16 Things You Learn When You’re The Other Woman/Man
If you let yourself be the “less important” person in someone’s life for long enough, you’ll somehow, unexpectedly, start to think of yourself like that too.
By 
Lady Goodman
- You don’t have to be in love with someone – or even know them – to feel true, deep pain about hurting them.
- It’s hard to know whether you are a case of “good people sometimes do bad things” or “bad people never realize they’re bad people”.
- You deserve better than what you sometimes get. But if you accept less, people have no reason to give you more.
- You can tell yourself the same lie a million times and somehow still believe it.
- If you want to badly enough, you can justify doing a lot of terrible things to have it.
- You maybe don’t really want to be happy. If you really wanted to be happy, wouldn’t you be pursuing a relationship with someone who could actually give you all of them?
- It’s never okay to stop getting tested.
- You feel the need to tell everyone you’re not a horrible person, and that doing one wrong thing doesn’t undo all the really good things about you.
- You can make even your closest friends start to question what kind of person you are. Even the tightest, most loyal relationships have their limits.
- You can’t help who you fall in love with, but you can help what you allow yourself to do with that love.
- Lying and guilt can take just as much of a physical toll as drugs or drinking.
- If you let yourself be the “less important” person in someone’s life for long enough, you’ll somehow, unexpectedly, start to think of yourself like that too.
- The terms “other person”, “person on the side” and “side piece” start to feel familiar, and you wonder if you’ll ever be someone’s whole person again, or if you even deserve to be.
- You can come up with an amazing number of excuses to family and friends about why they haven’t met the mystery person you’ve been seeing.
- Having all the sex and intense connection without any of the annoying responsibility and bullshit of being in a real relationship sounds amazing in theory – all the fun stuff, and you’re still free to live your life! But in the end, if you love someone, you realize that all that “relationship bullshit” is life. You want a whole life with that person and you can’t because they already have it with someone else. And you don’t even feel entitled to ask because that was never the deal. It’s all the little moments, and holidays, and planning for the future, and having stupid fights about taking the trash out, and eventually, you want it.
- There is nothing that makes you feel more powerless than wanting more of someone, and knowing you can’t have it.
