Are Affairs Really About Sex? What I Learned as the Other Woman
Everyone has a theory about why people cheat, and almost all of them start and end with sex. He wasn't getting enough at home. She wanted something new. Keep your partner satisfied and they'll never stray. It's clean, it's simple, and it lets everyone feel safe.
It's also mostly wrong.
I spent years as the other woman, so I've heard every version of the "it was just about sex" theory. This week I sat down with Dr. Marie Murphy, a non-judgmental infidelity coach, and we took the whole thing apart.
Waiting to Be Chosen: What I Learned From Five Years as the Other Woman
Being chosen is something we all want. Not just in relationships. We want to be chosen by friends, by family, in our careers, in every room we walk into. And when we're not, we sit there and pick ourselves apart. What could I have done differently? What was it about me that wasn't good enough? It's a brutal little loop, and almost everyone runs it at some point.
But there's a version of wanting to be chosen that's sharper than the rest, and that's the one that lives inside an affair.
Why People Get Into Affairs (And What's Actually Missing)
Nobody wakes up wanting to be in an affair. I believe that. I believe most of us are good at our core and that, given the choice, we don't want to hurt the people in our lives. And an affair is a very high risk of doing exactly that. So if almost nobody actually wants to be there, why do so many people find themselves in one anyway?
My answer is that something is lacking within. Not just in the marriage. In the person.
What Grief Looks Like When You're the Other Woman Who Ended It
When most people break up, they grieve what they had. The life, the person, the years. You get to mourn something real, something other people watched happen, something you can talk about at dinner.
When you're the other woman and you're the one who ends it, the grief is a different animal. You're grieving him, yes. But you're also grieving everything you imagined and never got to have. And that part is often the harder one, because you can't even point to a memory. You're mourning a future that never existed.
How to Know When You're Ready to End an Affair With a Married Man
Every conversation about being the other woman circles back to him. Getting fed up with his behavior. Fed up with him not choosing you. Fed up with waiting for a call, a plan, a version of him that keeps not showing up. Those feelings are real. I've had every single one of them. But they're not the thing that got me out.
What Nobody Tells You About Waiting as the Other Woman
A couple of months ago I said something on the podcast that I keep coming back to, so I'm going to say it here too.
You are worthy of someone who can be with you 100%, 100% of the time.
When you're in an affair, that's not what you're getting. You're getting whatever he's able to give you. Some days that's a lot. Most days it isn't. It is never 100%.
The Best of The Scarlet Edit: One Year, Seven Women, and the Stories That Stuck With Me
Next week marks one year of The Scarlet Edit, and I wanted to do something a little different to lead into the anniversary episode. So I went back through my guest conversations from 2026 so far and pulled clips from seven women whose stories stuck with me. They're stitched together into one episode, and the whole thing plays like a sampler of what this show has been for the last twelve months.
If you've been listening since the beginning, you'll recognize these voices. If you're new, consider this your invitation to go back through the catalog. Every episode these clips came from is linked in the show notes.
Listener Questions: What I'd Do Differently, How I Date Now, and What I'd Tell the Other Woman
I asked my Instagram followers what they wanted me to talk about that I hadn't covered yet, and the questions that came in were so good I built a whole episode around five of them. This is what happens when you ask a community of women who've been through it what they actually want to know — they don't ask softballs.
So I'm going to walk through the five I picked and what I said in the episode, because some of these answers I had genuinely never said out loud before.
Why Choosing Happiness After an Affair is Powerful
I actively choose happiness and joy every single day. And the more I share that publicly, the more it seems to confuse people.
The other day, a woman I connected with on LinkedIn asked how my year was going. I told her it's been amazing. Her response? "Amazing. That's a strong word." And I thought — yeah, it is. And I chose it on purpose.
