Late Sunday afternoon, 24-year-old grad student Adriana Sheridan said that she is “very interested” in an emotionally destabilizing affair with 52-year-old married professor, Charles Rourke.
“I know that I am younger than one of his daughters and I’d be nothing more than escape from his sexless marriage and failed dreams, but I just feel that it would work out,” said Sheridan, whose father abandoned her family when she was 12 years old.
Sheridan has experienced emotionally volatile and toxic affairs in the past, but regrets that none of them were with married men. “First there was Steve, who was 49 and had never had a relationship longer than three months. Then there was Jude, who had a seven-year engagement that he ended right after wedding invitations were sent. And then there was Trevor, who committed himself to a mental institution after his marriage fell apart because he was secretly renting a separate apartment,” Sheridan listed. “While these stopped my life in its tracks for months, it just didn’t have that edge that comes from ending a marriage.”
“I used to see these admissions as qualities of open men who were willing to be vulnerable with me, but looking back I realize that you can’t really trust a man until he’s made the commitment of marriage, whether to you or someone else,” Sheridan sighed.
Though he has no intention of leaving the safety of his marriage and hesitates to tarnish his image in the community, Rourke admits that were he to pursue an affair with Sheridan, he’d tell her that “She’s woken me up from the emotional coma I was living in,” and “I wish I had married you.”
“But I don’t think she’d take any words that come out of my mouth seriously. I know I certainly wouldn’t.”
“I’d never push for him to get a divorce,” Adriana insists. “I know in my heart that he’d leave her when the timing was right.”
