DH kissed his best friend (female)..

[boriso]

One of Dh's best friends is female - they have been close for 20 years and met at Uni before I met dh.

Recently she has been going through some major marital diffuculties (she fell in love with somoone else and had an affair) and my dh has been a shoulder for her to cry on. Recently I have started to feel a bit uncomfortable about this. Nothing I could really put my finger on, I have never felt threatened by this woman.

Anyway, I checked his phone this morning (due to feeling not quite right about all of this) and it seems that when they last met up they kissed. The text from her read - "It was only a kiss don't stress about it too much, it was lovely though".

What would you do??!!

Actually nfk, I think I am actually quite 'numb' about the whole thing. I don't think I am dealing with it well, I think I am in danger of not dealing with it at all. There is only so much emotional crap one can deal with at once and I think all this on top of the grief I am experiencing at the moment has meant that I have kind of shut down.

Sorry to hear about it all, boriso. Much sympathy.

boriso it must be horrid

take care of yourself, don't explode in a few weeks xxx

Can you leave the children with your husband and go to stay with a friend overnight? It might do you good to go somewhere where you can freak out if necessary.

I agree with MP. And PW.

It's marvellous to pontificate on what we all do in our ideal worlds with our trustworthy partners. But what's to be done with a man who has snogged his best female freind?

I'm a little worried that this OW doesn't see anything she has done as wrong. Firstly, she says it was only a kiss. Then she says that at least that kiss got Boriso and her dh talking. So, she's got it in her head that she's done Boriso a favour, really? Possibly she has, Boriso, and I really hope that you and dh get stronger and closer through this. But WTF is with this no-shame woman? I think you were right to insist the friendship ended, Boriso.

'My dh like a total bastard listened to all this and then snogged her. And then planned to go and stay with her this weekend. He is even more to blame. What a mess.'

That about sums it up, boriso. You've nailed it.

He was only honest with her because he got caught.

She's a non-issue. I would be inclined to have a word with her husband, however, because as I said farther down he's apparently giving her a second chance, and she's using him and cheating again. Not cool and if I were married to someoen like that I'd want to know so I could make a decision about what to do before even more people got hurt by a jerk-off excuse for a person like her.

But if he isn't grovelling, yeah, I think I'd be ringing up a counsellor to help me puzzle out my feelings about it all.

I'm sorry he's such a twat, but tbh, anyone who goes and does something like this instead of being upfront with his/her spouse that things aren't going well is a bit of a loser.

Yeah, I'd think she did me a favour, too, because if they hadn't been so stupid as to text each other I wouldn't have found out what a cheater he was until he took it even further.

Like I said, male or female, only a shit would go and do this to people - over and over again - and if my spouse went off with someone like that, it would say a lot about him.

He's not necessarily a twat. I think too many people give up on otherwise good marriages just because of small mistakes. Relationships are not black and white and it's simplistic to think none of us will ever have feelings for anyone else.

boriso, my dh has had two affaires in our 18 years of marriage. Well, one affair and one two-night-stand which he lied about for a year.

Anyway, yes it hurt very badly and I was confused and felt betrayed. But he still wants to be with me. He's deeply sorry and knows what an utter arse he was. He knows he could have lost me and the kids and feels very blessed he didn't.

Things can work if you both want them too. I feel no pain about the incidents now. They seem like very minor blips in the grand scheme of things and we're having a deeper, more fulfilling and loving relationship since we went through it and confronted the issues head on.

I'm not saying this is for everyone, just that you can make it work if it's what you want.

All the very best of luck to you both.

It just sucks all around, lapin, because these are two people who just do not realise the damage they're causing.

She's going on 'it was just a kiss' and it's like the emotional part of his affair means nothing to her - despite the pain and damage to boriso, her family and this 'friend's' family and spouse, whether they find out about it or not.

And he was obviously prepared to take it further, he just got busted.

Whether or not a person has friends of the opposite gender is irrelavant to boriso's situation, because her particular spouse has proven himself untrustworthy with his 'friend'.

it's twatty to do that to someone, spider.

it really is.

is an emotional affair with someone you've known 20 years a 'small mistake', though?

he only stopped because he got caught, spider.

he was planning to spend the weekend with her.

if that's a small mistake, i'd hate to see what a big one is.

If he's not grovelling then it's likely to be because he doesn't think he's done anything that bad (another indication of how he's failed to read the situation and will need telling what perilous ground he is on) or that because of the extent of his emotional involvement with OW that he'll be thinking about himself only, what he has lost & the vaccuum now in his life .

I posted earlier about dh's bf in the virtually the same situation and he was a mixture of the two. He said he hadn't strayed/he had needs too & OW had become important to him, or rather the flattery and the illicit thrill had. He took some convincing to drop the friendship totally (thought they'd just be colleagues, yeah right).

He did eventually work out for himself (having been told by me) that
a)OW a bitch
b)he had been a complete prat
c) he was bloody lucky to have a fantastic wife whom he needed to woo again.

He also worked at filling his life with something else that made him feel good and had a few comical false starts that had his wife & dh wetting themselves hysterically, the big change was he & his wife got a very good promotion abroad & they've since gone on to have their much wanted 2nd child.

Boriso, I hope your dh gets to those stages too. You have been so wise and collected, but hope you have someone you can offload onto as well.

Hi Boriso

I am so sorry to hear that your mum passed away and that your DH has not been there to support you when you needed him most, I really admire how fantastically you are handling this and at the risk of sounding very cheesy, I am sure you will come out the other side of this an even stronger person, whatever you decide to do. x

good post spidermama

A lot of posters seem to forget that Boriso has been quite happy for her dh to conduct a friendship with this woman for the last twenty yeaars. It is only NOW that she knows they have snogged she has stopped him from visiting her. That is worth bearing in mind when you talk about lack of freedom in a relationship and how suffocating might lead to temptations. Borisa has given her man freedom, and he has abused it.

Boriso, I hope you get a chance to really sit down and talk, and that your dh figures this out in his head. I have sort of been in your dh's position. It was over a year ago. Our relationship was not good, but I doubt my dh knew it, as I did not talk to him about how I felt, but somebody else. It is very easy, when you start talking about your unhappyness, to get carried away and see things in the other person you did not see before. In my case, I felt unloved, unnoticed, and my dh rarely had time for me. It was a short temporary infatuation. I was lucky that I managed to figure it out in my head before doing something really stupid. But it did enable me to sit down and talk with my husband, in a very honest way, and we did manage to put our relationship back on track. The last year has been much better, I love my husband very much, and he me, and sometimes you "forget" you love your spouse when you allow another person to interpret your relationship for you, tell you your partner is crap, you have to split up as there is no hope, etc. Yes, it was my fault for sharing confidences with another person in the first place and so putting myself in this position. But sometimes, when you seek somebody to talk about your own relationship to get a fresh perspective and maybe help to sort something out, you get something else than you bargained for. Especially if the other person has his own "designs on you".

What I am trying to say is, your dh is not necessarily a twunt, and it IS possible to save your marriage, but you have to trust that he is not in touch with her. If he still is, that is bad. He should be able to see that he wants to be with you, and he should be so scared to actually lose you he would be frightened of her calling him, or be thought to be in touch. If he is unwillin to give up on her for the sake of their long friendship, that speaks volumes, as it has moved passed friendship. They are not friends any more, and they can never go back.

I agree that good people can make bad decisions - in the heat of the moment, during a fragile stage of their lives, or for weeks and weeks - it doesn't make them BASTARDS or BAD - in fact sometimes they can learn and improve their lives and be better people as a result of their experience. Your DH doesn't sound like a bad man at all, Boriso. In fact he sounds like a very good man to me. I hope things improve. x

'Your DH doesn't sound like a bad man at all, Boriso. In fact he sounds like a very good man to me.'

Oh, yes, it's a very good person who snogs their best friend and was going to go away for the weekend with her. Except he got caught and that's what twarted his plans, not his conscience and the possiblity of losing his wife and family.

Who listened to her diatribe about being in love with him, and didn't click that by then kissing her, he was taking advantage of a) the friend's vulnerability b) his wife's trust.

I hope he's spent this entire weekend doing his best to cut off contact with this person and convince you that your relationship is worth saving to HIM, too, and was on the phone to a counsellor this morning to prove it.

Yes, relationships can be salvaged, but let's not trivialise this affair as just a one off, a fling or a small mistake and boriso should see it as such.

This is an involved emotional affair that was going to progress further if she hadn't happened to find them out.

If he can't own up to that, well, you both really need a counsellor no matter what.

Best of luck.

Oh my God, if you think he's a good man I'm seriously wondering what you class a bad man as!

Boriso - i am in a simialr situation to you, DH claiming that his female friend was just that...except she clearly wasn't, although i don't believe things got further than a kiss, the sneaking around and lying is just as hurtful. He said similar things to me as your DH has said to you, he couldn't talk to me, I was miserable all the time, got him down, blah blah blah....any old crap really to excuse his behaviour. I don't know what happened to the man i married, i don't know him any more.
it came to a head 4 weeks ago and I am now trying to re-build things. My problem is they work together so he see's her every day.
Sorry to hijack, but just to let you know you are not alone, there is so much support on here to help you through this .

I think what morningpaper was trying to say was that yes, this man has been an utter twat and came very very close to blowing his marriage outta the water.

However, from what Boriso has said about his behaviour AFTER the event (and yes, I agree he has only put a stop to it 'cos he got caught), he seems to be trying to do the right thing.

I think a marriage can recover from this, and hopefully in a few years this couple will look back at DH's midlife crisis for what it is.

Many , many marriages have "near misses" like this. If Boriso feels they can move on (if he does EVERYTHING she asks of him), then she should be supported in this.

Naivemum and Boriso, good luck to both of you. Thinking how I might be in a similar situation, I think you are both really strong, just for getting through the day, and really brave for moving on with the marriage. My protective shell is so well formed, I think I would just run. But then I'd miss out on the good things to be had, and neither of you would be staying if there weren't good things.

People fuck up. When people feel low about life, they do make stupid mistakes. It's horrible when they hurt others so badly, but doesn't mean they don't deserve understanding. Life is such a mess!

I hope you both genuinely feel like smiling again soon.