Hell Finally Froze Over- I Watched an Oprah Episode

I never thought the day would come, but it has. I actually Tivo'd an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show and watched a good portion of it. The topic was "The Other Woman Tells Her Side of the Story," which for some reason piqued my interest. It was a diverse group of women except that they were all very good looking; it was not hard to see how they could have gotten into relationships, illicit or otherwise. Each of them seemed fairly articulate. If I were married and discovered that any of these women were "the other woman," it would not surprise me because they obviously had something attractive.

I think what happens more commonly is that the "other woman" is not some knockout or paragon of wit and that is what makes it more difficult for the wife to understand- the "what does she have that I don't" factor, because the immediate reaction to hearing of the existence of "another woman" is usually something right along those lines. And if the answer is not obvious, then...Having been privy to situations like that, I can say that it is bad enough to have someone cheat, but if it is done with someone who is less intelligent or attractive than yourself, it feels like even more of an insult.

This excludes the revenge cheating, the boredom cheating, and such relationships. These described in the program were mainly women who did not know the man was married, and we don't really ever discover- perhaps the women themselves don't know- what led the men to them in the first place, other than apparently the "men are slime" gene. I like to think that there would be a more complex reason behind why a man pursues a woman (as in these cases) when he clearly is not at liberty to do so, other than the fact that "he is a man." That is pretty simplistic and demeaning to men.

Aside from those criticisms, it was a fairly well balanced view and I did not feel as horrified with myself as I expected.