I genuinely don't know what to write or how I'm supposed to react to this.
My wife and I are both in our mid 40s. My best friend is also the same age. He has been my best friend since childhood. He's the godfather to our children, and my wife and I are godparents to his children.
For a bit more context, my wife and he are also very close friends. They actually knew each other before I knew either of them, and they've always had a very good friendship
Our families are extremely close. We normally see each other every week for breakfast or a BBQ in one of our gardens. We go on family trips together, celebrate birthdays and holidays together, and our children are all teenagers and are basically like cousins.
My wife and I have a genuinely good marriage. We've been together for decades, we love each other, we're financially comfortable, and as far as I knew there was absolutely nothing wrong between us.
Then on Friday night, my best friend told me he needed to confess something that had happened a very long time ago.
He told me that when we were 18, during a six month breakup between me and my now wife, he and my wife had a sexual relationship for around 2–3 months.
I honestly felt physically sick when he told me.
I didn't know how to react. I cried. He just stood there and kept telling me that it ended years ago, that nothing had happened since, and that I shouldn't be angry with my wife because we weren't together at the time.
I got angry with him and told him I didn't want him to contact me again. Then I went home.
For context, yes, I broke up with my wife when we were 18. I was an idiot teenager and I broke her heart. That's on me. We were apart for about six months, then eventually got back together. We've been solid ever since.
In all those years, I've never had a reason to believe she was cheating on me. Not once.
Yesterday, I told my wife what he'd confessed. At first she said she had kept it from me because she didn't want to lose me. She apologised for hiding it.
She confirmed that they had been together for around three months while we were broken up. She said they eventually stopped because they realised remaining friends was better for them, and then around three months later, she and I got back together.
But then she also told me that technically it was none of my business who she slept with while we were broken up. It was her body and she was single. If this had been some random person she slept with during those six months, I probably wouldn't care now.
But it wasn't some random person. It was my best friend. The man who stood beside me as my best man at our wedding. I've trusted for most of my life. I've allowed into my home every week. That man who is godfather to my children.
And they've both known about this for 26 years while I had absolutely no idea. That's the part I can't get past. I keep thinking about every BBQ, every family holiday, every time the four of us have sat together talking, and wondering whether they were both looking at each other and remembering something I didn't know. My wife keeps saying that nothing happened during our relationship and that she has loved me all these years. And honestly, I believe her But something has changed in my head. I can't look at my friend the same way anymore. I can't even look at their friendship the same way.
Part of me wants to completely cut him and his family out of our lives. No more breakfasts, no more BBQs, no more holidays together. I don't want my children caught in the middle, but at the same time I don't know how I'm supposed to carry on having him around as if nothing happened.
And then there's my wife. I know technically she didn't cheat on me. We were broken up.
But she deliberately kept this from me for 26 years, and so did he. I'm struggling with the fact that two of the people I trusted most in the world knew something incredibly significant about my own life that I didn't know. I don't know whether I'm overreacting because it happened so long ago, or whether the fact that it was my best friend and was deliberately kept secret makes this completely different.
But right now I feel hurt, betrayed, embarrassed and honestly a bit stupid and Jealousy so much