I found out my wife and my best friend had a physical relationship before we got married, I don't know how to react

He wasn’t those things at the time!!!

The male posters on here (some of them are "mate"-ing each other, perhaps they know each other already) are keen to focus this all on the woman, her supposed wrongdoing and the women on here telling OP it isn't that big a deal.

But if there's a villain here, it's the male best friend who shagged his friend's new ex (she had no commitments or obligations) and then, nearly 30 years later when life was fine for everyone, decided to fuck shit up.

We have the dudebros on here very keen to point fingers at the wife and the women on here, but, for some reason, not at the only person who arguably did something wrong - a man.

It's an entirely valid reason to divorce.

Things certainly can't continue as they are.
He can't be friends with this guy any more nor can he see his wife in the same way any more.

They're liars. Simple as that. They've lied by omission and have been likely having an affair throughout . Paternity tests recommended.

(As an aside, this passing people around in 'friendship groups' makes my skin crawl. Yuk.)

Very few people could get past this.
It's nothing to do with him being a man, as a woman, I'd be the same as him.
It's sick.

As if any female poster here could get past her dh sleeping with her best friend. On a 'break' or not.
No way could they and nor could I.

It seems absolute madness to me that someone could be so completely consumed by historic teenage stuff about dumping your girlfriend over football (she got over it!) and a few following weeks of fumbling when both kids are single which fizzled out by itself. It's imbibing the whole thing with an absolute ocean of significance and meaning that it simply doesn't have.

Still, if you want to destroy your entire marriage for that, that's your prerogative. OP asked what we think, and it seems most of us think 26 years of actual adulthood, marriage and real life, with children, should be a bit more solid than that. Honestly, if that's all it takes for you to decide your marriage now has nothing worth saving, it was probably not that solid to start with.

Thread will fill up soon. Enjoy your evening.

I don't who the 'us' is here. It's only you I'm talking to in this post.

Never mind.

The point is that every time he sees his wife and friend together, he'll think of them being intimate. He just won't be able to help it. It'll just pop into his head.

The friendship is dead that's for sure.

It's all very well talking about what should happen but as anybody who's tried to forgive an affair knows, some things just cannot be forgotten.
You should put it aside, but you can't.

Yes I know it wasn't an affair but still your spouse and your best friend it's just too yukky to recover from and I don't judge anybody who just can't get past it.

The kinder replies here that aren't openly hostile to the OP appreciate his upset but suggest he tries to save the marriage.

These posts are kind and well-meaning but ultimately I think misguided.

Sometimes it's just best to cut the Gordion knot. Saves time.

Or just stay in an increasingly bitter marriage out of convenience.

I have to say, if you do want us to believe you're a woman, you'd do well not to start by assuming that anyone capable of disagreeing with you and articulating why must be hysterical. It doesn't make me look irrational. You might also want to look up the difference between inferring and implying; it's hard to successfully patronise when you use the wrong words.

However, I obviously did not say you were a man, so that's just stuff you made up and doesn't matter. The me-railing of your life story that comprises about a third of this post may or may not be made up; it's totally irrelevant either way.

Three teens did a few weeks of stupid youthful shit when S Club 7 were in the charts and all were single. I actually can't believe anyone with a long, happy, fruitful marriage would be so rattled by this nearly 30 years later; it's so absolutely insignificant in light of all the life and maturity that will have happened since. It barely registers. It doesn't even begin to weigh even with decades of actual adult married life. They would have been barely out of school uniform at the time.

However, if you'd blow up your marriage over it, that's your prerogative. I think it's insanity but people are allowed to be insane.

I think you need to calm down.

It seemed to me that you were inferring that anybody who disagreed with you had to be male as this site was full of people who were female etc.

Forgetting, of course, that if this is the case, then those disagreeing with you are also of the demographic you describe.

In other words, those disagreeing are also female etc.

Just because I am female does not mean to say that I am not allowed to say that other woman treat other women with more care than they do men.

This guy has every right to feel terrible.
I'd feel the same.
In fact, I'd now be ringing up my solicitor for a divorce.

No marriage could ever be happy after this revelation. It just could not be.
Whether it should be is irrelevant. It just can't be.

The only reason to stay together would be for the children and/or money which would be fair enough but it would be an unhappy marriage.
There's no happy ever after here. Not after this.

My children are adults and I have my own money.
I'd be out.

My DH of 30 years does not know every daft thing I did at 18. And vice versa.

You don't think having sex with the man who is his best man and the godfather of your children might feel a little different to your dh than "every daft thing"?

I don't care about who you are. It doesn't interest me.

My point is what I said, which you can't remember because you're only here to complain in the chorus. Yes, it's ridiculous teenage shit from a million years ago; just look at some 18 year olds, they're kids in barely adult bodies. The side point that you care about is that places reflect their demographics, and the only thing that bothers you lot about this one is it being mostly female because you never complain about it not centring youngsters or Tories. If you can't cope with a largely female site reflecting that and you're going to do the chorus' boring, pointless and endless derail every time, like now, then maybe it isn't the place for you. Find your perfect Old Bailey of justice and go there.

ETA: You guys haven't even chosen the right thread to do the chorusing on anyway, because the only person in this tale to do anything potentially questionable is the best friend, who is a man. So if you think everyone's being soooo unfair and unreasonable, it's not a woman who's being given some slack. But when your entire purpose is to point fingers at women, you won't notice that.

I’m so sorry, OP.

I am genuinely shocked by a lot of the replies here. They are missing the entire point of what you are saying. You created your entire life around the assumption of a particular reality, and it turns out that it wasn’t true. You had a deeply intimate bond with both of these people and you believed that what they told you was true. To suddenly find out that they had been keeping something important a secret, between them, for all these years, is deeply destabilising.

This isn’t about control. This isn’t about entitlement to her ‘privacy’ like some people seem to think. You have every right to feel hurt and betrayed by both of them - simply because they led you to believe something that wasn’t true. If you had that information then you could have chosen what to do with it, but you didn’t.

I think it’s also really problematic that he chose to tell you now. Not because I think it’s right they kept it secret, but because after all these years of having done so, there is no actual merit in telling you because they had already allowed the construction of reality around the omission. To suddenly throw this in is actually very cruel. I would want to know what his purpose of this was, because if it’s to alleviate his own guilt of keeping it a secret then you have another layer of selfishness piled on top of what already happened.

People replying here thinking it is ‘just’ about random sex decades ago are spectacularly missing the point. I understand how it feels to have the foundation of your reality knocked away - it changes how you view so many things, and you go back over so many memories wondering ‘what were they thinking then?’ And ‘did they make the conscious choice to hide it during this conversation?’ etc.

You have been put in a terrible position and the people here who have the audacity to act like your response is the problem are devoid of empathy.

Please take care of yourself.

Honestly idk, i fear there more lies they are not telling me.....again i can't trust them

Worse is that, one of my kid isn't mine!!

And just to add, when I was leaving my ExH, my best friend shagged him. I have never spoken to her again. Just wrong, on so many levels. I know you could say "well you're splitting up anyway", but that's not the point. Instead of consoling me she was in his bed talking about me to him, and having sex with him. Not on. I have honestly hated her ever since, and that was 18 years ago. The rage is still there. If she turned up at my door homeless I would let her sleep in the street. Sometimes you just can't accept some things. They might be fine for someone else, but we all have our red lines, don't we?

I'm female, middle-aged and middle class and I suspect that those that agree with me are too.

So what exactly is your point here?

There is absolutely a chorus; we get scores of them on every thread and at a conservative estimate you are about the 500th person to do it on this one. If you can't cope with a mostly female forum reflecting its demographic (it's also mostly middle aged, middle class and centre left but nobody gives a shit about that), if you want a perfectly blind just court, if you think it's so sexist that it's not worth anything, take it to the enormous manosphere and enjoy the objective enlightenment there.

Yes of course I'd say the same to a woman. Meaningless silly historic teenage shit is just that and as I said, the only person who may have done something wrong here is a man, so the Greek chorus isn't even hitting it on point of fact this time. But that's what you get from a cohort that is only here to correct and complain because it's mostly women... then whine about sexism. Like MN is some terrible social force ruining men's lives, ffs.⁸

And just to add, when I was leaving my ExH, my best friend shagged him. I have never spoken to her again. Just wrong, on so many levels. I know you could say "well you're splitting up anyway", but that's not the point. Instead of consoling me she was in his bed talking about me to him, and having sex with him. Not on. I have honestly hated her ever since, and that was 18 years ago. The rage is still there. If she turned up at my door homeless I would let her sleep in the street. Sometimes you just can't accept some things. They might be fine for someone else, but we all have our red lines, don't we?

There's no Greek chorus. Only people who are capable of putting themselves in other people's shoes. Empathy if you will.

Maybe try putting yourself in the OP's shoes and ask yourself how you'd feel if you found out your dh and best female mate had been shagging for months and not bothered to ever tell you. Till now for some dubious reason.

Which is strange and a cause for concern in itself.

(Though obviously paternity would not be an issue. I see that that is a key difference.)

I can bet that you wouldn't shrug it off.

I couldn't but more importantly than that I can empathise and there's no way I'd be OK with it and I'm guessing that not many women who currently being horrid to the OP would be OK with it, either.

He (OP) should have just reversed the genders.