By By Sola Adebawo
There were many reactions to my last week’s article on Side Chicks and the Shortening of Men’s Lives. This one is the viewpoint of a nameless side chick. I hope you find it engaging:
EARLIER ARTICLE: https://stonixnews.com/side-chicks-and-the-quiet-shortening-of-mens-lives/
This is not a rebuttal in the combative sense. It is a testimony. One voice from inside an arrangement that often speaks only through gossip, outrage, or moral certainty. I am not here to justify the lifestyle. I am here to explain how one arrives in it, how one survives it, and why it feels coherent for as long as it does.
I am not proud in the way people expect pride to look. I am not ashamed either. I exist somewhere in between, in that uncomfortable middle space where life often actually happens.
I am a side chick to a married man. That sentence alone is enough for many people to stop reading. I know how it sounds. I know the labels waiting in the wings. Home wrecker. Desperate. Immoral. Foolish. I’ve heard them all, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted. What rarely happens is curiosity. So this is not a plea for sympathy. It is simply my account, from inside the room everyone else describes from the outside.
I did not set out to love a married man. No little girl grows up dreaming of borrowed time and hidden phone calls. I met a man who was present, attentive, emotionally fluent in ways I had not experienced before. When I learned he was married, the story had already begun. People love to believe there is always a clean moment to walk away. Real life is rarely that generous.
He spoke of a marriage that still existed on paper but not in spirit. A home that functioned like a corporation. Shared duties, shared history, no shared intimacy. I know this is the oldest explanation in the book. I also know that marriages do die quietly long before they are pronounced dead in public. I did not break his marriage. I walked into the space it had already abandoned.
One of the most common assumptions about women like me is that we are delusional. That we are waiting to be chosen, rescued, promoted. That we sit around imagining weddings that were never promised. That has never been my story. I knew the boundaries from the beginning. I chose within them. There is a strange kind of dignity in clarity, even when the clarity is uncomfortable.
I am often told I am being used. That I am a victim who just doesn’t know it yet. This one always makes me pause. What does being used mean when you are conscious, consenting, and emotionally aware? I am not coerced. I am not confused about his limitations. I do not hand over my agency in exchange for affection. I show up because I choose to, not because I am trapped.
There is also the assumption that I take more than I give. That I siphon joy from a marriage while offering nothing of consequence. The truth is less dramatic. I give emotional presence without demanding permanence. I listen without requiring ownership. I care without asking to be centered in his public life. That does not make me superior. It makes the relationship what it is. Narrow, specific, and contained.
People like to frame morality as a neat ledger. Marriage equals good. Affairs equal evil. Desire is messy. Loneliness is inconvenient. Real people do not always behave in ways that make for clean moral arithmetic. I am not claiming moral innocence. I am saying that absolutism often flattens human complexity into something unrecognisable.
What about his wife, people ask. This is the hardest question, and the one I take seriously. I do not celebrate her pain. I do not pretend my presence is neutral. I also do not accept full responsibility for a situation built long before I arrived. A marriage is a private ecosystem. Outsiders can enter, but they rarely create the original dysfunction. Accountability, in my mind, belongs first to the vows that were made.
There is an honesty in my position that people overlook. I am not pretending this is a fairy tale. I am not posting curated photos or playing the role of the perfect partner. There are no lies about the future. No false performances for society. Everything exists in its proper scale. Limited. Temporary. Real.
If I am honest with myself, part of what keeps me here is not romance at all. It is safety. Emotional safety. Financial steadiness. The quiet relief of not having to carry life alone during a demanding season. These are not poetic reasons, but they are truthful ones. Survival often dresses itself up as love, and love sometimes borrows the language of survival.
I know this arrangement will end. All borrowed things do. I am not naive about time. What I resist is the idea that a relationship must be permanent to be meaningful, or socially endorsed to be valid. Some connections are chapters, not entire books. They still matter while they last.
It was after reading last week’s article that the limits of this thinking became harder to ignore. I read it slowly. Then I read it again, less defensively. Somewhere between the lines, I recognised myself. Not as a villain, not as a victim, but as a participant in a story that costs more than it ever seems to give.
Because the truth is this life is improper. It is unsustainable. And no matter how carefully it is explained or rationalised, it leaves bruises. Some visible. Some delayed. Some carried quietly by people who never consented to the arrangement at all.
Being a side chick does not only sit in the shadows of a marriage. It stretches itself across lives. Across wives who feel absence before they can name it. Across children who sense tension they are too young to decode. Across men who live divided, carrying secrecy like a second job. And yes, across women like me, who learn too late that borrowed intimacy exacts interest.
There is regret here. Not the loud, theatrical kind. The quieter sort that comes with recognition. The kind that understands that choice does not cancel consequence, and agency does not erase harm. I can acknowledge that I chose this path and still admit that it diminishes everyone it touches, including me.
Being a side chick has taught me uncomfortable things about myself. That I value presence more than promises. That I can hold contradiction without collapsing. That judgment from strangers hurts less than dishonesty with myself.
You don’t have to agree with my choices. I am not asking you to. I am asking you to understand that behind the label is a thinking, choosing, feeling human being. Not a caricature. Not a cautionary tale.
This is my side of the story. Not to absolve myself. But to tell the truth as fully as I now understand it.
Just a woman living inside a complicated truth, doing the
best she can with the emotional tools she has.
What's your reaction?
