For nine years my married lover promised she’d leave her husband and child for me… what happened next destroyed my life, says MAX WOOLDRIDGE

It was a rainy April evening, cool and blustery, and I remember it vividly because that was the night I fell in love with a married woman.

Lauren and I had been seeing each other for a few months at that point. It was 2004 and we’d arranged to meet in our usual place, a bookshop near her flat. When she hadn’t appeared an hour after our designated time, I began to worry she’d decided against it.

And then suddenly there she was. Soaked through and dishevelled, her usually immaculate hair damp and limp. We embraced and I told her she was the most beautiful drowned rat I’d ever seen.

She’d forgotten her umbrella and her mobile phone had run out of battery, she said, apologising profusely. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I replied. ‘How could anyone be annoyed with the gorgeous vision that’s just walked in?’

It was then I knew I was head-over-heels with a woman whose husband was at home waiting for her.

We had met for the first time at a work do at a hotel in west London. She was 5ft 9in with shoulder-length blonde hair. I found her enchanting, flirtatious and funny.

She was 42, I was 38. We seemed to have chemistry, even then.

I resisted the thought of her at first – she was married, after all, and I soon discovered she had an eight-year-old son too. Still, we exchanged a few casual emails – and then an unexpectedly direct message landed in my inbox. Would I cook her supper at my flat in Wimbledon? I can’t pretend I wasn’t thrilled.

Some kind of physical relationship became inevitable. What I hadn’t expected was to fall so madly in love with her and do that thing men accuse women of doing when they have affairs with married men: hang on in there, believing we would eventually be together when all logic and reason insisted we would not.

Did I waste the best years of my life on her, as a ‘histress’ rather than a husband? When I look back I think, yes, I probably did.

Yet being with Lauren was so exhilarating, I found myself utterly unable to end it.

There were times – when I looked at her in a restaurant, face flushed and wine glass in hand, or in the morning when we woke up together – that I felt like the luckiest man alive.

When we kissed she made my heart skip like no one else had. Out in London after work together, our arms linked as we walked, stopping for hugs and kisses along the way, it felt so right, I could forget she was married at all.

She worked from home in rural Hertfordshire but met with clients in the City regularly and had a flat in north London where we often stayed together. Of course, I couldn’t see her as often as I liked.

These joyous times and nights out together were tainted by the fact they would soon come to an end, and during school holidays our relationship simply went on hold. I barely heard from Lauren at all then. Her texts were sporadic and daily email exchanges became more like a weekly catch-up. I expected this but it was still hard to take.

It was when our evenings ended at King’s Cross station, with her boarding a train back to her husband, that I felt my status most keenly. Suddenly alone again after days of intimacy, I often felt hollow and uncertain.

The longer we spent together, the larger the void. As an illicit lover, I had entered a new world, a shadow land governed by secrecy and discretion.

My life was in limbo, waiting for her to make a decision and turn us into a proper couple.

I told a few friends about us, but I mostly kept quiet. A love like ours was easily dismissed as a fraud and not a real relationship.

So many people just didn’t get it. They would say the fact I’d gone for someone apparently unavailable displayed a classic fear of intimacy, even though – within months – I was prepared to commit to Lauren.

All I needed was for her to take the leap too. And there was no question I was led to believe that some day she would.

Across the nine years we were ‘together’, she sent me hundreds of cards – postcards and love notes – some inscribed with pledges like: ‘wait for me’ and ‘I can’t wait until we’re together all the time’.

She kept telling me how much she loved me. There were so many promises and positives to dwell upon. She told me she was unhappy in her marriage and promised, on her son’s life, that she didn’t sleep with her husband any more. My heart warmed when her message inside one Christmas card read: ‘Can we make this the last Christmas we’re apart?’

Social media barely existed at the start of our relationship, and there was no way to ‘dig’ into her life outside of mine, even if I’d wanted to.

In any case, I was the one who got the best bits of her, I was certain. All the edited highlights were mine – the laughter, the smiles, the fun… the sex.

And yet, as thrilling as that was, I found myself hankering after the mundane bits, too – the washing up as we told each other about our day, the meandering walks on a Sunday afternoon. I wanted the private language of proper ‘coupledom’, the rubbish jokes, the endless new ways that two people in love gently humour, even try to annoy, each other.

I wanted a real relationship and was confident it was just a matter of time. And so I waited.

In the meantime, every moment we had together was precious. The time we spent together felt like it was on a clock but, in many ways, the set-up suited my haphazard lifestyle at the time. I was making my living as a travel writer, and went abroad a lot.

But returning home to the UK was always poignant. As I watched others being met at the airport, Lauren was never there to greet me.

As I hit my 40s, I watched friends enter middle age with wives and growing families, and wanted that for myself. I wanted it with Lauren.

I often thought about the women who were in my position. The rational side of my brain knew that people were strung along by married lovers every day. But surely that wasn’t happening to me? Lauren would never take me for a fool like that.

We were in love and she was waiting for the best time to tell her husband. I was sympathetic, she had a very painful decision to make.

Looking back on it now, I realise how naive I was, making excuse after excuse for her. In retrospect I should have given her an ultimatum: it’s him or me.

Why didn’t I? It felt far too risky a move. If I pressured her, I might push her away. The fact was, I loved her too much, and that gave her all the cards. The fear of losing someone I adored seemed to override everything, including my sense of self-respect and even the future I envisaged for myself as a husband and father. Instead I imagined myself a loving stepfather to her son. Just as long as I could be with her.

I was in love with a married woman who loved me back and knew we were meant to be together – or so I thought.

Every time we met I thought she would at last announce she was leaving her husband.

In fact, Lauren was forever saying goodbye – but to me, not to him. Hastily ending our whispered phone calls as soon as her husband or son entered the room. Running to catch her train and barely turning to wave at me. Her eye always on her watch.

And then, unceremoniously, one warm July night in 2013, she revealed that she was leaving – only it was me being dumped, not her husband.

She told me she had met someone else. A much older man, she said. Initially I thought that was perhaps her way of softening the blow, but no, he really was a much older man.

She refused to give any more details or to say whether she was going to leave her husband for this guy, whoever he was. Obviously, it was not just her family she kept secrets from.

I was stunned. Total disbelief. If she had been unhappy in our relationship, she’d hidden it well. Just weeks before, her texts and messages told me how much she missed and loved me. How could I not have seen this coming? How could she do this to me?

For months, I blamed myself for not seeing any signs. For blindly believing we’d be together.

But most of all, I felt immensely sad. Such a huge and important part of my life for almost a decade was suddenly gone.

And then a month or so later I felt angry. When, in an email, she thanked me for our ‘nine happy years’, it felt like a boss expressing gratitude for my long service.

Like many a spurned mistress before me, I decided to tell the spouse. I tracked down an email for her husband and wrote that I had been in a relationship with his wife for many years.

He didn’t respond. Maybe he knew all along? His silence felt dignified – and I began to bitterly regret telling him. He was the innocent party in all this.

In our deceit we had both shown the poor man a complete lack of respect, and I knew he deserved more. Deep down I knew I deserved more, too.

I had messed up big time, and now I had to own my bad decisions. I’d been the ‘other man’ and now I was ‘a man scorned’. All the phrases traditionally applied to women now fell on me. I felt like a thorough fool.

And still I couldn’t claw my way out of it completely.

Despite all of this awful mess, Lauren said she wanted to remain friends – and I was tempted, thinking that if we maintained contact, maybe we could get back together down the line.

Eventually I saw sense, realising that seeing her socially as friends would destroy any hope I had of recovering from my utterly broken heart.

My behaviour afterwards was cliched in other ways too. I began online dating too soon and was endlessly disappointed with the women I met. They were perfectly nice people, but I compared them all to Lauren and thought no one could hold a candle to her.

Indeed in those early months I thought I’d never feel the same way about a woman again. How could I possibly rediscover that chemistry with someone else?

On each date I’d be judging and assessing the woman opposite me not for herself but on all those things I’d loved about Lauren, looking for that same flick of the hair, the smile, the head tilt.

Of course I never found it. But with time comes acceptance.

Perversely, I was able to track my gradual recovery by my reaction to seeing Lauren’s profile on a networking website. Every few months her LinkedIn profile (and photo) flashed up unexpectedly under a People You May Know banner. At first that glimpse of her triggered feelings of anxiety – and literal heart palpitations – but slowly I began to look at it more objectively.

In the end, perhaps 18 months after she ended our affair, I felt almost nothing when I saw her face pop up. Eventually I was even able to smile at it.

Finally, I was ready to start seeing other women, not as Lauren replacements, but as people I might forge a life with that wasn’t built on lies and deception.

Now, more than 20 years after we first met, I’ve no idea what happened to Lauren, whether her marriage survived after my email bombshell or how things turned out with my replacement.

I’m able to view my years as a ‘histress’ rationally, from a distance and not without humour. I still have the occasional regret, I am now 58 and I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be a father to a child of my own, a situation that’s not on the cards now.

But I also know that I simply cannot dismiss as a mistake something that was so special, and someone I spent some of the happiest times of my life with. Writing about it (and weaving the story into a nearly completed novel) has also helped and put a lot into perspective.

It took me a very long time to click with someone again.

Naturally, the first thing I did on my first date with my partner Tessa in the summer of 2022 was to check that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

Although it’s not a perfect relationship (is there such a thing?) there’s a lot of love between us and it works just fine. We met online, and at last I discovered that spark I didn’t think I’d find with anyone again.

At last, too, I am fully integrated into someone’s life, and not living in the shadowy wings of it. Tessa has some wonderful friends and a gloriously amusing grown-up son from a previous relationship with whom I get on well.

We moved in with each other last autumn. There are no time restrictions, no secrets, no urgent and tearful goodbyes on station platforms, no double life and no guilt.

At last, a loving relationship feels like I’d always hoped it would.

• *Names and some details have been changed.