I Didn’t Realize the Power I was Gaining Over Another Man

~ By an Anonymous Contributor

My best friend and her husband moved from another state to our area. We were overjoyed to see each other again and did so frequently as the months passed. Soon, she began to confide to me her intimate problems.

After a broken love affair, she married on the rebound to a man I’ll call John. He was a sailor, funny and handsome. But she despised him. She hated hairy men. His body was repulsive to her. And yet, he was handsome enough, he could have been a movie star and was certainly superior in body build to the average man. She kept thinking of the former man she had loved.Her husband gradually turned from a happy-go-lucky dreamer full of jokes, to a broken man, losing his hair at 27. She pushed him through college, accepted money from her parents and all the while despised him—at best tolerated him. She realized how terrible she had been but said she could never accept him or admire him.

Then, last fall we took the Fascinating Womanhood class together. This helped her some and she quite degrading him. She realized how terrible she had been but also said she could never accept or admire him.
Our two families did a lot of things together. I first unknowingly began admiring him and then with a partial realization admired him and told him so. It is part of my personality to do this, but with our being together so much it had a real drawing power. He dearly loved his wife and had craved her admiration for years—now he was getting the “bread of his soul,” only from the wrong woman.

I didn’t realize what was happening until our second Fascinating Womanhood course when we had the lesson on admiration and learned that one of the effects is to promote a man falling in love with you. That night, I really became panicky as I fully realized what I had done. John also began to realize that our relationship was causing him to much emotional conflict and that he must do something to cut it off, but he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

When I took his wife home one day, he carried some things out to the car and then asked if I would like him to back the car out for me. He seemed to have something on his mind so I let him. But he didn’t get out of the car and began to talk.

It was a personal conversation and I was uneasy, but every time I suggested he got in, he began to talk about something else. He put his hand on my shoulder and then on the back of my neck as we were talking. Finally, after 35 minutes and knew his wife must be too. He kissed me and gently said, “Good-bye.”

I drove home confused. After going to bed I became progressively nauseated and remained so all night. I tried to re-hash the evening but every time I thought even of John’s name, I became so ill I felt I would die. But if I thought of my husband, I felt uneasiness. I kept feeling sicker. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning I finally said, “God, I beg of you, please take away this emotional involvement with John. I can see it’s not in your plan for me.”

In the morning, John called. We decided where each of us had failed and decided on a separation of our families. John said he was sorry for his actions but added, “I couldn’t help it.” I knew what he meant. He was a man with a hungry soul and I had fed his soul. Truly, Fascinating Womanhood is a power. But a woman can bring only sorrow by using it on someone else’s husband. I thought I could round out his life by giving him something he was missing, but it sure doesn’t work that way.

When his wife realized she almost lost him, she began to appreciate what she had. She forgot about the man in the past that she loved, and began to feed John’s soul. And the nausea I felt—I realized was caused by guilt. It is a nausea of the soul. When combined with the nausea of the body it gives a sensation of doom that makes one want to call on the rocks and mountains to fall on you and get it over with.
Thank you Fascinating Womanhood, for teaching me these principles.

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