“Do you think I am cheating on him Z?”, she asks in a moment of introspection.
I am sitting drinking wine in a hotel room in Melbourne, 8000 miles away from home with Wendy, a colleague of mine who is already slightly tipsy from the intakes of the evening at the hotel bar where we are staying.
Wendy sits high in the ranks of the food chain and has expended a lot of energy and time to get there.
Most consider her intimidating and she can come off that way after years of trying to make her mark in a man’s world.
She is telling me about her marriage.
How her spouse is emotionally unavailable, that he doesn’t actually listen to what she has to say, how she was lonely for years without talking to anyone, how they tried therapy and it did not work, how they decided to have kids thinking it would fix things but it didn’t.
As the bottle of wine goes lighter, she crosses another threshold telling me about a wonderful man that she met not too long ago. How he completes her sentences and the fact that it was instant chemistry.
She tells me that she resisted for the longest time before deciding between morality and the dark caverns of loneliness.
The caverns won out.
She talks about her marriage in the past sense. As if someone has passed away and we are both attending a wake.
The moment of trespass is usually small, almost unnoticeable. Whether it’s returning a flirtatious text or holding eye contact a moment too long or maybe going to a coffee shop you shouldn’t be at. Wendy has crossed that threshold a long time ago.
It seems doubtful, then, that she believes the marriage would recover from what it has been through.
She was more likely dealing with a painful truth the only way she knows how — by ignoring it.
She talks about the new man. She has never been happier in her life before, like she is free.
However, I can see the darting conflict in her eyes. There is a sadness in knowing what she is doing and the fact that it might hurt someone she deeply loved, even if it’s not today.
Alcohol does that to you, especially when you are vulnerable. It is not necessarily a bad thing, just the way it is.
I wonder how she will feel about this tomorrow morning. Will she even remember?
She is looking back at me to see if I can offer her any advice, or even just judgment.
I don’t know of any way I can…
Everyone is different.
For some people, commitment feels like a prison.
For others, it feels like they are finally flying high.
Some people cannot imagine life with only one partner.
Others want one person to love. Multiple partners feel like too much to manage.
There is no should. There is no everyone.
What do you want? What works for you?
Find it.
Do that.
