The photo above is from my wife’s 40th surprise birthday party. It was in a venue very close to our hearts as in August 2011 it was the venue for our Wedding reception.
Everything was going well back then. I was thriving in my job as a software engineer and finally making good money, good enough to final repay the woman of my dreams for sticking by me through all the hard times as I rebuilt my life and career from the ashes.
All her friends and family were there and she had so many we needed the same biggest room in the venue as we had for the wedding. It was so exciting planning everything in secret, the conversations going on right in front of her nose, the secret shopping trips for a special dress and the lies to cover up what was really going on that night.
Four years later and it was my 40th but her idea of heaven, all that attention and fuss is my idea of hell. Well, actually, my real idea of hell is exactly what I got.
She too was planning a very big surprise for me, sneaking around with lies and secret rendezvous. Four days before my birthday and she was in a hotel room, being sexually intimate with another man who had absolutely no idea the woman he was with was actually a married woman.
If I hadn’t become suspicious of the amount of time she was spending away with a female friend I’d never heard of before and the odd distant behaviour, her affair may still be carrying on to this day. She had absolutely no concern for my feelings and seemingly little fear of being caught given her behaviour.
Since I found out on 6th January, I’ve had to pick through an avalanche of lies, one by one, almost constantly discovering new information. At first she told me it was a brief situation that started in October 2022 with her meeting up with a friend to release some balloons in memory of our baby that we lost in May 2021, followed by another meeting in December where she almost accidentally fell on his penis. It was far too convenient, too obvious a lie and it started to unravel pretty quickly.
Soon I found out that it started as long ago as May 2022 online with sexual messages, images and phone calls being exchanged from our guest room as I lay sleeping in the room next door and the affair hadn’t ended when she said it had. In fact, there was a whole other life she was leading that was exactly the same as her real life except I didn’t exist, I was her “abusive ex”. That’s why she was removing her rings, instead claiming it was because her fingers had swelled up.
In the end the only way I could get the truth was to speak to the extremely shocked man that she had an affair with and compare notes. He left his previous girlfriend to start a relationship with her. That night, he sent me through picture after picture of the images she sent him. It was unbelievably painful. See for yourself and imagine how you would feel if this was your partner.
I actually ended up feeling sorry for him because she had gas lit him. She ended it with him, telling him it was because of his controlling and jealous behaviour, not because she had been rumbled. She had him excluded from their mutual friendship circle.
In June 2022, I sent her and her sister to New York as a special treat for both of them and during that time away she was messaging him. In October he came up and spent several days with her in a seedy cheap hotel chain just a few miles from our home, our friends and family and in fact my niece saw them together and told my sister in law but she wasn’t aware of the context.
In August, my aunty was dying in hospital and my wife was not there to support me, she was too busy meeting up with him again just days after my aunty passed away.
There were more visits in December and January until I uncovered it all. Friends were telling me to leave her, including her own sister and best friend but I couldn’t, I loved her. We’d been together for 20 years and I was only 19 when we first started dating so my life with her was longer than my life without her. I couldn’t just throw it away, given that she showed remorse and seemed willing to seek help for her behaviour.
It then turned out that he wasn’t the only man she had been sexually “flirting” with. There was a married teacher she met via instagram and had cyber sex with as early as March 2022 and another man from tiktok between May and December. The notion that it was just an accident and falling for someone with a shared emotional connection completely fell apart when you realise there were these other men too, albeit not in person.
Still, we worked on things, we went to marriage counselling and we improved our communication and worked through some issues. It got to the point where we didn’t think we needed the marriage counselling anymore.
Things weren’t perfect. I couldn’t get the images of her and him together out of my head and I made a really stupid decision. I decided that the issue was all the deception and that now she’d already cheated once, the best way to confront it was to tackle it head on and allow her to have sex with another man once but this time in front of me.
I know most people are thinking why would you do that? Why would you let your wife cheat on you again? It all comes down to my incredibly low self esteem and body issues.
My body is not normal. I have a weight problem I’ve been fighting all my life, mostly failing but with the occasional success. My wife too has a weight problem but back in 2013 we both went on a health kick together and both lost a lot of weight. Whilst she was able to maintain at least a large chunk of the weight loss, I couldn’t.
I think a lot of her behaviour is a bit of a midlife crisis. She didn’t get much sexual attention from anybody other than me in her youth so now she’s addicted to the attention she’s discovered she can get and by allowing her to feed that, I put petrol onto the flames.
Anyway, my biggest body problem is not the weight. I was born with some kind of testosterone deficiency so didn’t develop normally. Functionally my body is perfectly fine but it places me into a category no man would want to be in.
For a large chunk of my life I was oblivious to this and I had my wife and she always said she loved me for who I was, it didn’t bother her and we still had a good sex life, particularly in recent years since we started trying for a baby.
In 2021, I did some research and found out both how rare my condition is and also that it was 100% treatable had my parents tried whilst I was an infant, but they didn’t and now it’s too late. I remember spending a night balling my eyes out to my wife talking about this stuff. It was just so painful but she reassured me it didn’t matter to her, that she never wanted anyone else and that she wouldn’t cheat on me so when she did exactly what she said she wouldn’t, and told this other man that he had made her orgasm in ways she never had, it totally destroyed any self worth I had left and I ended up self harming with a kitchen knife. She later claimed it was digital penetration but I don’t know whether that was just her attempt at making me feel better.
Letting her cheat to get it out of her system seemed like a way I could try to find acceptance of the situation by confronting my worst fears and let her do the things she couldn’t do with me.
When I suggested it to her, I really expected her to turn it down, tell me not to be stupid and that I was enough, but that’s not what happened. She really liked the idea. At first it felt like a game and I thought to myself other people have weird and wonderful sexual relationships, why couldn’t we?
I actually felt in control. There were very strict rules and controls. It wasn’t an open marriage. I effectively had the final say at every stage and in a way she felt subservient to me in a strange way but just a few days in and she completely broke my heart again.
Mr married teacher created a new profile on instagram and contacted her again. She picked up when she left off and I discovered her half naked in the living room, playing with her breasts whilst watching him masturbate over a video call. This was nothing to do with our arrangement, it was completely outside of all the rules. She handed over her phone and I read the messages whereby she had been gloating about being unfaithful, talked of having sex in cars (the person she had an affair with doesn’t drive and has no car), and she talked about not being able to go up to the bathroom to strip as hubby was in the office and might hear.
It took me to a point where I simply couldn’t see any other option but to divorce her. At the same time though, that meant losing my whole life. My home, the woman I loved and the chances of ever finding love again seemed absolute zero. She begged me all night long not to leave her, she threw up into a bin so after thinking on it the whole night through I took the pragmatic decision to not leave on the condition that she install an app on her phone that meant she couldn’t hide anything anymore. I loved her but I couldn’t trust her. She had persistently let me down, every single time I had given her a chance.
I allowed her to continue the arrangement and whilst I was on holiday in Portugal with a friend, she had cybersex with four different men on consecutive nights and I actually encouraged her. It still felt like a game and I was de-sensitised to what it was I was seeing. Towards the end of the trip though, my faculties started to return and I kept prompting her, is this what you really want? Are you sure? hoping she’d get the hint and back out but she didn’t.
She arranged a first date with one of the men she was having cybersex with for the day after I returned from Portugal. I felt I couldn’t back out. I actually drove her to where she met up with him with knots in my stomach. She met him and told me she snogged him with tongues. That night I had to physically force myself to kiss her. Even though it was me doing it, it felt like it was against my will. I lost all desire to have sex with her.
She arranged a second meeting where it was expected to take it up a notch further and again I was encouraging her as if it was what I wanted. I told myself that I needed to do this, that I needed to see it happen but a couple of days before I got cold feet and wrote her an email asking to abort but never sent it, I was scared she’d be angry if I pulled out as she was still adamant that it was what she wanted.
The next day I sent her a WhatsApp, asking to bail but I deleted it before she read it but finally on the day itself it was just too much and I asked her to pull out.
To my relief, she wasn’t angry and was actually a little bit relieved herself. She was getting nervous about it. That night we went out as a couple instead and it was such a big relief. She did make me do the contacting to cancel and the guy was understanding.
Things started to deteriorate again between us. The communication had gone backwards. I felt we never really dealt with the incident with the married teacher and the app we installed was making me paranoid. It was just little things like the sexualised selfies she was taking designed to show off her cleavage and breasts, there was an image of an anonymous card that turned out to be completely innocent but looked very suspicious.
She had arranged to meet a couple from the same online friendship group that were involved in her affair and she didn’t tell me, I didn’t know anyone in her circle lived in the same city. That made me very uncomfortable. I just couldn’t trust her.
She was having counselling, effectively paid for by me as I was paying £800 a year for her to have private BUPA cover through work and she told me that the counsellor had told her that it was ok for women to cheat. When we had marriage counselling the counsellor tried to insinuate that both of us were equally responsible for the affair and it made me very angry. Whilst I accept that I was partly to blame for the communication problems in the relationship, I was not responsible for the affair. It didn’t matter what she did to me, there’s no way I would have done what she had done to me to her. It went totally against both our sets of moral values. My father had two affairs and it screwed up my teenage years. She knew exactly how I felt about that and she felt the same about cheating, she was brought up with the same Christian values.
I have witnessed this same anti-male, pro-female bias in the psychology arena before. When men do something bad, they’re monsters, when women do it, it was probably a man’s fault somehow. It made me worry what else the counsellor was telling her so the next time she had her counselling session I listened in. It was online counselling and she did it in the living room, which has cctv, whilst I was in bed, quite ill with a high fever.
It was a bad thing to do to invade her privacy like that. What I heard (only Mandy’s side of the conversation) re-enforced my concerns. I had written Mandy a letter explaining how it felt to be me. I sex swapped us and asked her to imagine if she had been through the same stuff as she put me through and how she would feel. I also did the same with her and imagined what it felt like for her.
At the end of the letter I suggested a list of things that would make me feel more secure in our relationship, for example stopping using snapchat, an app designed perfectly for concealing adultery which was exactly how she had used it in the past and removing herself from the groups that were connected to her affair and to stop taking sexualised selfies.
This did not go down well. She ignored every positive thing I said. She ignored anything related to empathising with my feelings and just honed in on the suggestions, which I even said were up for negotiation. I do regret that section, well the whole letter really, and I do realise now that for a relationship to work there does need to be trust but I also feel that given the things she had done it was completely understandable that I felt the way I felt.
Of course, with the counsellor, she missed out all the context so it made me look unreasonable and like an abusive controlling partner. She didn’t mention what she did in March and it sounded unlikely that her counsellor knew about the other men. The whole reason I asked her to have counselling in the first place was to deal with that attention seeking addiction and the compulsive lying. She told me that when she was a child she used to make up stories. The way she described it made it sound like she had some kind of personality disorder but there had been no sign of that in our marriage.
Very shortly after, I ended up in hospital. My temperature was shooting up and down between 36°C and 39.6°C all week and antibiotics weren’t doing anything. I spent a week in hospital on IV anti-biotics and having scans and blood tests. It turned out my liver tests were “deranged” and they suspected it was a gallstone blocking a bile duct but it had cleared itself. They said I needed my gallbladder removing but surgeons were unlikely to want to do it because of my size so they sent me home.
When I first went into hospital my wife was reluctant to visit and I had to ask her to. If it was her in hospital, it wouldn’t even be a consideration, I’d be there for her. Then she started messaging me saying she missed me and found it hard to sleep without me but as soon as I was back home, the atmosphere changed completely and she was incredibly angry about the letter I sent that we never had time to discuss.
She refused to talk so I wanted to reassure her that I wasn’t going to force her to do anything and that I wanted her to uninstall the app from her phone. This wasn’t because of what she said in her counselling, although that did re-enforce the decision. I’d already come to the conclusion that the app was causing more harm than good. It was all muddled up with wrong timestamps, it was impossible to work out who was saying what in conversations and it was repeating clusters of messages from days before so it was not very useful and was actually making things worse.
She asked me if I had listened to her counselling session and I could have done what she did on numerous occasions and lie through my teeth, but I didn’t do that, I admitted it. She said she felt very uncomfortable. She told me she loved me but wasn’t in love with me and that she needed space and wanted to sleep in the spare room. It was devastating. I did understand why she was upset. I recognised that what I did was wrong but by the same token, it was all driven by her behaviour and she was refusing to take responsibility for why I was paranoid in the first place and it wasn’t so much to do with the initial affair but the drip feed of information and what happened with the married teacher in March, just two months earlier.
Listening into a private conversation is hardly a crime on the scale of having an eight month affair, especially given the things we had discussed previously. She said she would have never have listened into my sessions but I’d never have had an affair. She let me down in really serious ways on numerous ways and each time I forgave her and gave her another chance, yet she wasn’t willing to give me the same chance.
From that point on I have been living in pure hell. Every single thing I do has been misconstrued in the most negative light possible. I go to the doctors and I arrange counselling and I’m told that she’s “bewildered” that I’d waited until she was upset, which is completely hypocritical as it took her ages to organise counselling despite me spoon feeding her and it’s not like she sought help before she was caught out with her affair, she knew what she was doing was seriously wrong but she didn’t care one bit. The guilt only came after.
She claimed that she was annoyed because she was “working on her” and I was only just working on me but that’s not what I’ve witnesses at all. I’ve seen a lot of her being in denial and going backwards. The deception hasn’t stopped. The sexual attention seeking hasn’t stopped. She’s regressing in terms of taking responsibility. She’s drinking heavily, I stopped drinking for good the day I learned of her affair. She claims to be feeling “stronger” and “more confident” but these are not the actions of someone who is confident. She’s deeply unhappy and a lot of that is her own guilt and she’s projecting it onto me as being my fault.
As for the “I love you but I’m not in love with you comment”, the “in love” feeling is something you only have in the first few months of a new relationship, we’ve been together for 20 years. Love matures to a different level. It’s no different for me. As I’ve said, there are times when I’ve felt physically sick touching her and repulsed by her but you can work through that, I did.
One day she’s being reasonable, the next she’s angry and biting my head off. I don’t know what to say to her. I’m scared of my own wife to the point where just the thought of being in the same house as her with this toxic environment she’s created for me is causing panic attacks.
My mental health is in a worse place than ever. Every hour feels like a day. Every day feels like a year. I can’t concentrate on anything, I can’t even watch TV. I’m crying all the time and I feel there is no hope left at all. She’s not going to forgive me or give me a chance. I just want us both to wipe the slate clean, let go of our past mistakes and rebuild a new future that’s happier for both of us but I’m left in limbo. It’s been two weeks already and things just keep getting worse, I’m running out of time. My mental health can’t sustain this feeling of being hated by the one person you love the most in the world. I see no future, only death and right now death feels like it would be a relief.
She went to Southport on her own for a few days to clear her head and came back with a giant penis candy, then she took a vibrator with her whilst spending a night at her sisters, then she posted another sexualised selfie to her WhatsApp status and hid it from me. She’s using me. Getting me to do things when it suits her but treating me like dirt at other times, ignoring my messages, posting passive aggressive posts on Facebook, telling me it’s not about my feelings as if I don’t matter at all and only she does. She’s says she’s always putting everyone else first but now needs to put herself first. Was she putting everyone else first when she had an affair? I have put her first throughout our relationship. I’ve stayed doing a job I hate because if I leave she would have to take more financial responsibility and would lose the BUPA benefit.
Rant Over 