Relationships and what ifs

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It's funny today I was thinking about this guy I liked before I got with my current boyfriend. I started thinking about how some things turn out for the best. The other guy was a really good friend. He was from Louisiana and I'm from Ohio, but he was in the air force and stationed in Maryland. He made a stop over to see me once, and we talked frequently over the phone. He told me about any and everything, and he liked that I listened to him. We were once on the phone for almost 9 hours. He told me he had never talked to anyone the way he did to me. He liked me a little more than I liked him. I wasn't willing to give up everything to be with him the way he wanted me to, which is why things didn't happen between us. He always told me if I lived by him we would have been married already. He would go awhile without calling me, and I would start moving on and then out of no where he would call me again. It's like he sensed me moving on or something. This went on for awhile off and on. We had the whole conversation of me not wanting to uproot my life for him, because while he was a good friend and I cared about him I wasn't in love with him, not enough to be willing to move anywhere far away from my family to be with him. After he visited me we had talked for a few weeks and then I hadn't heard from him. A few months later I started taking to my current boyfriend, and we became friends and we talked for about a year before we started going out. Sure enough my first date with my boyfriend I get a call from the other guy during our date, but of course I don't answer it and ignore it. I go home from my date and I check the message on my voicemail and there is this guy asking me to call him whenever I got it so I did. I wanted to see what he wanted because it had been almost a year since I had heard from him. I told him I had a boyfriend, I wasn't falling into that trap again. I wanted something that was real and not in passing. Then the guy tells me he is getting married, and he has this sound in his voice like he wasn't sure about it like he wanted me to convince him not to or something, but I shrugged it off and wished him good luck. I didn't feel jealous, I didn't feel much of anything. I had moved on, and I assumed he had too. I had talked to him a few times after that as a friend. He was stationed in Iraq, and he would message me on occasion and I asked about his wife and he asked me about my boyfriend and my at the time soon to be born son. Then we would stop talking for another year or so. Then one day I get a message from him, and we started talking. He told me about his son and his wife, and I told him about my son and my boyfriend. I mean I just thought we were old friends catching up, because I no longer felt anything but friendship for him, and I thought it was the same on his end. He did tell me he had changed a lot he had stopped drinking, he used to call me drunk all the time and once serenaded me with some Elvis songs. We both loved oldies. We had a lot in common, so it was easy to be friends with him. He did say I was the only woman that he had ever talked to the way he did, which I found odd since he was married, but I shrugged it off just thinking maybe he was talking about our friendship. We talked like old friends the way we always did. He called me and talked to me for awhile. I would like to point out my boyfriend knew all about this, I have never hidden anything from him. I have always been honest and upfront. I am not a cheater, and I have never had the desire to cheat. Well one day I get an odd text from him and it asked who I was since he got a new phone...I responded finding it odd, but since he did drink even if he told me he quit, I mean old habits die hard. It turned out it was his wife, he never mentioned we were talking to her, and he didn't have my name on my number. I don't know what he thought was going on between us, but I was under the assumption we were just friends. I don't know if she just didn't want him talking to any women and that's why he hid it or if he thought he was cheating, because that wasn't the case on my end. I told her I wasn't doing anything with her husband just talking like friends do. I spent forever trying to convince her nothing was going on, I told her I couldn't tell her he wasn't cheating on her but I did know it wasn't with me. I would never knowingly be the other woman, nor would I cheat on my boyfriend. This guy and I were always friends, so to me that's what was going on. I told her I hoped they worked it out. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if he was cheating, he never struck me as a faithful man. I don't think he knew how to be with one woman, which is the other reason I didn't want to be with him. He was always sleeping around and telling me about the women he was with. He would call me crying and telling me that someone left him, and he was extremely insecure about his height. He was short and stocky but he was nice looking. I would help him through a lot of his problems, which is why he always talked to me. He would cry and say he wished he could be with me etc. I remember those phone calls. I felt like he slept around to make himself feel better about who he was, like he was somehow more of a man. I know things never would have worked between us, but I had hoped we would always remain friends no matter where we went in life. I don't agree with his actions, but a friend is a friend. I guess life took us down different roads. I stopped talking to him after the incident with his wife. She told me all of these things about him he wouldn't tell me. It's like he wanted me to believe he had changed, when in reality he was just miserable. She confided in me like I was her friend in that moment, because she had no one. I wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear, but I couldn't. All I had was the truth. I wasn't the other woman, and I never would be. I don't think she believed me, I think she wanted to, but she didn't. Part of me wanted to be her friend, because I felt for her, but because of who this guy and I were I couldn't be, but I offered her a lending ear in that moment and hoped that things got better for them, mostly for her. She didn't deserve to feel the way she did. She is the reason I'll never be the other woman. I wish I could have convinced her I wasn't who she thought I was. She told me she didn't have any friends to confide in, it was just her and her son. She told me so much, and to this day I wish I could have helped her more. I often wonder if they worked things out. I know he never bothered trying to contact me after that, and I definitely never contacted him. I think things happened the way they did for a reason. I ended up with the kind of guy who would do about anything for me, and who loves and understands me. He gave me my son, so while I sometimes wonder "what if" I know at the end of the day things worked out the way they were supposed to.