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Dear Sugars

The Infidelity Episodes: The Other Woman

Dear Sugars

WBUR

Boston, Wbur, Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, Society & Culture, Dear, Relationships, Advice, Steve Almond

4.65.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2016

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sugars return with another installment in the Infidelity Episodes — looking at the often-overlooked experience of the other woman. After the Sugars had taken on the Betrayed and the Betrayers, they received dozens of letters from women struggling to make sense of what it means to be involved in a cheating situation, while being neither the one who cheats nor the one who is cheated upon.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Dear Sugar is supported by...

0:30.0

There's some little sweet days we'd be

0:37.0

I check my bell by every day

0:45.0

Oh, and this sugar, using my way

0:54.0

Steve?

0:55.0

Cheryl

0:56.0

Have you ever been the third point in an infidelity triangle by which I mean the other man?

1:06.0

No, I wanted to, I crushed hard on a married woman and had in fact a beautiful but chilling experience with this woman who I had crushed on for years

1:19.0

And then I went to visit this couple and they were going through a certain kind of upheaval and late one night nothing ever happened but I felt for the first time after the husband had gone to bed

1:31.0

There was a moment that I, you know, have commemorated in some awful poem and thought about for years where I realized that this person who I had psychically been chasing around for so long and coveting was actually because of turmoil within her marriage

1:46.0

I had her marriage ready to have physical sexual contact with me or at least it seemed very clear and I got very frightened and kind of freaked out by it

1:58.0

My bluff was called and I backed away from the situation but it has been rattling around inside for, you know, it still is

2:06.0

It was a real moment of realizing that I was transgressing and unlike many third points I knew both and loved and still loved both of those people

2:16.0

Is that why you backed away because of your your allegiance to the husband?

2:21.0

I think unconsciously what I wanted was to get married and be in a happy marriage and the moment I saw that this happy marriage was like most marriages not so happy

2:32.0

I felt very frightened and disillusioned

2:35.0

What about you?

2:37.0

I've never been in a full-blown affair where I was that other woman, that third point

2:42.0

But I approached it. I had met this really charismatic man who was maybe five or seven years older than me

2:51.0

When I was 19 he was in a poetry class that I took as an undergraduate

2:55.0

His wife at the time when I first met him was just, you know, having a baby and I just had a crush on him

3:00.0

And years passed, maybe five years passed, and I was in the midst of getting divorced from my first husband

...

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