I Spent My Whole Life Trying to Be a Good Girl. So How Did I End Up the Other Woman?

For nearly all of my life, I have tried to be “good;” a good daughter, a good friend, a good wife, a good mother. I spent 40 years on a one woman PR campaign where the product I was promoting was always me: How can I help? How can I make you laugh? What can I do to ease your pain? How can I make everything better? Make you more comfortable? 

Needs? I didn’t have them. 

Don’t worry about me, I’m okay! What can I do for you? 

There was supposed to be a reward for all this self-sacrifice: for never accepting a compliment graciously; for always taking the small piece of chicken; for volunteering for the short straw - even before anyone else had a chance to draw. I was supposed to find security, validation. I was supposed to be loved. 

In a stunning twist (to everyone but me), the exact opposite happened: I lost myself entirely, and this people-pleasing and hustling for my worth left me depleted, lonely, and completely disconnected from my own needs. I felt worthless, and worse, I felt hopeless. Somehow all of my attempts to be good - to meet everyone else’s expectations - meant falling short of my own. 

This was not in the brochure. 

As the title of this post indicates, I fell far short of my own ideals; the ship of good girls has long since sailed and I didn’t even make it onto the dock. My likeness will not grace a statue in the town square (although I did receive a very recognizable scarlet letter.) There will be no plaque on a park bench lauding my years of dedicated service. Just a big black mark on my really permanent record (they don’t even make an “I survived an affair and divorce and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” shirt - I checked.) 

Five years ago I found myself doing the unthinkable, living the unthinkable: here I was, a self-proclaimed good girl, cheating on my husband by kissing someone’s else’s husband (three times!) Even worse: I was in love with someone else’s husband; the kind of love I couldn’t run from, pray away or otherwise escape no matter how hard I tried (and boy, did I try.) In a head (and a heart) roiling with pain, fear, and confusion, one question kept resurfacing: how the hell did I get here?

When I was 14, the person I adored most in the world, my handsome, smart, funny father, died just five days after his 40th birthday. My mother had already been abusing alcohol for decades, battling demons spawned by her own painful childhood, and though she tried for awhile to rebuild her life after he died, over time she slowly descended into depression and drink until the combination proved lethal. I was 24. 

Just shy of my 26th birthday, I would marry a man with the same patterns, certain that although I had failed to save my mother, I could rescue him. 

Scott was my anchor. He kept me rooted to something, gave me a sense of home and family during that terrible time after my mother died when I had nowhere else to go. His support of me during that time created a bond that was the primary reason why I married him - ironically, in spite of the fact that one of the last things my mother told me before she died was clearly and emphatically not to do so. 

It wasn’t a passionate love story; he was resistant to - almost resentful of - love or gestures of affection, things which as an abandoned kid I longed for; but he met the primary requirement I needed in a partner: he was going to stay. And maybe, over time, if I was good enough and if I loved him hard enough, I could fix whatever broken thing in him made him withhold from me and he would love me and I would have a family again. 

It didn’t work. Instead, we spent twenty years entangled in a pattern of co-dependency and emotional manipulation fed by his narcissism, disordered personality traits, and substance abuse, and my profoundly misguided belief that I was responsible for fixing them. 

Were there good times? Of course there were. A great many of them. And they are dear and precious to me. But they came at a price.

Not that I came into the marriage healthy or whole myself. I brought with me what I would later learn was complex PTSD (spoiler: it was about to get far, far worse), abandonment wounds, and perhaps most significantly, a core belief that I was I was difficult to love; a belief that Scott reinforced. By the time someone else’s husband would kiss me, I hadn’t been kissed by my own husband in more than ten years - an admission that’s even more humiliating when I also admit that I become pregnant three times during that ten year period. It’s humiliating to admit that he didn’t care enough to offer even token gestures of affection, not even to get what he wanted - and that I didn’t value myself enough to put a stop to it.

I was consumed with caretaking Scott’s emotional and physical well-being in order to protect him - so he wouldn’t die and leave me, obviously - and to prove that I was worthy of his love. I was desperate for someone to stay; for something solid I could count on forever. I loved him so much, wanted this family so much, I could not fathom a scenario where I would be the one to blow it all up.

Good and bad, villain and victim: it’s a concept that works in the movies. But in real life, betraying others to this degree, betraying your own moral code so egregiously, requires not so much a lack of character but rather a deep and chronic pattern of self-betrayal. The pain we cause others can nearly always be traced back to the unhealed or un-acknowledged pain within us. 

First rule of cheat club: don’t ask what you’re running from, just keep running (well, that’s actually more of a membership requirement; the first rule of cheat club is obviously…don’t talk about cheat club; special emphasis on this one.) 

For me, abandonment of self meant never, ever looking critically at my marriage; denial was essential to keeping my life intact. Loneliness, anger, resentment, heartache: push them down. Tell everyone you are happy. Fix him so he’ll love you. Fix yourself so he’ll love you. Do not tell anyone you are drowning. Do not drown. You can fix this. 

But I was drowning. In loneliness, heartache, and grief. And then along came a man who thought I was miraculous. 

I was not the only one abandoning myself. He came with his own history of trauma and unhealthy coping patterns, and like plenty of people around us, his own bad marriage. His wife was part of my inner social circle and their intense dislike of one another was common knowledge - a pattern of self-betrayal familiar to many of us (the secondary lesson here? It is far easier to deny your truth when everyone around you is doing the same thing.)

For more than two years, I loved him and he loved me and we never said a word to one another about it - not so much as a single text message or phone call. Instead that unspoken knowledge became yet another secret, another truth that, like my own unhappiness, I was becoming increasingly aware of - and just as desperate to not know. 

Fear and denial became my constant companions. They stayed by my side long after the truth began banging on the door with both fists. 

Why didn’t I just tell my husband what was happening? In a healthy relationship, transparency and trust can head infidelity off at the pass. But my partner was not a safe person to confide in. He had told me time and again that if I ever even thought of cheating he had no intention of hearing me out; he would cut me out of his life without question. I believed him. And I may not have wanted to remain married to him, but I also did not want a divorce, or to hurt him - statements that may only make sense to people who are facing the heartbreak and agony of ending a marriage. As Liz Gilbert wrote in Eat, Pray, Love: "The only thing more impossible than staying... was leaving. I didn't want to hurt anybody, I wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland."

To understand why someone as strong and as resilient as I am - and I am - could be so brash and brave and outspoken in all other areas of my life, and so fearful and timid in my home, you have to understand the dynamics of emotional abuse and trauma. 

Unhealed trauma causes us to repeat our shitty, painful, or damaging patterns again and again because we are trying to create a different outcome this time around - a happy ending. If we can replay the same dynamics with a different outcome, i.e. get that difficult, withholding or abusive person to treat us differently this time - we can prove ourselves safe and lovable and good. 

Shockingly, this rarely works. 

Because Scott triggered all the same feelings of low self worth, of codependency, the need to rescue someone, the fear of abandonment I’d grown up with, but on the surface he appeared healthier and safer than my mother (in reality, he was much worse) he was the perfect partner for me. And because even now there is a strong instinct to protect him, I will also give him his due by saying: I believe Scott loved me with all the capacity he has for love; limited though it may be.

The only way to stop the cycle is to heal yourself. But to heal yourself, first you must get out of that dynamic - and to get out, you have to be able to recognize that the dynamic exists in the first place.

People who have been narcissistically abused or have CPTSD (I was both) cannot access, or do not act as, their true selves when triggered. Instead of acting rationally, we become who we think we need to be in order to survive. The fear of abandonment was my greatest trigger. The very idea of admitting any of my true feelings to him flooded me with fear, panic, and despair. 

Keep this hidden at all costs. No one will love you if you tell the truth and you will be alone. 

At stake was not only my marriage, but the only family I knew, my friendships, my social circle, and my reputation as a “good” girl: in short, the entire life I had constructed in the hope of finally feeling safe. So I hid from the truth, lied to myself and everyone else so that nothing had to change. But the truth made its way free anyway, as it always does. And everything collapsed just the same.

Late one summer night, the smoke from the 4th of July fireworks still thick in the air, this other man would kiss me at last - and then we would walk away and not speak a word about it. Instead, we’d both go back to pretending that everything was fine - until we’d repeat it all two months later: another kiss, another round of silence and denial. We never saw or spoke to each other outside the group. We simply pretended that nothing had happened and outwardly carried on as normal, each individually writhing in our own misery, fear, and pain.  

This is what betrayal of self looks like; this is self-destruction. 

The affair will finally happen more than 18 months later, after we’ve spent a year without contact trying to make these feeling go away, after we’ve both told the truth about those kisses to our spouses, after I’ve started (and ended) couples counseling, left the marriage, begun individual therapy and moved out of the home I shared with my now ex-husband - not just because I’d asked for a divorce at last, but because he will set fire to our home (this will be the second time), causing catastrophic damage.

The good news is, when I leave, I won’t have much to pack. 

And that’s how it happens, the final betrayal of self and the inflicting of devastating wounds that will pain people I cared about for as long as they live: while living in a hotel room with my children, divorce underway, the only family I know falling apart, every possession that matters to me now a heap of smoking rubble - my mother’s purse and my father’s watch, my children’s baby things, my parents Christmas ornaments - I will fall into an affair with this man who will shatter the last of my resolve when he says to me, “Of course I love you. You are very easy to love.”

It was the first time I had ever heard it; and the first time I truly believed it. 

This brief chapter that we are entangled will be the darkest period of my entire life, equaled only by the loss of my father and my mother’s descent into her own darkness. 

Is Scott to blame for my betrayal? Of course not. He bears absolutely no responsibility for my choices. Neither does my mother nor my father nor this man I loved, nor anyone save for me. Our marriage was broken and it broke me in many, many ways that are significant enough to merit their own post; four years later I am still assessing the damage. But when I do finally do this terrible thing I will do it for my own reasons. I will do it in part out of fear that this is my only chance to finally know love - that if I don’t seize this moment then I may never love or be loved again; love feels like such a rare and precious commodity to me - fleeting and fragile as a soap bubble. I will do it because my sense of self and my integrity are so compromised I don’t feel I have much further to fall; and I will do it because the only time that I will find any relief from the heartbreak that consumes me amid the horror of fire and divorce is when I am with him.

The brilliant Rayya Elias once said, “What most people don’t realize about heartbreak is that when a heart breaks, it breaks open.”

This love will break my heart - and break it open. It will be the only time in my life that I truly fear for my safety; that I will feel hopeless enough to wonder if I will survive it. From that very first kiss, I will live with heartache, shame, and fear so ferocious I can actually feel it in my chest - a literal aching and burning. My heart will break because I love a man I cannot love, am not allowed to love, and to whom I will never belong. It will break because I am going to hurt a man whom I do love and have loved nearly all of my life - however little my love is valued. It will break because I am devastating and betraying people who trusted me. It will break because I am ashamed, and most of all, it will break at the thought of hurting my children; the first time I even think the words shared custody it is as though I am holding my palm over an open flame; everything in me recoils. And my heart will break because every path before me seems equally terrible; there is no way back, no way to undo this, un-know all these truths I have denied for so long. 

This love will also set me free. Because I loved him, I found myself in such a mess, such agony, that I finally sought professional help (the absurdity that after all I’ve been through that I finally went to therapy for boy problems is not lost on me.) I got out of that marriage, and I got my kids out, too. 

I deeply regret the pain we caused and the mess we made. I always will. What I regret most is that I let myself get so far down this road; that I reached a point of such desperation and fear, such betrayal of self, that I could make mistakes I will not be able to repair in a lifetime. 

If you learn only one thing from my mistakes, I hope it is this: betraying yourself is how the problem starts; it is not just an inevitable consequence. You cannot betray others without betraying yourself. And that is where nearly all mistakes, of all sizes, begin. 

And most of us are living in some sort of betrayal of self right now - the things we can’t afford and don’t need that go on the credit card; the boundaries we do not set; the extra drink - or two or three - that we know is a bad idea; the nasty words to the stranger in the checkout line, or the true and honest words we know we should say but swallow down out of fear. 

But our - inevitable - mistakes and regrets, they do not reveal where we are “bad”; they reveal where we are broken. We don’t betray ourselves by loving others too much; we do it by not loving ourselves enough. Putting others first, ignoring our needs, not saying the hard things - it’s all buying on credit. And that bill will always come due.

I did not do this terrible thing because I am bad. Even in the midst of it I was still trying desperately to be “good”; avoiding the truth in a deeply misguided attempt to not hurt anyone, myself included. I am a naturally resilient person, a strong person. I am smart and capable, and emotionally intelligent (I realize that given the context, these assertions would benefit from a citation from my therapist in the appendix; just trust me.) And still this happened to me. Mistakes of this level…they go far beyond good and bad, victims or villains.

I am a good person who did a bad thing. If it can happen to me, please believe that it can happen to anyone. And if, in spite of all I’ve said here, you still can’t imagine yourself in my shoes, can’t find empathy or compassion for the girls who failed, try harder (or just go fuck yourself, honestly, I’m good either way.)

For my girls out there who have abandoned themselves in service of a man: your love is not meant to be squandered redirecting careless grown men toward their glory. Read that again. 

For my fellow fallen girls, the girls who’ve sinned, and the girls who “failed": I forgive you. I love you. You are not alone. Forgive yourself. And then forgive yourself again. 

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Maybe this doesn’t seem like a happy ending, but it is. I do not regret loving him. My life today is far better because it happened - and if I had to, I would tear it all down and go through all of the pain again tomorrow. Because while I may have healing yet to do, today I am the happiest, healthiest, calmest, and the most joyful I have been since I was a little girl. And my children...of all the things I am proudest of, leaving and making myself healthy and whole for them is number one. 

I didn’t love him because I was broken; that’s why I hurt everyone - myself and Scott most of all. But the love, that came from perhaps the truest and best part of me and it was real; some part of me will love him always. But this is story is not about him; it never was. 

This one, at last, is just for me.