It was a HORRIBLE time in my life but temporary only. To the point above her conscience will have to carry the burden of her choices and as she is now coming to terms with the facts that she now has more problems than she did before I can’t help but think that there will be a terrible price to pay emotionally.

Who knows. I am healing and feel like most of the time I am in a pretty solid place so I am thankful of that and looking forward to the independence ahead and all that life has to offer. I don’t miss my ex anymore and don’t really care whether she succeeds, fails, or whatever as long as it doesn’t affect my children.

It started when a younger attractive woman that worked on the same floor in my office building began flirting with me when she passed me coming and going on the elevator, escalator and hallways. Eventually I struck up a conversation and learned that she had children but no mention of a husband. Finally after several months I called her and asked her out. She told me she was married. Then she asked me what my ‘story’ was. A short while later she came over to my office suite and asked for me, proceeding to apologize for flirting with me. Within a very short time she began to pursue me. I had been single and completely alone for over eight years and most of the 21 years (now 27) since my wife had an affair and divorced me for my 30th birthday (my two daughters 3 and infant) when our divorce was final.

I made the mistake of thinking I could be friends, but when she very quickly told me she was falling in love with me, I found myself feeling the same. Though I encouraged her to work out the issues in her marriage at the beginning, I ultimately bought into her declarations that her marriage was a mistake of youth (she was 22 when she married), they were more like roommates than spouses, she had never loved him and he did not show her any love. Basically the only thing the had in common was their two children. I rationalized that her children would be better off as children of divorce (my daughters have turned out pretty well) than living in the midst of their parents loveless marriage.

So I fell for her and pretty much made her my life. My business went in the toilet, my self-esteem plummeted and I put all my hopes for my future and for happiness in the hopes of marrying her. She used her Christian faith and her children as the only reasons she was still married. Although we ‘broke up’ dozens of times over the course of the five years, she would always come back to me telling me how much she missed me and loved me. Every year during the holidays she would ‘break up’ with me and then send me e-mails or call me on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas to tell me she loved me. In December of 2010 we ‘broke up’ again, right on schedule. On Christmas Day she sent me an e-mail wishing me a Happy Children’s Day. The email began with my name followed by “love” and ended with “I Love You”. She had a way of feeding me morsels of hope such of telling me how her therapist had given her a referral to a divorce lawyer and in October of 2010 confided to me that she had told her therapist that when she was with me she felt “loved, loving and joy”. The affair was a constant roller coaster ride of emotions for me, constantly going from the happiness of the closest intimate relationship I had ever had to utter despair and devastation.

By mid January of 2011 she told me she was done with me and that she would no longer acknowledge my presence, demanding that I cease any and all communication with her. This was to include those times when I saw her in the hallway or elevator where she had begun the flirtations that led to the affair. I did not handle this particularly well and ended up threatening to tell her husband about the affair. She proceeded to tell me with tears in her eyes that she had told her husband about the affair and that I had ‘buried’ her . In the following few weeks I sought her forgiveness and sent her several e-mails. When I saw her on the street in front of our building she was receptive and flirtatious, responding coyly to my asking her if she was reading my e-mails with “Well, Maybe.”

The very next day she said she needed to talk to me and took me up to the privacy of the parking garage where most of the sexual part of our affair had taken place and proceeded to tell me the reason she was still reading my e-mails what that she was ‘terrified’ of what I might do. She made hurtful references about my daughters as well. So that was one last roller coaster ride.

In the end, after five years of telling me how ‘special’ I was and how much she loved me, she completely turned on me, telling me she never loved me that it was just an affair (so different from all the hours we sat and talked about how this was not the typical affair). She belittled the whole thing, abandoned, betrayed, devalued, dehumized, emasculated and vilified me. She had the gall to take her husband to the police in April of last year and try to get a stalking order against me claiming I had threatened her life and that I was nothing more than an ‘older; guy she knew that worked across the hall in office that become infatuated with her and was stalking her because she had refused my advances. After that I wrote a long letter to her husband telling him in great detail about the affair. Less than four months later they were divorced. I believe she used me as her “exit affair”.

In October when I tried to seek forgiveness she responded by telling me I should ask here husband for forgiveness. When I was overheard by a security guard ranting in the empty office elevator as I was leaving the a few days later, she, having begun a relationship with the head of security for the building, was informed and used that combined with a litany of fabrication to obtain a temporary stalking order on October 31. I have since moved out of the building and had had no contact with her in three months. Last week I sent her husband an e-mail asking for his forgiveness. He forwarded it directly to her and she forwarded it to her attorney. On her birthday on 1/31 I sent her an ‘anonymous’ email with two music videos. She claims to be a Christian and I had recently seen a comment she made on a facebook post saying ‘amen’ to a reference to how to live a truly Christlike life. One of the videos was a ‘Christian’ video to a song by Joseph Arthur called “In The Sun” and the other, also by Joseph Arthur is called “Birthday Card”. As a result of those actions I will probably end up with a criminal record and a permanent stalking order. I have already experienced the humiliation of having my date asked for ID for reason made know by the officer during a routine traffic stop.

I have learned that she is a textbook Narcissist and now see that I was nothing but an object to her, she has not an ounce of empathy or compassion , despite her facebook “amen” and I have allowed her to all but destroy me. I think about her all day every day and despite praying to God to take her out of my head, I continue to wake up thinking of her and fall asleep thinking of her.
I have also prayed that I won’t wake up and I have been actively and seriously considering suicide, even to the point of telling family members and my attorney/friend that I am going to kill myself.

So that is the legacy of an affair. One that wasn’t supposed to be an ordinary affair, but different, meant to be. I have hurt so many people.