Ira writes:
So remember how the
Infidelity episode started with Jessica Pressler of the
Daily Intel blog at NY Magazine? She'd noticed that the
New York Times wedding section sometimes featured couples who got together when one of them cheated on a previous relationship. She wondered what it would be like to be the ex in that situation, to open the paper one day and read the details of the affair.
Well...someone heard that and wrote in. I've deleted identifying details but the story checks out:
I just listened to the podcast of Ep. 393: Infidelity and was particularly struck by the intro, since this exact thing happened to me.
I once upon a time had a girlfriend for five and a half years and then some five years after we broke up, she got married and I discovered (after I'd gone to the wedding) in the New York Times that she had cheated on me with her now-husband.
The operative part of the announcement in the Times was: 'The bride and bridegroom met over the holiday weekend in XXX, when XXX and a friend stayed in Washington as houseguests of Mr. XXX’s oldest friend. XXX and XXX saw each other now and then over the years and even kissed five years later at a wedding. But they were seeing others and were in different cities.'
The guy sent in a work of fiction he'd written about the incident. In it, the protagonist reads the article in the paper, storms in on the bride and groom before the wedding and punches the groom in the face. So there!
In reality, by the time the story appeared in the New York Times, this guy was happily married to someone else. Which, um, takes some of the tension out of the whole thing. He writes: "My own reaction was much more measured than the main character's in the story—to me, it was mostly just a kind of sad postscript to what was (while I was in it) a usually happy relationship."
