An Affair To Remember.(extramarital affairs)

After her husband betrayed her, Isabel Gillies thought her life would fall apart. It only got better.

My husband, and the father of my children, fell in love with someone else and chose another life over ours.

She was the new, young philosophy professor at a small Midwestern college, where he also taught. She looked like Audrey Hepburn. After years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then the Midwest, where one can wear an L.L. Bean fleece to dinner and nobody bats an eye, my New York Citygirl appearance had given way to that of a slightly overweight jeans-and-a-sweater mom. She wore Marc Jacobs. She was funny. She became my friend. Then she became our sons' stepmother.

I think he fell in love with someone better suited to him and went for it. It was a bold move. Brazen. Who leaves their family? Who leaves the perfectly nice, perfectly smart mother of his children? Who dares to break the norm? He did something that would prove to be wildly unpopular. It broke apart our family. It ruined happiness.

Soon after we married and had our first son, in December 2001, we decided to follow his dream of becoming a tenured professor over mine of making a living as an actress. At eighteen, I had a role in Metropolitan, a pioneering independent film that became kind of a cult hit. I did a bunch of commercials. I landed a recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a part I still have. But let's face it: I was no Meryl Streep, and Josiah* was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard and had a true love and great talent for teaching.

Academic life seemed like a better bet for us. It was sturdynot much money but lots of perks. Long summers, child-friendly hours in vibrant college towns where we could afford a rambling old house with rosebushes tangled in the front yard. We would always be surrounded by youth and intelligence. Leaving New Yorkand all my friends and familywould be hard, but I was malleable and extroverted enough to make friends and carve out a life wherever academia took us.

So we sold our two-bedroom apartment on West Seventy-ninth Street and spent a couple of itinerant years in various locales while Josiah completed his dissertation. After a year as a lecturer at an Ivy League college, he landed a coveted tenure-track poetry job at a small Midwestern liberal arts school, and in the late summer of 2004, we moved.