The last piece took my story as far as 17th January. I had hoped when I wrote that piece that we were at a turning point but it turns out that there was worse to come.
One thing I didn’t mention was that on 16th January, she almost lost her wedding and engagement ring. She hadn’t been wearing them for a while, she said because she had put on weight and they were tight (turned out to be another lie) and kept them in her purse and now her purse was missing. We went back over her steps and it turned out she dropped it in costa. The symbolism of losing the rings would have been hard for me to swallow so I was more relieved than she was when she got her purse back from Costa and she has been wearing them ever since.
My mood continued to change on a regular basis as lots of questions ran round my head. Niggling inconsistencies and things that still didn’t sound right. For example, her claim that she gave him oral sex over a condom and that it wasn’t to climax. That felt like a lie for my benefit. We’d never used a condom for oral sex, it just sounded like something only prostitutes would do. I kept trying to block the thought out but it was my instinct that kept bringing it back.
On 22nd January, my doubts got the better of me. I knew that we had Echo devices in all the bedrooms, and I knew that they could sometimes capture recordings when they think they’ve heard the wake word and all these recordings are stored on the app. I discovered a recording from 6th December, just a few days before the December incident. These recordings really only lasted a couple of seconds, so it didn’t get a lot, but she was talking about her accent, accent being confused with alexa by the device. It wasn’t so much what she said but the way she said it, putting on a very girl like voice.
There was a previous occasion when she had a late night live chat downstairs in the living room whilst I watched YouTube in bed. It was very late so I wanted to check if she had fallen asleep down there so I checked our cctv app. We have CCTV cameras in the living room, utility room, kitchen, landing and hallway plus rear garden and driveway.
They’re there for security and we actually caught someone trying to break in with that living room camera, I don’t normally look, but I did this time and she was still having a conversation, it sounded like she was talking to another woman with a child there but I also remember her saying something along the lines of “if x knew what y was saying, x wouldn’t be happy”.
I could only hear one side of the conversation though and it didn’t worry me too much but again, it’s that damsel in distress kind of voice that Mandy was using. Looking back, I should have said something but I didn’t. I guess part of it was the hiding in plain site thing. I credited her with more intelligence than to do something daft when she knew there was cctv that I could check up on at any time.
I really wanted to get hold of her phone and just check it but she had it with her all the time, even when going to the toilet or shower. The only opportunity would have been when she was asleep. I would have had to walk round our bed without disturbing her and grab it. I knew her unlock pattern had changed, and I didn’t know what the new one was, although I had a rough idea. Logistically I couldn’t do it so I was just left with these niggling doubts that she was still being dishonest.
On 23rd January I was going to go to AMC again. The week before I made her stay at her mums, which was impractacle, so I decided instead to make her install a parental control app called mmGuardian. This was part of the deal we had already made. It was either uninstall snapchat or install this software. I didn’t give her time to think, I sent her a link and then came down and we installed it together.
I could see she was nervous about it. I had told her that we were just going to use a feature that sent warning notifications to me if sexual langauge was sent or received by her. The app didn’t register properly the first time so we had to install it twice. We did a test, I added the word banana to the banned words list and got her to send it to our nephew on snapchat and I showed her what it looked like. We tested it the other way around to. She did know that the app had the capability to store messages, however I made her believe we hadn’t turned that feature on.
I didn’t touch it for a couple of days. In fact, I spend Tuesday afternoon writing a sweet email to Mandy, apologising for being clingy and mentioning my fears that one day I’d come home and she’d be gone. I talked to her about how hard my depression was on her and that I could understand how good the attention from tiktok would have been for her. I was promising her that I would try to be better and reminded her of the good times.
In the night of Tuesday, 24th January, I decided to look at the messages in the group. It was a series of revelations. Firstly, Mandy did not break up with him on 15th December, as she told me. It was 9th January, after I caught her out. She said his name was Matt, it wasn’t, it was Tony. She hadn’t blocked him, but she did try to manipulate the situation within her group to have him removed for his “jealous behaviour”. Reading this stuff actually made me angry for him too. She was lying to everyone. I had arranged a relationship counselling session for the Saturday, and she mentioned this in the group as if it was just counselling and that her doctor gave her the details. It was just weird, an entirely separate life she was leading in this virtual world.
I saw a link to one of her tiktoks. I’ve never used tiktok, it just doesn’t appeal to me but I clicked on it and the video was very sexualised. Any man seeing that will have seen it as a come on. She’s never been that kind of person, it was like a completely different person.
Naturally, I was very angry that she was still lying to me but I needed to be very careful about my next move. I had to keep looking into her eyes, listening to her tell me she loved me and act normal but inside I was full of rage.
I was in a state of panic, I contacted my Aunty Gel and arranged to meet up with her, something I’ve never done before. I talked to her about what had been going on and read the evidence. It was a really good conversation and I left feeling a lot calmer and supported.
I arranged to meet Mandy’s sister that evening in secret. I needed other peoples opinions to help me decide what to do, whether to confront Mandy or leave it until the counselling session. I showed Jo the evidence and she was in as much shock as I was.
I couldn’t just return home, I drove up and down the A555, eventually returning and acting normal. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep for a second. I knew Mandy was spending a bit of time with Jo on the Thursday. I asked Jo if she would observe Mandy unlocking her phone and tell me what the pattern was but she refused. I admire that actually. She’s a good person and stuck to her principles. She was piggy in the middle between me and Mandy, loved us both and wanted the best for us and kept the confidence of both of us without saying anything to the other. That would have put a huge amount of strain on her but she did it and I’m very grateful.
By Thursday, things were getting worse, the messages revealed she was effectively stalking his online activity. It sounded like she was pining for him. In fact there was one group of messages that sounded like she was talking directly to him and was planning to call him on Friday 27th and apologising for upsetting him. That was the last straw. I couldn’t take the risk of her talking to him.
I really didn’t want to do it. I feared that by confronting her, I’d push her away and that would be it, divorce, losing my home, losing my family, everything.
I messaged her dad to tell him not to come tonight and told him she’d been lying and I needed to confront her.
I took my mum to a dentist appointment on Friday morning, playing things normal still, then when I came back and she returned from a walk shortly after, I grabbed her phone when she was sat down before she could do anything about it and I told her what I knew. She was just in shock. Sobbing but saying very little. I told her that if she walked out that door then, that it would be over. Her only chance to save our marriage was to be honest. I asked her why she had done all this, she didn’t know. I asked her if she really loved me, she said she did. I asked her what she wanted. She said me. I asked her how I was supposed to believe a single word she said when she had done nothing but lie to me.
She told me she needed help. That she didn’t understand why she did it. She said she used to make up stories as a child. It was beginning to sound like a personality disorder to me and I questioned if there had been any others over the years, she said no. I asked if she would still engage with the counselling session tomorrow, she said yes.
She told me that she felt trapped. She had nowhere to go because I told her that Jo (her sister/best friend) knew, her dad knew something, and her other sister in law, Chelle knew. I’ll be honest, exposing her to close family was partially revenge but also I needed support and my sisters in law have both been amazing.
She complained about having her phone taken off her and told me I couldn’t treat her like a child, I told her she shouldn’t act like one then. I did give her the phone back without looking at it in the end as she needed to contact Jo etc. Lets face it, any message she added, I had access to.
I told her I still loved her and wanted to get things sorted but that she had to change. She had to engage with both private counselling and relationship counselling. I told her she had to be completely honest from now on and any mistake would mean certain divorce. I told her exactly what I thought of her behaviour. It was intense but I calmed down and when I see her in such a distressed state, I can’t stay mad for long. She was the love of my life after all and I wanted her to get better.
She said she needed some space and because she had nowhere to go I decided I would ask my good friend Lorraine if I could sofa surf there for the night. Lorraine has a new baby who isn’t sleeping at night so thankfully she kindly let me stay. I couldn’t go until the evening, so Mandy and I carried on chatting, hugging and kissing and we didn’t part on bad terms.
I spent Friday night with Lorraine and her partner and their baby, we had a Chinese takeaway and we talked all through the night. Not just about Mandy and what was going on with me but about life and all sorts. I’m very lucky to have friends like that.
The original plan was to come back around 11:00 on Saturday, then go straight to our counselling session at 12:00 but come 07:00 I was worried about driving later without having had any sleep, so I text Mandy and told her I was going to come home now and nap for a bit before the appointment. I did that, woke up a bit dazed at 11:00 and off we went, not knowing what to expect.
The session went really well, we covered a lot about the miscarriage and there were some things I didn’t know about like Mandy described what our baby looked like when she miscarried. I couldn’t bring myself to look. It was quite a traumatic session, I cried, she cried and it felt that we were making progress. Underneath it all there’s a lot of love, we’ve just lost our way a bit and I don’t think any of this stuff happens without the miscarriage.
After the session in the car she had a bit of a dig at me for coming home early before the session, as if I hadn’t given her the time she needed. I took exception to that as I gave her 12 hours and I was the one making sacrifices even now, she should have been the one to leave really but to be honest being alone wouldn’t have been a good idea.
She asked me to drop her off in Stockport so she could have some space, then she’d come home and I’d take her to Jo’s to sleep away for a bit. I agreed. When I got home I just slept for hours.
When Mandy came in, she came straight up to bed and lay next to me. She told me about a bench she had found in a park that had the inscription “field of hope”. Hope was the name I used for our baby. When she first got pregnant, we came up with the names Alexander James for a boy or Jessica Louise for a girl but because the miscarriage was only after 8 weeks, we didn’t know the baby’s sex so I thought Hope would be a fitting word to describe what our baby meant to us rather than as a name, and we had a plaque made and buried our baby in a special planter we bought together in our garden.
She said she wanted to take me to this place so we could remember Hope together. She also told me she thought I was amazing and realised now how much I had been through and how strong I had been. It was a really touching moment. I took her to Jo’s and continued to message her in the evening. Things were more settled.
On Sunday 29th January in the early hours, the parental controls app notified me pornographic content was accessed from her phone. It surprised me a bit to be honest. The software tells you what links were access and how long they were viewed, it was about 14 minutes of a 15 minute video. I sent her a message joking saying if you’re going to watch porn on your phone, at least watch something good (because it was rubbish), she found that amusing.
Later that morning my mood dipped again and I was thinking that the only way I was going to find out the full extend of her mountains of lies was to speak to the other guy. I set up a fake tiktok account and tried to send him a message but you can only message people following you but he had a facebook account too. I sent him a message request from a dummy account but didn’t hear back. To be honest, I would have ignored a vague message request from a blank account too so I changed my mind and sent one direct from my real account with a bit more info and including Mandy’s name and telling her I was her husband but also telling him I knew he didn’t know (she admitted she told people she was single and that she had a bad break up).
He didn’t take long to reply but he didn’t believe me. He thought it was a wind up. I told him what she told me and also that we were married from August 2011. I actually felt really sorry for him. He wasn’t a bad guy, he didn’t know she was with some one and this was a big shock to him too.
He said that explains why she never took me back to her house and met me at the hotel. I needed to confirm the details against Mandy’s lies. She said they first met in October, it was August, exactly as I suspected, but they had been chatting since May.
When he told me that she had text him yesterday to say she’d been to the park we released the balloons in, that made me really angry. That was straight after the counselling, even after being caught out, she was still doing it. It was pathological levels of deception.
He sent me a voice note so I heard the voice of the man my wife had sex with for the first time. It was all very unnerving, for both of us. He told me that she was always making him delete saved pictures from snapchat. He rang me, we talked for 35 minutes.
With that two night stay in December, he was only expecting to come for one night but she surprised him, meeting him the next morning. There were never two separate hotel rooms. They were having video sex often, she would do things for him on camera, using a sex toy that I bought for her only in May. It wasn’t something we usually did because in the past when I’d bought her a toy she would never use it unless I encouraged her to but this one worked a bit differently and worked very quickly on her when I used it whilst she was blindfolded. She used the same terminology with both of us. There was no condom and she was giving him oral sex to orgasm.
It really was the worst case scenario. There was shower sex, spanking, even light throttling. She was doing lots of things with him that she never would have with me. It made me very angry.
He knew about her family. He gave her money for my niece towards driving lessons and flowers for Jo for housesitting the cats. She told him Jo knew all about him. It was painful, really painful hearing all this stuff. I sent him the letters she had sent me and asked him to tell me what was true and what was a lie. It was all lies. She was just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear and thought she could get away with it.
They had countdowns until they would meet each other on their phones, when they met they acted like a couple. She treated him to a meal for his birthday in October. They had their own emojis they’d send each other, she told him that she loved him. He sent me a video of him scrolling through all his whatsapp messages with her, showing the dates after she told me they’d split up. They had their own spotify playlist. They had plans to meet for 3 nights in half term. He would send her his work shifts so they knew when to ring each other. He could even tell me what we ate each night in our normal routine. It was creepy.
She talked about learning about depression with her ex. She would make excuse about the cats if she couldn’t speak to him if I was around.
She used the excuse that it was because of her parents why they couldn’t be together on 9th January and that she still wanted to be friends.
There were things that he bought for her sat in the living room, trinkets relating to our baby, slippers she wears that he bought her.
It was shell shock all over again, for both of us. I did something quite manipulative and out of character. I messaged her and asked her to come over for a couple of hours and told her I missed her.
In fact, when she walked through the door, I was still on the phone to Tony, the other man so I had to just put it down. Not sure if I even managed to hang up properly. We went upstairs and kissed and cuddled then had oral sex but differently to before. It felt like this was going to be the last time so I may as well enjoy it. I know that’s really bad and a very strange reaction to finding out your wife for 20 years is a pathological liar and has betrayed you in everyway possible, but that’s what I did. We lay together then had sex an hour later.
Afterwards she walked back to Jo’s as normal and my mood just deteriorated into a full blown mental breakdown. I knew I couldn’t let myself be alone. If I did, the chance of an impulse suicide was just too high. I decided to go to the pub quiz. When I got there, I lost it. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t look at anyone. I just sat there in tears. The guys around me were really good. An autistic lad who doesn’t really do physical contact gave me a hug. I was on my phone talking to Chelle and Jo. Everyone was very worried about me but I was ok whilst people were around me. I was planning to take myself to hospital straight from the quiz. I honestly thought I needed to be sectioned and put on a strong sedative to get through the night but I couldn’t speak. I’d gone mute again.
Chelle offered to meet me at the hospital to talk to the doctors. I didn’t have the capacity to act for myself at that point.
Tony was messaging me still. At first it was helpful, but then he kept sending me the sexual messages and photos she sent him, there was even a video that would be classed as pornography. I was already having a complete meltdown. I was actually in a far worse state than the time I took a big overdose of aspirin and ended up sectioned. It was unbearable.
The pressure had to be release. I sent Mandy a message telling her she’s made me so ill I have to go to hospital and that I’d spoke to Tony.
I sent her screenshots of our entire conversation. She did genuinely seem more concerned about me than anything else, well, it would probably be even more difficult to explain away why your husband killed himself when the truth came out. She kept saying she was scared. I was worried she was going to hurt herself but she said she was too much of a coward, to which I replied I know. She said she needed help. I asked if she wanted to meet and talk and she said yes so I scrapped the idea of going to the hospital straight from the quiz.
4 of the lads from AMC told me to ring them at anytime through the night. They still didn’t know what was wrong.
I was just about ok to drive, I hadn’t been drinking alcohol. I know that would be deadly. She agreed to meet at home, Jo would drop her off and I would take her back after we had talked. The plan was I would then go to Lorraine’s.
I wasn’t angry when we met up. I was horrified. Confused. Not sure what she wanted. I didn’t really want to lose my house and my life. I told her that if she got help and did everything she was told that I’d try but also that I’d be putting myself first from now on and that there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t wake up and change my mind at any point. We hugged, I took her back to Jo’s at midnight after a couple of hours.
I ordered some food as I hadn’t eaten all day then I rang Chelle and we talked for a few hours. Chelle calmed me down and kept me sane. I got through the night.
On Monday morning I felt a little better. I messaged the guy whose tiktok channel and snapchat group initiated the whole thing, Steve. Tony had been kicked out of this group as a result of Mandy’s lies and I told Tony he could contact Steve and tell him everything, including the links to this blog as he might not have believed him, the whole story seems so far fetched. He gave me Steve’s number too. To be honest, I wanted her lies exposed.
I was also worried Steve was a threat. In one way, telling Tony was a relief because it removed that threat completely. I had made it impossible for a relationship to be established there. The next step was to work out if there were anymore threats. I knew Steve and Mandy were very close and in fact he set up the contact with Tony and Mandy based on her lies. I could still access the messages and see what was going on. I saw Mandy had made a long post to the group with the truth but she had no choice, her story had been blown out of the water by my torpedo’s. I was encouraged that she wasn’t blaming me and started to look like she was taking accountability but I still didn’t know whether she’s being genuine or just on damage control.
Steve replied to me and bear in mind I’m a complete stranger and I didn’t even exist until the night before, he was very kind and compassionate. I could tell he was being genuine and he was bending over backwards trying to help. He let me vent and he talked to me over the phone too.
I had gone from feeling like an outsider of this strange world Mandy was engulfed in to an insider. That gave me safety. He opened up about his life and how he was upset with Mandy too, she had betrayed all them with the lies.
They seemed to know a lot about Mandy’s life, everything except me. The New Years party I organised and set up, they knew about it and had videos and photos from the night. The only thing missing was me. It’s very weird being airbrushed out of your own life. It was cathartic to fill in the gaps and let him get to know me.
He was still positive and looking for a solution for us and talking to her too. He asked her if she loves me, and she said she did straight away. She described me as the most caring and genuine person you will ever meet. He would give you the shirt on his back and the last penny in his account… He always treated me like a queen… I’ve betrayed him in the most disgusting of ways and he doesn’t deserve any of this at all, and I don’t deserve him.
Then he offered me some advice, tell her to come home, sit down, sort it out. you know her more than anyone. She’s broken at Jo’s, you’re broken at home. It won’t heal immediately but I think you both can get through it.
I told him that she was the one asking for space and that she felt trapped. So he messaged her to ask if she wants to go home to you. She did come home and things were better again. It always feels better when she’s here but there’s so much damage done and I certainly can’t trust her. Doesn’t stop me loving her.
We went for a walk and I was feeling positive again, like I’d got my old wife back and that there was hope. I went to AMC in the evening and having to retell the story unsettled me again and when I came home I was back to being angry again. It’s like I’m running the bleep test with my emotions right now.
I know what I want but I know what she’s done. Yes, the threat is gone and I feel proud of myself for eventually trusting my instincts and taking back control by removing any possibility of threat. She won’t be able to do this to me again. I’ve exposed her for what she’s done. She can’t hide from it anymore. She’s going to have to face it and deal with my moods. She’s going to have to prove herself and in the meantime, I’m going to start focusing on me. I’m going to join a gym. I’m going to get myself out there and do things with my friends and I will see how I feel.
It reminds me a little of the Beautiful South song, A little time. She had her fun, now she can’t complain if I decide to go off in a different direction. I’m not saying I’m going out looking for another woman, I still love her, but I’m going to get myself into a position where my mental health can’t be destroyed by her actions. If she does the right things, she has a small chance that we will work. If I detect any lies coming from her mouth, she’s gone!
What this whole episode tells me about toxic female behaviour is scary. Even the good women, brought up in stable homes with two loving Christian parents and distilled with the right ethical values. If those kinds of women are so susceptible to a little bit of validation from social media that they would behave like this, what chance do men have?
This isn’t bash all women time. There are men like this too, but the way women do this kind of thing, the sexual power they have over men can be used very easily for devastating affect, and they will lie through their teeth, right to your face to try to save face. I couldn’t do what Mandy did. Never. It’s not part of my make up, I wear my heart on my sleeve and it’s a bloody big heart.
She still has my love but she’s lost my respect. What she did was incredibly weak. It shows poor character. She strung along two men with mental health issues, exploiting those issues and the desperate need to be loved and more importantly for men, the need to give love, for her own advantage. As a men’s advocate, I’m appalled. This is what toxic femininity looks like. It’s abusive, it’s manipulative and it’s disgusting. I didn’t marry a slut. I know that’s a harsh word to use but how else would you describe her behaviour.
Again, I reiterate, there are women that have more backbone, moral fibre and character that would never do this. I’m just very disappointed to discover that my own wife wasn’t one of them!
Rant Over 