Why You Should Let Your Girlfriend Hang Out With Your Mistress

I should be clear: I don’t actually have a mistress. At least not a traditional mistress, that is.

 A few months later and the addition of a wagon to the garage, we were slowly but surely building another car. As these things go, the project turned more into slowly than surely.

Meanwhile, the girlfriend was bored with taking hundreds of pictures to capture just the perfect angle on my turns and waiting through cold Saturdays on an expired airport tarmac to support me and announced that she wanted to start driving – you know, to get seat time, so she’d be ready to race once her car was done. While I’d heartily encouraged her to drive, I had no idea how I’d take sharing the car during my weekend adventures. What was I going to say “No, I didn’t really mean that you could hang out with my mistress, I only offered in an effort to keep you happy and never thought you’d take me up on it”?  Off to the races we went.

It turns out that hanging out with the Mistress and the Girlfriend, as scary as that sounds, is actually pretty fun. Not only have we improved our communications (the girlfriend and I)– albeit, it was far from perfect in the beginning and there was some raised tempers (again the girlfriend), but we’ve really had a great time (Jane and I).

The girlfriend gets the sport, understands the issues with the car, has much better grasp of why jack stands are never far from the car and has actually been helpful in fine tuning the new suspension. Just a few weeks ago at a practice/suspension tune day, I was standing on the track taking my turn as the cone-flipper-backover-guy and the girlfriend went all the way around the showcase in a full sideways drift and punched it onto the straightaway –I thought to myself ‘damn I got that car really tuned and man she’s a keeper’ (both the Girlfriend and the car).  I might even go so far as to say that all of our relationships (Me, Jane and the Girlfriend) are better for this ménage ‘a trios.

Of course the car that we’re building for her hasn’t even hit the ground and she’s already planning an engine/trans swap and trying to figure out how she’s going to get more horses. Suddenly it’s a bit like when the Mafioso’s wife finds out about the mistress and the credit card starts smoking.