Behind his wedding ring

This book is not about villains.

It is not about perfect wives, selfish husbands, reckless lovers, or women waiting helplessly for men who belong somewhere else. It is not a guide to what anyone should do, and it does not try to decide which kind of love is respectable enough to deserve a place in the world.

It is about complicated love.

The twelve women in these stories love men who are already committed to someone else. Some of those men remain married. Some do not. Some of the women want more. Some deliberately do not. Some discover that secrecy is unbearable, while others find that distance, independence, or limitation is part of what allows the relationship to exist at all. Some wives know. Some do not. Some relationships survive exposure. Others change when fantasy becomes everyday life.

There is no single lesson connecting these stories, because there is no single truth about relationships like these.

We are often taught to speak about affairs in simple categories. One person is betrayed. Another is guilty. Someone is selfish. Someone is foolish. Someone must leave. Someone must choose. There is often truth inside those words, but rarely the whole truth.

Human relationships are usually less obedient.

A person can love two people differently. Someone can remain in a marriage for reasons that cannot be reduced to fear or convenience. A woman can love a married man without wanting to become his wife. A relationship can contain genuine tenderness and still cause pain. A marriage can contain love and still contain distance. An affair can be selfish in one moment and deeply caring in another.

Contradiction does not automatically make a feeling false.

That is the territory of this book.

The women you are about to meet are not presented as examples to imitate or warnings to avoid. They are simply women making choices inside imperfect circumstances. Sometimes they understand themselves. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they remain. Sometimes they ask for change. Sometimes they discover that the thing they thought they wanted would not make them happy after all.

And sometimes they simply love.

The question running quietly through these pages is not whether every affair is right or wrong.

It is something more uncomfortable:

Can a love be real even when the relationship around it is complicated?

Perhaps there is no answer that applies to everyone.

Maybe that is precisely the point.

Love does not always arrive at the correct time. It does not always choose an available person. It does not always lead toward marriage, shared houses, public photographs, anniversaries, or a conventional ending. Sometimes it enters lives that are already full.

What people do with that love is another question entirely.

These twelve stories are about that question.

Not about permission.

Not about condemnation.

About the women living inside it.

And about the possibility that a love story does not need to be simple in order to be true.

- Tanja Muriel Louise Seifert