My lover split from his wife but has dumped me too - was he using me?

Dear Coleen

I’m divorced and had an affair with a married man that went on for over a year. He had been married for 20 years and has two young children, but his marriage was mundane and sexless.

I know this is often a line married men spin, but he’d told a lot of his friends the same thing before we got together and most of them considered his wife cold and difficult and wondered why he was still with her.

We had been friends for a while before it happened and I fell for him so deeply. But eventually, his wife found out and he had to move out of the family home. They’re now splitting up. The issue is, he’s been unable to cope with the guilt of breaking up his family and losing daily access to his kids.

The separation is acrimonious because he humiliated her with our affair and she’s now bitter and angry.

The long and short of it is, he broke it off with me a couple of months after she found out. She’s now seeing someone else, but he is alone and living with a friend when he could have had me. We have a number of friends in common so I hear about what he’s up to all the time.

I just can’t move on from this. I have tried dating other people, but they just don’t compare to what I had with him. I know it was wrong for me to get involved with him, but people fall in love and I’m angry with him for throwing away what we had, especially now his wife has moved on.

The worst thing is thinking that he might just have used me as a way to escape an unhappy marriage.

How can I get on with my life?

Coleen says

This is the problem with an affair – it hurts so many people and very rarely ends up the way you want it to. I think you have to let him go for now – he’s dealing with guilt. When he comes to terms with it, he might want to pick things up, but don’t wait around for him.

If you love someone the way you love him, it hurts when it ends and there are no magic words to stop that pain. It just takes time. And there’s no point in getting bitter and angry yourself – you knew what you were getting into when you started seeing a married man.

You don’t know if those things he told you about his wife are true. I’ve been that wife and know that men or women having an affair will say anything to get what they want, or to justify it.

I understand why his ex-wife is angry – he ripped her heart apart and killed any trust she ever had in him.

Look at it this way – if she hadn’t found out about your affair, it could have gone on for years with him promising to leave her. What kind of life would that have been? And if you’d ended up together, you might have become just like his wife. If he can do it to her, why not you? He’s also blaming you for splitting up his family!

Use your anger in a positive way to make a happy life for yourself. And don’t get involved with married men.