When Your Married Lover Forbids You To See Other People

It’s absurdly common.

When you read the title of this article did you chuckle a little bit to yourself or possibly even let out a slight snicker?

I understand if you did.

You may have thought to yourself, someone who’s cheating on their spouse would dare ask their lover to be faithful to them? What nonsense!

Though the obvious hypocrisy involved in the concept of being faithful to a married lover while they’re cheating on their spouse is indeed as blatant as the clear blue sky — I’m here to tell you that this is a common theme in many affairs — mainly between married men who have affairs with single women which I will expand upon shortly.

There are plenty of mistresses who are absolutely loyal to their married lovers and there may even be other women reading this who have been through this experience. In fact, I have no doubt there are other women out there who have experienced this.

As a woman who was once caught up in an affair with a married man and knowing other women who also went through the same situation, I can attest that this kind of behavior is not a rare thing.

It sounds absolutely absurd and — believe me — when my married lover first started demanding that I give my complete loyalty to him I think I actually laughed. Are you serious? You’re actually going to try and dictate to me who I see and where I go while you’re at home with your wife and family?

I think not.

Yet, in the end, I did remain utterly faithful to him.

But why?

The answers are not easy ones. They’re mixed into a cocktail filled with emotional insecurity and an unhealthy sexual infatuation.

In truth, I remained faithful to my married lover because, for a long time, I was terrified of losing him — even when the relationship I had with him was destroying me emotionally from the inside out.

I was a single woman at the time all of this began. I was divorced. I had no children. I was completely free and independent living on my own and working. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

What I ultimately chose to do was enter into a relationship with a married man — whom I originally thought was separated — but, of course, I later found out that he was not.

Still, I stayed in the relationship — or fling — as I initially thought it was going to be. You know, something that only lasts a few days or a couple of weeks — maybe.

Try four years.

At the beginning of this relationship, everything was cool and carefree. We were utterly infatuated with one another. We had sex all the time. He was easy-going — he was funny. No problems. This wasn’t a serious thing.

However, a couple of months into the affair and after I found out that he was still living with his wife, he started making more comments about what I wore, where I went, and who I was hanging out with when he wasn’t around.

It certainly didn’t help that we worked at the same company. He became more and more possessive of me and started telling me he didn’t like me speaking to other male co-workers.

I was so blinded by the intensity of our affair and the sexual chemistry we shared that even though I was hurt, enraged, and confused by his jealousy, I was also strangely flattered by it.

However, once I gave in to his initial requests to change my behavior and routines to accommodate his jealousy and possessiveness, it was all over. The demands just got worse.

The insecurity on his part only intensified. He wanted to know where I was and who I was with ALL the time while he was gone. I became like his slave, looking back.

It became an incredibly stressful situation that I had put myself in. I started dreading going to work because he would be there, quietly stalking my movements.

He would call me randomly from payphones when he wasn’t with me, questioning my whereabouts and activities which, logically, were really none of his business as a married man. He essentially terrorized me.

I was afraid that he would show up at my apartment while I was running errands and discover that I wasn’t there, assume that I was with another man, and then leave me. That’s honestly how bad it was and I have never admitted that before.

The fact that I was a single woman living alone made me the perfect prey for a man like this. A man who wanted to have a woman on the side at his disposal whenever he liked. He also had access to my apartment so it was, in a sense, a haven from his responsibilities as a husband and father.

He quickly isolated me from my friends, and my family lived far away. I was an easy mark.

If I had also been cheating on a spouse or a partner, I imagine that there’s no way my married lover would have been able to enact so much control over my life as he ultimately did.

And I allowed it — no question. It was one of those holes you crawl into and then realize you’re in too deep to get out without a fair amount of pain involved. So you stay inside the hole to avoid the pain.

I was what I consider to be an intelligent, independent woman at the time I started this affair. Yet somehow I still got trapped in a game of destructive jealousy with my married lover that lasted for years.

He took what he could from me and then some. I would wait for him. He would leave my apartment and go back to his wife — and maybe even another mistress for all I knew.

The lesson here is that even those of us who feel we are free and sensible women end up falling for men like this and allowing ourselves to be controlled by our own need for love and acceptance.

It’s not a good choice — but it doesn’t have to define you forever.

At the end of the day, I’d like to think that if my self-esteem or my confidence in who I really was as a person had been more evolved, I may not have gotten myself into that mess in the first place.

Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

My message to any other woman out there who is in this kind of situation or if you know a woman who is in a scenario like this — is that it’s not worth it to let behavior like I’ve described continue. It IS a form of abuse. The pain of staying in it will only get worse. Things CAN get better if you get out.

It’s time to take back your life.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1–800–799-SAFE (7233)

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