Confronting the Other Woman – Should You?
So you’ve found your guy cheating and after contemplating serious bodily harm, you’ve either decided to stay with him or you’ve left his no-good lying, dirty rotten, behind in the dust, but you’re still upset about the other woman.
If you are like most women, you obsess over her. You wonder if she’s prettier than you, better in bed than you, funnier than you…on and on it goes, a million thoughts constantly invade your brain and no matter what you do, you can’t make them stop.
Just like most women, you probably also think about confronting her. You’ve probably got a thing (or ten!) that you’d like to tell her, and really, who can blame you?
But, even after all the hell that you’ve been through, you still have some common sense left, and a part of you wonders if confronting the other woman is the right thing to do.
There’s a few things that you may want to think about before deciding whether a confrontation is what’s right for you:
1. How is the confrontation going to benefit you? Right now, you’ve got to make your yourself your very top priority. Is talking to this woman going to give you closure? Is it going to make you feel better? Now ask yourself if you’ll still feel better if she won’t answer your questions? Or worse, how will it make you feel if she goes into intimate detail about her relationship with your husband? You can’t control how she reacts to you – so if her reaction, or lack of one, is going to cause you more pain, then a confrontation may not be the best option.
2. Was she a friend? I think that it’s important to remember that, unless the other woman was a friend of yours, she really didn’t have any obligation to you. Your husband, on the other hand, did. A lot of my friends get really mad at the other woman, while letting their husbands almost completely off the hook, making excuses like, “That’s what men do.” What?!?! In my world, men who do that end up on curbs. But, seriously, don’t shift blame from your husband to this other woman. If you are planning on confronting her because you think “it’s all her fault,” it may not be the best thing to do. On the other hand, if she was a friend of yours, then she, too, had an obligation not to sleep with your husband. In that case, a confrontation is almost unavoidable.
3. Is your husband still seeing her? If you are planning a confrontation to get her to stop seeing your husband, it’s probably not a wise idea. Seriously, if your husband is still cheating on you, do you really want him back? If you do, it’s time to think about your motives and to spend some time working on your self-esteem.
I guess I made it sound as if confronting the other woman is never a good idea, and I don’t necessarily think that. There are times when a confrontation may be a good thing. If it’s going to help you in your healing process, then by all means, tell her how her involvement with your husband affected your life. Just don’t set your expectations very high – meaning, she’s not likely to see the situation the same way as you do.
If you’ve decided to confront her, it’s also smart to think about how you’ll do it before you run off and start a fight. Writing a letter or an email may be better than a face-to-face confrontation because it will allow you to say what you want to say without any interruption. Another benefit is that it will allow you to actually think about what you are saying before it all comes flying out of your mouth. If you are anything like me…that’s a serious benefit!
Has your husband cheated on you? Did you know the other woman? Did you confront her? How did it go? We’d love to hear about it!