

I keep coming back to what you said about thinking about why I'm so angry at her.

Personally, I feel it is quite simple. OW fucked your WH. Boom! You are angry at the OW, and rightfully so. Don't feel like that needs to be over thought.

Sister Milkshake, anyone who quotes the Simpsons not once, but twice in their profile, is alright in my book! Thanks for the kind words, sister girl! xoxo

I don't agree with SMS that it is 'simple' and found your further reflections very insightful Thelia.

I know my anger was multifold: shattering my [feminist] belief in a sisterhood, for example (she was letting down the sisterhood, but I was naive in my ideal of one). But also what I despised in my final OW was her 'need' (single woman with time clock ticking) for a man and that was partly a projection, just like you were projecting: despising myself for what felt like a lack of independence because the affair had rocked my world so much. To mention but two things.

That helped me have some sympathy for her, which of course reduced my anger and my obsession, and so I could get on with more interesting thoughts and things. So I was quite genuine, and also quite disingenuous when I killed my OW with kindness! She didn't stand a chance (she set out to compete with me but I wasn't informed that there was even a competition, so late to the party I didn't bother trying, and so in a way set myself the competition between the better parts of me and the not so better, if that makes any sense. So it all became about me, and not about me and her).

It also helped me to reflect upon my relationship to independence, and come to accept the bits of me that weren't as independent as I had thought, and, well many other things besides.

Anyway, as far as I can discern, your OW is young enough to be your daughter; I am supposing as well as her just being handy, your husband's attraction to her was about that also, a fear of aging. And you may feel that her age gave her an unfair advantage, and that frustration (something you can do nothing about) might also be in the mix somewhere. For my husband, that all became part of the process of learning to love who he was, and not seek his younger self reflected in a younger OW's admiring eyes.

Not long after Dday he did give me this so-called compliment that I was turning into a very beautiful older woman - not easy to hear when he had just spent 4 months with a younger and rather beautiful OW. But I (I was on my way to a new post Dday art class for Edie, who was not going to let the grass grow under her feet solely caring for others any more) turned it around into a personal thesis on inner beauty and took that sense with me into that class.

The anger with OW never leaves by the way, it just subsides. I can resurrect it if I choose, which occasionally I do, but on the whole she,an d the others, remain offstage characters in my world, making occasional 'noises off'.

Edited to add, that your title is very apt. It's about confronting the other woman in terms of what she means to you AND confronting the other women in you. For me, turning all this nasty business into a learning opportunity, as many of us do here on SI, means I could see it as a way of improving my relationship with myself. (As ultimately that's all we actually have).

[This message edited by Edie at 3:45 AM, May 4th (Sunday)]

No, the age difference isn't that substantial. My husband and I are in our early 30s and I think she is 23 or 24 years old. I don't feel her age is an advantage or what drew my husband to her, but I do think the fact that she was younger and naive appealed to him because it allowed him to play the role of sophisticated older man, something he doesn't get to do with me since I have always paid the bills and worn the pants.

Maybe I reckoned a larger age difference because of the huge difference in maturity between you both!

something he doesn't get to do with me since I have always paid the bills and worn the pants.

Hopefully he's getting to wear some pants now.

[This message edited by Edie at 5:58 AM, May 4th (Sunday)]