"I was the other woman. Now I'm the wife"

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It's not my belief that you set out be the other woman. No one, I think, chooses to be thought of as slut, homewrecker, or "other," but then there is a moment that each one of us can recognize as defining. I certainly never imagined I'd fall in love with a married man, but I did.

With me it only took one smile accompanying a quick handshake and hello to cement my future and fate. John was new to our IT department, and so we were co-workers in a sense but only spent a limited amount of time together. We didn't share office space, but we did see one another from time to time, in the hallways, quick conversations in the cafeteria that turned into longer talks in the parking lot over the course of a year of getting to know each other. Our relationship steadily progressed instead of taking a running start.

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My friends supported and warned me in equal measure. My family wanted me to be happy and worried that I would come to resent being a second choice. But my heart knew that it had found a mate, and after all our discussions when it realized this man knew all about me and loved me because, and in some cases in spite of, it. From that moment on, we were that couple. The ones with a secret. The people you never thought you'd become. The couple that sneaks around, makes phone calls early in the morning or very late at night. Dating was hard enough for normal couples, but we were Catholics, co-workers in a company that frowned upon fraternizing, and he was married. We were like the trifecta of what not to do.

I wasn't always comfortable with the names I was being called behind my back even if I knew they were true. And I wasn't happy when I felt the need to explain and defend our relationship over and over again to people who had no business asking in the first place.

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