Say Goodbye Like You Mean It

How one bad apple nearly spoiled the whole bunch

I heard an interesting theory recently:

Most men have affairs to save their marriages, but most women use affairs to help them break away from an unhappy relationship.

I see some truth in this but I think it’s too much of a gender stereotype.

There’s a time of my life I’m not proud of, my partner and I were both at very low ebbs, but him more so than me. He’d been made redundant and, despite his desire to get back out and find another job to ‘bring home the bacon’, the months were passing by and nothing fitted his skill set. I was concerned about his low mood and morale, but also the effect it could have on our children.

I went back to work, finding temporary jobs that I could do was easy in comparison. He ran the house. While he kept up a cheerful facade around others, with me he didn’t have to pretend. He berated himself constantly and my attempts at reassurance wore thin. It got to the point that I didn’t want to be alone with him because he talked only about his frustration or how he could ‘package’ himself better. Our communication had always been great but now I didn’t want to listen. I couldn’t share any of my frustrations because they seemed trivial compared with his.

The office banter became a lifeline to me, the people I worked with only saw my ‘game face’. They knew I was happily married with kids, but they didn’t know that sometimes I wanted to scream when I got home, or that I read a book rather than talk to my husband.

One work friendship started off in all innocence, but by the end it didn’t feel so squeaky clean.

I often struck up conversations with this guy a few years my junior. He had a younger family than mine and I saw a lot of parallels, so I would sometimes give him parenting advice, he’d recommend TV shows or films to me. He made me feel interesting and funny and the things we talked about were fresh.

It’s so obvious now looking back, in letting my friendship with him develop to the extent it did, I’d committed what is currently termed as emotional infidelity. I kept thinking our friendship was above board because my partner knew about it, and my intentions were innocent. Then I read an article on the topic and this phrase struck a chord.

When something funny happens in your day, if the first person you reach out to tell about it is not your partner, then you’re committing emotional infidelity

Well of course that was true. I’d begun to hear songs on the radio and tell my friend to check out the artist, to pick books to read which I planned to pass to him and sometimes to send him a funny text.

Just when my partner needed extra support, I was only giving him scraps of my attention.

I knew I ought to stop, to pull back and get myself on track, but it was hard. I had come to depend on my friend to put the sunshine in my day. A person you’ve been with for decades can seem dull, predictable, especially when they are feeling low and worried about money. Someone less familiar will find what you say fresh and interesting, there is always something new to learn about each other. Plus neither of you moan about taking the bins out or damp towels left on the floor.

I realised I needed to see less of this friend, so an office reorganisation presented the perfect opportunity. We no longer sat together and opportunities to chat became few and far between. At first he resisted, tried to make time for us to meet, but this felt clumsy and I didn’t want colleagues to talk. For the first time I wondered if there were rumours already.

If I’m honest, I was pretty petulant about it. I had grown very fond of his companionship and his attention was a huge ego boost. I was sulky and imagined myself hard done by, but I stuck to my plans. Lots of times I was tempted to send him a lighthearted text message, or visit the break room I knew he used for lunch. Logic said that would make me feel better for a moment, but worse for a lot longer. Now I’d recognised it had gone too far, to perpetuate the dynamic would be a betrayal to my partner. It was probably disrupting my friend’s marriage too.

Remember that old saying “one bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch?”— well it does!

With fruit or vegetables, if one piece starts to go a bit rotten or mouldy, you have to remove it, otherwise it will taint those around it. Likewise it was necessary to cut this inappropriate friendship from my life, otherwise it would spoil my primary relationship, which we’d built on trust.

My partner and I needed to move forward, together, as a united front. We had a family to raise, older parents to support, he needed to get back to work. We had undertaken to travel this road together; bumps, twists, roadblocks, all needed our full, combined attention. I had not stopped loving him. Maybe he had stopped loving himself for a while but I needed to help him with that, instead of getting distracted by someone else.

I am relieved that my wobble did not take us off course. We have had to steer around some big pot-holes and bumps since, but we are happy together and making plans for the future, while supporting each other in our very different interests.

I learned a lot from that mistake so, although flirting is delicious, I take care now to make my intentions very clear. I’m a one man woman.

My title is a lyric from a song I recently discovered “Stop Making This Hurt” by Bleachers & this piece was prompted by “Addiction — That Thing you Can’t Give Up” #4Thoughts_Meme Image courtesy of Steve Halama [Unsplash]

Posy Churchgate (she/her) writes fiction, is an Editor atTantalizing Tales & Blogger