Secrets

by: Mark Macapagal

About a year or so ago, while I was still in the States, a former officemate, who was also a good friend of mine, took me aside because she wanted to talk about something rather troubling for her. Over coffee, she related to me that she had started seeing a married man and that the stress of it was wearing her own. “Mark, you can’t even begin to understand how difficult it is,” she said to me. “You’re right Jean, I can’t,” I replied. “Because honestly, I think it’s the easiest and most wonderful thing in the world.”

She looked at me incredulously but saw that I was dead serious in my statement. I mean, sure, there’s a lot of stress when you’re involved with someone you shouldn’t be. Your mind is in a constant dilemma because you are always asking yourself, “Why am I even doing this?” But see, I know that at the same time, it is also probably the single most exciting and passionate thing you could get into.

Being with someone you shouldn’t be creates that wonderful sense of, “Oh, I must truly and utterly be in love.” You tell yourself that you must really be crazy about someone if you’re willing to do all the hiding, all the sacrificing, all the inner turmoil just to steal a moment or two together. You must really be in love to have this shared secret.

The stress? It’s real and it’s not. First, it’s not really real. In the States, who cares if you’re carrying on in an affair? Your parents are nowhere in sight and even if they were, they don’t have a hold on your life. Your friends won’t judge you since they have even less of a hold on you than your parents. The only people that should care are the three people involved. But second, it’s also real because oftentimes, it’s the stress that becomes the aphrodisiac for all that happens.

Everything you do together is suddenly magnified a hundred times over because of that sense of doing something wrong but that feels so good. Each brush of the hand, each touch of the cheek, you look into each other’s eyes and tell yourselves silently that it’s just the both of you against the world. It’s an amazing feeling. Those of you out there in great relationships, trust me, you’ll never understand it yourself until you get that taste of danger on your lips.

So I told her to see it through. Half the reason why she wanted to talk to me, she said, was that she knew I was the only friend she had that wouldn’t judge her; and I didn’t. I left her with the rather cryptic words, “See it through, and the answer will come to you.”

Now the reason I brought this up now is because out of the blue, over a year later, that friend of mine called me up here, international long distance, over the weekend. She began by saying, “Well Mark, I don’t know if you were right or wrong. It’s been over for a while but I’m glad you didn’t just tell me to stop having the affair. Your little speech just always hung in my head and made me check myself all the time.”

In the end, she told me, she kept finding herself alone in hotel rooms as the guy went back to his family. At which point, I told her honestly, “That’s immaterial, do you love him? Because if you do, you should stay with him.”

What she said truly surprised me. She went, “Actually Mark, you’re not looking at it right. Whether I loved him or not, that’s what’s immaterial. It doesn’t matter if I love him because that can change and I can move on. I left because I love myself, and that’s something that should never change."