5 Signs You Need to Marry Your Girlfriend

Dating a married man is a rocky road with very few perks. It will be an uphill battle that you will deal with every single day. The reality of dating a married man is the fact that you are not his priority. You are his distraction. You are his comfort. You are his back street girl.

You have low self esteem and you’d like to keep it that way.

The way I love has always been passionate and all-consuming—I give myself over to someone entirely, and I expect the same from them. When I’m into someone, I can’t bear to even consider sleeping with anyone else, and finding out my partner doesn’t feel the same way has been horrifying in the past. The men I’ve dated weren’t cheaters , but they loved flirting with other women, which means much of my romantic history has been filled with frantically scrolling through text messages at 3 a.

Finding one in which they called another woman “gorgeous” made my heart sink into my stomach, and watching them flirt with someone better-looking than me made me feel like an old sack of potatoes. It was never enough for me to be beautiful and loved. I had to be the most beautiful and the most loved. I had to be the only one. So when Sam—a man I befriended more than a year ago—told me flat-out that he was in an open marriage and would like to have an “affair” with me, I laughed and turned him down.