In a situation like that, there is no happy medium. You can't make everyone happy so the best thing you can do is just work on making yourself happy. That doesn't mean at other peoples expense and I really don't think that's the case anyway. You can't help who you fall in love with. The fact that she takes the burden of being the one that "ruined their marriage" is completely unfair. I don't think you can ruin a happy marriage. If he wanted to stay married he would have. I think the relationship just happened at an inconvenient time.
When I first met my husband, he was married at the time. We became friends through quite a few mutual friends but there was sincerely nothing there at the time. We went out to lunch together with several other friends because we all worked together and had the same schedule. We spoke briefly on myspace on a few occasions. I never had his phone number and he never had mine. The night he actually asked his wife for a divorce he got my phone number from a friend and sent me a text message.
When he split with his now ex-wife, he started staying with a mutual friend. Myself, along with roughly 5 other friends, spent a lot of time at this persons house. This wasn't the least bit unusual considering we all spent a lot of time at that house long before his split with his wife. At the time I had 2 roommates who were out of town for a couple of weeks and he was sleeping on a very uncomfortable couch (or the floor) of our friends basement. I offered him a free bed and he took it.
The immediate reaction was awful. I hate to go into details about it because it was well over a year ago and I feel like his ex-wife and I have actually established somewhat of a descent friendship, if you want to call it that, considering how we started but.. I got some pretty nasty myspace message. Most of them basically consisted of calling me a homewrecker and saying that the problems hadn't started until I came along, that I had no right to text or flirt with him, etc..
By the time my husband and I were actually in somewhat of an unofficial relationship, most of his family knew about me and absolutely despised me. At one point I gave him a ride to pick up some stuff from his ex in a parking lot. I had originally planned to drive him to his car and let him drive there alone but it was at work and the parking lot wasn't far so he told me to just go there. I sat in the car and said nothing, I didn't even look at her. As we were pulling out to leave an SUV came barreling in and parked, blocking us in, I thought I was seriously going to hit it. His Aunt jumped out of the vehicle and came up to his window, screaming at the top of her lungs about how he left his family for a "piece of ass," she called him every name in the book, and said that I would never be welcome in their family.
His dad refused to meet me for the first few months we were together. He had some mail he had to pick up at his dads so we rode up there together. I, again, stayed in the car. His dad didn't so much as look at me, despite the fact that he was standing right in front of my car. I think a lot of that was half because of how we got together and the other half because of how I looked (at the time I had hot pink hair, several piercings, and of course my visible forearm tattoo.)
This went on for a while. His ex posted myspace blogs giving detailed accounts about how she felt about the situation and how the divorce was going. Most included comments about "his new girlfriend" and how I'd never be welcome around her child. They made him look like a horrible person and me look just as bad. It was made out to be like he left his wife and child for some sort of college type party life and some new piece of ass. That was far from the truth. Because of the posts that were made publicly on myspace, a lot of the friends he shared with his ex took her side and immediately hated me. He lost friends like that.
We both drank a lot in the beginning, I guess to deal with the stress.. I never cared much for what people thought but it gets exhausting biting your tongue to keep the peace. Which is exactly what I did. I never posted anything on my myspace to counter-act what she was posting. I never spoke to his family about it. I never defended myself to anyone that was whispering behind my back. I never told the people calling me a homewrecker that he was actually "my first." Out of all the messages I received from his ex I replied to only one. Simply saying that I really didn't think it was my place to discuss their divorce or our relationship with her, that she'd have to talk to him. I think this actually pissed her off more but those weren't my intentions.
We've been married for almost a year now (January 9th) and I get along fine with his family.. Other than that Aunt that jumped out of the SUV. His ex-wife and I get along. The three of us actually took my step-daughter trick-or-treating together right before Halloween. I'll admit, it took a long time for everything to calm down but it did eventually happen..
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