A Bond Forged by a Betrayal

Why a woman is not a woman’s worst enemy

Kintsugi is a Japanese art wherein broken pieces of ceramic are restored using powdered gold. The idea is to celebrate brokenness instead of hiding it; to take something damaged and put it back together in a way that makes it even more beautiful than before. I found the thought both inspiring and comforting. The idea of broken pieces becoming whole again is something I need to hold on to at this point in my life.

While writing my last column, I realised that the Kintsugi-isation of my scars had started. And the golden powder putting me back together is the woman who Mr Two Years was cheating on me with. Or the woman who Mr Two Years was cheating on, with me. Or who, in popular racy fiction, is known as The Other Woman.

Logically, OW and I shouldn’t want to acknowledge each other’s existence. While it’s one thing to know and accept how utterly foolish both of us were in trusting a man we’d been repeatedly warned about, it’s another thing to be constantly reminded of one’s stupidity. OW should make me want to cringe; she’s a living, breathing reminder of how the last two years of my life have been an utter sham. And yet, she doesn’t. Oddly enough, over the past month, we’ve become each other’s go-to person.

When you come out of a relationship as suddenly as I did, it takes a while before your mind and body find its new normal. Immediately after the breakup, there were mornings, when, in the few seconds before I’d regain complete consciousness, my hand would reach for my phone and type a message for him. It was muscle memory. But then, just before hitting ‘send’, I’d remember everything. The lies, the hurt, the mind games, the money games… all of it. There have been times I’ve wanted to call and hear his voice, because I never got the chance to prepare myself for his absence. We didn’t go from good to bad to ugly to awful to walking away from each other. I went to bed one night with proclamations of love and woke up in the morning to his ugly truth revealed to me by a woman I was wary of.

According to a 2010 study by Oxford University, with every new partner you lose about two close friends. I lost a lot more. Friends who I started seeing less and less of until we almost lost touch, because their invitations were never extended to him; friends I cut out over derogatory comments about him. Some of these friends have welcomed me back with open arms, relieved that I’m back to the world I belong. But there are friendships lost forever. When I tell my friends what happened, the standard response is, “But what did you expect? You knew you should’ve trusted him only as far as you could throw him.” And I have to make my peace with that response because I can’t explain why I trusted him.

With OW, I don’t have to explain. She knows. When, in my frustration, I ask her, “But how did he even make the time? How did his lies not unravel sooner?” she knows what I’m talking about. She doesn’t have the answers either, but not having the answers together is somehow better than not having them alone. It makes me feel a little less foolish knowing that I wasn’t the only one who was taken in by his lies. 

All of last month, each time either of us has wanted to vent our feelings, we’ve called each other. It’s almost like he’s a college paper and we’re comparing notes, filling the gaps in each other’s timeline. In the course of our conversations, we’ve found out about times we were both in his bed within hours of each other; of dates that ended with his “going back to work”, when, in reality, he was coming home to one of us; of ‘I love you’ messages ‘sent to all’; of the untruths he made either of us believe of the other. Some of it is downright disturbing—I’ve spent a lot of time with my head bent over the washbasin, vomiting my guts out—but the details have also helped loosen the hold of memories. They keep me from giving in to those errant moments of weakness and confusion when I still look for some truth in our time together.

The day this column goes to press is the day I met him for the first time, two years ago. OW and I will be celebrating that night, because while we may have lost a fake lover and terrible friend each, both of us are walking away with what will hopefully be a lifelong friendship, which is more than what he’ll ever have. They say that a woman is a woman’s worst enemy. Whoever believes such nonsense needs to meet OW and me for a drink.

betrayalenemywoman