Yours Truly by Murray Watts

Author:Murray Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780281080953
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Love Affair

A young woman discovered that her husband was having an affair. She asked him how he could have done this to her and he said, ‘This would never have happened if you had loved me enough. This is your fault as well as mine.’

She ran out of the house in terrible distress until, at last, she came to her parents’ house. She poured her story out to her mother, who put her arm round her and said, ‘You must try to win him back. You must buy better clothes, start wearing more make-up and take much better care of yourself. A man doesn’t want a woman who looks dull and dreary. That is why he has started to look elsewhere.’

In anger and despair, the young woman walked away from her parents’ house, weeping even more bitterly. A friend saw her staggering along the street and took her by the hand. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ she said. ‘What dreadful thing has happened to you?’

The woman could not speak for a long while, so the friend made her sit down on a park bench. ‘Calm yourself,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything.’

The woman poured out her story once again and explained how her husband had met a younger woman at work and had been secretly having an affair for two years.

‘He’s a wicked and selfish man,’ said her friend. ‘You must get your own back on him. Have an affair yourself and he will soon see what he has lost.’

‘I love him,’ said the young woman. ‘There is no one else I want.’

‘He will never come back to you,’ said her friend, ‘unless you treat him in exactly the same way that he treated you. Then he will come running.’

The woman left her friend in great confusion and, everywhere she looked, there were handsome men in the street, glamorous posters and alluring images on magazine covers. The whole world seemed to be shouting, ‘You’re still young. There are plenty of other men, it’s time you took your revenge.’ She was so overwhelmed by the clamour of her thoughts that she wandered into an empty church and sat down on a pew deep in shadow.

She cried quietly for a long time until a kindly priest came up to her. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said, ‘but you seem to be in trouble. Is there anything I can do to help?’

Reluctantly, she told the priest what had happened and why she was now sitting alone in such great sorrow. He shook his head. ‘This is one of the most painful things that can happen to anyone and there are no easy answers. But you must learn to forgive him, because we have all committed great sins, even if they are just in our hearts, and no one is innocent.’ He went on to tell her the story of the woman taken in adultery in John’s Gospel and how all her accusers had left one by one, convicted of their own sin. ‘You must not condemn your husband,’ he said.

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