I feel like a fool and I want revenge. But at the same time I still love the man who has me so angry.
The situation is that I found out a few weeks ago that my boyfriend of nearly three years has a nine-month-old child with a woman he works with.
I knew they were close friends, as he told me this upfront, but I never knew they were lovers.
From what I have gathered, her boyfriend used to beat her up and cheat on her. During this time she leaned on my man for much needed emotional support.
After that relationship ended, she continued to hold onto my man and eventually they became intimate and she became pregnant.
I only found out because his mother forced him to tell me. She dotes on her first grandchild and also likes this woman a lot, having known her for years as her son’s close friend.
His mother came to our house and told me she felt I should know her son is now a father. She told me that he preferred to be with me and what happened was a moment of weakness.
She sought to assure me that to the best of her knowledge her son and his friend were not sexually involved before that time and have not been since then.
She told me that she asked her son to say something to me on it, but he was scared that he would lose me, so had said nothing. In her view that was wrong and the situation had gone on long enough, so she was letting me know.
His mother stressed, too, that she was not defending her son’s action in anyway, but knowing that he and the woman were friends from primary school days, she was sure what happened was an accident and not a deliberate act of cheating.
She then told me that I needed to decide what I wanted to do, but she loved her son and her granddaughter, and if I decided to stay with him, I would need to accept his child.
I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.
She was actually saying to me that it was an accident that he had sex with somebody else, who became pregnant as a result. Can anything be more stupid?
Accidents don’t happen; they are caused, and usually by someone’s thoughtless action.
What ticked me off even more was the fact that she expected me to forgive what happened as if it was just a little thing. But how could it be when a child is involved?
Every time I see that child I would remember that he cheated on me.
For the rest of our lives together that child would always have to be included in any financial plan we come with.
And what about what I want? I never wanted to be with a man who has a child from another woman. That situation is too much drama. I grew up in that environment and I know.
What hurts most, though, is that I never even suspected that he was horning me. He didn’t sneak around or go out more often than usual. We live together, so I would have noticed these things. Besides, my last boyfriend was a big cheat, so I knew what signs to look for.
When he and I talked, he insisted it was a single contact he had with her and not any long-term cheating.
I don’t buy that.
The average woman would not keep a child for a man after just a one-night stand. The only way she would keep it is if she felt that she could get him for herself. So, as far as I am concerned, what she did was deliberate.
And his apology is crap, too. Is he sorry for deceiving me because he was intimate with someone else, all the while giving me the impression that he was in love with me?
Or is he sorry that I had to find out the way I did?
Imagine, he slept next to me while she was carrying their child for nine months in her womb. Since then, nine months passed and he never said a word until he was forced to confess. So how sorry could he be?
His apology means absolutely nothing!
The truth is, though, I feel as if I have no leg to stand on. I hate him for what he did and for hiding it for so long. I would love to get back at him for doing what he did to me.
But I still love him because he has always been there for me through thick and thin. He helped me through some financial and health issues I had, and didn’t have to because we weren’t even involved at the time. But he did it because he is a genuinely nice man with a good heart.
Since his apology, he has returned home – to give me space to think, he said. He still gives me half the rent and pays the electricity bill as usual. He makes no demands on me to make a decision, neither has he said anything to suggest that he wants to call our relationship quits. But I have heard that every day he and his friend are together on evenings playing with the baby at his mother’s house, where the child is kept.
So I have to decide if I should swallow my pride and continue on as if nothing has happened, or just dump him and forget the best relationship I’ve ever had in my life.
That is my problem, and I feel really foolish because I’m not sure what to do.
