The other woman is licking her wounds.
This week, Gordon Ramsay's self-proclaimed mistress Sarah Symonds announced that she’s asked Jamie Jungers, Tiger Woods’s alleged No. 4, to join her support network, Mistresses Anonymous.
The group hosts daily forums in online chat rooms and also features webcast roundtables hosted by Ms. Symonds. Over bottled water, the “recovering other women” rant against men who concealed their other mistresses and ultimately stuck with their wives – men who “get their cake and eat it too.”
Hardly the cunning femmes fatales portrayed in pop culture, the mistresses often appear dazed, speaking of themselves as victims who yearn to break free from the cycle of chasing after unavailable men.
Mistress support groups have also appeared on websites such as ExperienceProject.com and Tribe.com. Here, the women speak of hardships such as Christmas, which they must spend alone, as well as the "forbidden subject" – asking a man when he will divorce his wife.
The emerging picture is that of mistress as naïf, not scheming predator.
“I never hear from women who are having a great time,” Ms. Symonds said in an interview this week.
The self-appointed “infidelity analyst” and author of Having an Affair? A Handbook for the Other Woman has said she’s had a string of affairs, including a seven-year romp with the Hell’s Kitchen chef and another with Tory peer Lord Jeffrey Archer.
“I’ve lived this life myself and it’s absolutely toxic. At the end of the day … the man is having it all. He’s having the best out of two women whereas we’re sharing half of one man,” she said.
When activity in her chat rooms spiked over Christmas and the New Year, Ms. Symonds wasn’t surprised: “They are times when women are reflecting and saying they don’t want to put up with these dead-end situations any more.”
Websites such as ExperienceProject.com, which lets members post their stories anonymously, are filled with mistresses consoling each other. On forums entitled “I am in love with a married man,” they agonize over the ever-present wife, but also fret that their philandering lovers will cheat on them if they ever do leave the spouse for good.
“I get absolutely NOTHING from this man,” writes the aptly named bathsheba13 in her post “Cried a river.”
Some of the women are jaded, repeating as their refrain, “All good men are taken.” Others are more hopeful, if somewhat misguided: “I have decided to make a five-year-or-less plan,” justysmom writes, “to become the best me I can be and maybe than [sic] I will be enough for him, or maybe once I realize my true potential I won't even want him any longer.”
Not surprisingly, whiny mistresses get little public sympathy.
“These women sound like spoiled brats,” said Elizabeth Abbott, a historian and author whose most recent book, A History of Marriage, completes a trilogy about relationships that also includes A History of Mistresses.
“This is like having a support group because you ran around the block for 100 hours and got tired. It’s a silly thing.”
Dr. Abbott sees a major distinction between support group mistresses and the “savvy” mistresses of yore, kept women who enjoyed lavish love affairs. As with Mr. Woods’s mistresses, many of the women going online to bemoan their treatment at the hands of married men are “very low-maintenance,” and appear to be calling few, if any, of the shots.
“It’s not a traditional mistress,” Dr. Abbott said. “It’s a very modern thing. They’re not supported by him, they don’t see him regularly.”
Ms. Jungers, for instance, told the Today Show that Mr. Woods refused to help out with her rent payments: “I didn’t even get a birthday card,” she recalled flatly.
