Husband has been having an affair for 2 years

[GARLANDGIRL2024]

I found out last night. I am still numb.
i received a message on facebook from a fake profile saying your husband has been having an affair for 2 years with a colleague.

i showed him the message and I could tell by his face it was true. My whole world, my whole heart, my family all shattered to pieces in that one moment.

He admitted it, it didn’t take much to get it out of him. They used to work together at his last company. Sleeping together for 2 years. She’s single and 10 years younger than him.

they no longer work together. Their last meeting was 3 weeks ago, when he told me he was out with his work colleagues and stayed in a hotel after. He often stays in hotels approx once every month or so, as he works 2 hours away from where we live so when he goes for a drink after work he stays. What a fool I am, never thought anything of it cos I trusted him!!!

tells me he doesn’t love her, it’s just a sex.
he doesn’t want to be with her, he doesn’t want to end our marriage.

about a year ago he had what he called a mental breakdown, told me he wasn’t sure if he was happy, wasn’t sure what he wanted. He swore blind there was no one else, but it all makes sense now!
He very nearly left me, and our 2 young kids. We’ve been married for 9 years and together for 15 years. But he decided to stay. 2 years ago he came off social media and asked me to do the same! I said no so he asked me not to post any pictures of him or the kids…. Again it all makes sense now!!!

i am just utterly shocked. What I keep thinking about was that he very nearly left me for her, so there’s feelings there or as he says there was but not anymore
yet he still sleeping with her!!

I just cannot believe it. A week before Christmas. Our kids are 5 and 7 and we’ve together planned a perfect Christmas for them, it’s all ruined now !!
I don’t know what to do.
part of me wants to act normal for the kids until Christmas is over.

please help I’m utterly devastated and broken. Haven’t stopped crying all day

Divorce, take the house, download Bumble and start meeting up with cute men in their twenties. This man is dead to you.

(Thank you for my periodic reminder to never get married.)

If it makes you feel any better, all men are like this. Every woman swears she's married to the perfect man who would never do this, it comes as a shock out of nowhere, and the only men who don't do this to their wives is because they're not capable. They're all the f**ing same.

I have never cheated and I am monogamous. Fully faithful. I do not like lying and deceiving people.

And that’s actually what it comes down to. It’s nothing to do with sex whatsoever. In my opinion much like rape isn’t.

It’s completely unforgivable because they’ve got enjoyment out of the deception and the lying part of it as much as the mechanics.

I am really sorry OP. Emotionally this is really hard. I now it will be tough but tell some of your close friends so whatever happens you can lean into them a little over the coming weeks. The man is a pig and I do not say that lightly. Think very carefully before you consider staying with him. He has nearly left once and the only reason he is not doing so now is that practically it does not suit him to do so.

Start gathering all the relevant financial information. Your joint accounts. Mortgage, his bank accounts, savings accounts, investments and pensions in particular. Given your length of marriage all assets will likely be seen as joint, so make sure you work through all of this as objectively as you can.

You don't need to understand. What makes you think that is a helpful or supportive comment?

You have just described my life with my xh. After all these years, reading this feels like the shutters have just fallen from my eyes, it describes my relationship exactly. The shame isnt ours, but we carry it anyway.

Op, I am so sorry that this has happened to you. When you have had the rug pulled from under your feet as you have, you can go through a period of being paralysed by the shock. Just know that you will come through to the other side, and then can start to make decisions for your future. The future that is best for you and your little ones.

Similar experience. Found out this time five years ago - we had a 4 month old. The shock of it made me ill. It was horrifying.

fast forward five years and we are together and happy and now have a 5yo and 2yo.

i know it’s not for everyone and I think most women leave. I get it.

but either way OP you WILL be fine. This is a reflection of him and not you.

I could understand you wanting to get through Christmas and keep it special for
the kids and then deal with the fall out after.

For me, he had to leave immediately. We had Christmas apart that year. Different as our son was a tiny baby so oblivious. I really feel for you trying to make your kids Christmas special.

honestly wtf is wrong with men, how can they do this? I’m so sorry OP. Hang in there - you can hold your head high. He is a failure.

@jumpintheline it’s not only men. Women cheat as well. It has nothing to do with gender. MN is mainly a women’s forum, thus we hear more about women being cheated. But women can be equally awful.

"tells me he doesn’t love her, it’s just a sex.
he doesn’t want to be with her, he doesn’t want to end our marriage". Sadly he forfeited that choice when he cheated. It is solely your decision now. I couldn't stay personally after a lengthy campaign of deceit like this. Best of luck whatever you choose. And remember this is NOT your fault.

We are all backing you OP ! I truly believe that some situations are beyond forgiveness

@MounjaroOnMyMind was so touched by your candor and honesty in saying all this here, just wanted to take a moment to honour your courage in writing it.
So very sorry this happened to you.
And thank you so much for making us aware of 'hysterical bonding' (I had not heard of this) and the behaviours we can default to in these situations, it's so interesting and yet understandable and devastating. xx

Thank you. It's all a long time ago now, thankfully. I don't think people see the damage they do with infidelity. I felt as though I'd been in a car crash the first time I found out.

Yes, hysterical bonding is one of several things that I wish I'd heard of before. As soon as I heard about it I knew that was what I'd gone through. It's so odd to feel so passionate and as though you just want to rip someone's clothes off when they've betrayed you so badly. It just made me think it was proof we belonged together. 🙄 I wish relationships were taught at school - I would have found it really useful.

When I found out the second time I didn't realise until later that he was actually seeing two women. I'd come across emails and it took ages - months - for me to realise that they were from two different women. Luckily I'd saved them on a floppy disk (which I'd asked him to pass to me!) I called him at work - we were separated by then - and said, "So does OW know you were seeing OW2 at the same time?" Honestly, I felt quite sorry for him. He thought I'd called him up for a nice chat and then he was hit by that. The silence was deafening. I said, "No, I thought not. But I do. I know everything." Still silence, then I said, "Right, have to go. Enjoy the rest of your day" and left him to it. Never had any trouble with him at all after that!

How are you OP

Yes hysterical bonding and the pick me dance are real.
Men do this too.
I have witnessed the cheated on partner, both male and female, bend over backwards trying their utmost to become the person they believe their oh desires.
Of course it’s unobtainable, and the cheater has the best of all worlds what with a partner doing absolutely everything for them, and trying to make themselves look like Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston etc etc etc.

Darling, they are not. There are good men who have been chosen and settled with equally good women.
The question WE have to make to ourselves - those of us who ended up with narcs/liars/emotionally unavailable/cheaters men - is, why we CHOSE them. Do some psychotherapy and soul searching, understand what is it that we find familiar in these men. Most likely we have all come from families where there was subtle abuse, codependemcy, one parent was a narc. Thus, our nervous system naturally gravitates, unconsciously, towards these men.
The good men are those “nice guys” who we wouldn’t give a second look because “we were attracted to bad boys”. At the same time, women who had grown up in healthy families chose these good men and set up happy homes and marriages. Because they naturally gravitated towards them. These women would NEVER have chosen the men we chose.
It’s not that all men are narcs/liars and they choose us. WE are attarcted to them and WE choose them because this is the way we have been programmed from a young age. Reprogram, do the work, rebuild yourself, go no contact with people that do no good to you.
“Until you make the unconsious consious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate - Carl Jung

I'm so sorry op and to the horrible nasty person who sent a woman that msg this close to Xmas I hope they can't sleep at night ! Sending hugs. Have been there and that shock and pain you get in your stomach is the eorst feeling in the world

Interesting point, but I can’t fully agree with this, I’d like it to be true that nice women from nice families gravitate towards nice men but I don’t think it always is.
Nice men from nice families can end up doing bad things too sometimes, as can nice women. When I was a school girl a classmate gave her lovely parents hell, her siblings didn’t. It was more nature than nurture in her case.
There is a definite cycle of abuse link with some victims of abuse subconsciously seeking out abusive partners, yes, but I’m in my sixties now and over time have known decent women brought up by lovely parents whose husbands were/ are really nice men but at some point still cheated.
I know women who cheated whose families are lovely and married really nice guys. I also know two really nice women from lovely families who married the most awful men. I know another couple where the husband cheated, his mum was my mum’s best friend and a nicer lady and more loving mum than her was hard to find. He had every advantage growing up, notably a loving home, and still he cheated on his wife. The whole family was devastated and couldn’t believe it.
Not all nice women who have a secure family background choose nice men and vice versa. We can all only judge the character of the person they present to us at the time and we can all be misled.
Easy to be flattered by the initial love bombing of a narc, and I think nice women are more likely to trust and believe them. Conversely it’s also true that narcs can easily attract people with low self esteem from abusive backgrounds who want the relationship so badly that they ignore or overlook the red flags. But nice women from secure and loving backgrounds sadly don’t always choose nice men.
I do believe cheating is a form of abuse, and when choosing to cheat they are not behaving as nice guys at all, however in some cases it never defined their character or behaviour before they cheated and in some cases was no longer a part of it afterwards. There have been plenty of threads on here where women have used the words “shocked/ had no idea/ blindsided/ I never thought in a million years that he’d….” to describe their feelings on finding out their husband cheated, because their husband wasn’t this guy before he did. He wasn’t a ‘bad boy’ to start with when they chose him and his fall from grace came as an out of character shock.
No matter how nice and decent human beings are, there isn’t one on this planet who never does anything wrong to some degree or another, no matter how good or bad their family background. Sadly most of us when choosing a partner can’t spot a man who’ll cheat until he does, because men cheat for a huge variety of reasons and outside of the player/ serial cheat/ flirty type guy, who might be easier to spot, the others could be absolutely anybody.
I guess everybody thinks they got the ‘nice guy’ and everybody has the ‘nice guy’ until he isn’t.

Ηmm, you mever know what goes on behind closed doors though. Nice women may actually be co-dependent women, nice families may be narcs who put a show or co-dependent parents.
Also, parents don’t treat and raise all their kids the same, thus the differences.
Overall, the better the family environment, the better the choices we make.

And equally, behind closed doors nice families and nice women might also be exactly that but nobody has any control over the choices made by others and people can still be mistaken whilst thinking they are making very good choices.
Can’t say without being too outing what I did for a living over many years before I retired but I had a great deal to do with a lot of families and I used to think that was the case but found it really wasn’t.
There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say.

@Thewookiemustgo Not all nice women who have a secure family background choose nice men and vice versa. We can all only judge the character of the person they present to us at the time and we can all be misled.

There was actually a thread on here a couple of weeks ago, where multiple posters said they’d actually been blindsided by “bad” men not despite their secure background but because of their “good” families.

They had great Dads who were kind and honest to their mums, so according to them they came into relationships very trusting, expecting the best and ultimately ended up being quite naive. I’d never thought of it this way but would maybe explain some of the choices some people I know with lovely parents have made.

That said I do believe in some instances people are in denial about their families.

A girl I used to be friends with up until our mid 30s said that men couldn’t treat her badly because she “doesn’t have daddy issues”. I don’t know who she was trying to convince because she actually had one of the worst relationship histories out of anyone I’ve ever met.

The last time I spoke to her she had not long split up with a cheating and somewhat violent guy who was on the sex offenders list and had multiple secret phones that he’d use to organise romantic weekends with his preferred girlfriends. He also punched her a few times towards the end when she confronted him and told his other girlfriends she was with him. He was basically just using her as a flatmate and barely touched her after their honeymoon period. And it wasn’t the first time she’d been with a violent cheat. She had been with one terrible guy after another from age 18.

She will claim she has a great father but hadn’t acknowledged the reality of her upbringing. Yes her Dad was married and devoted to her mum, but he was physically abusive to her (my friend) and her brother until just before they turned 18.

Her brother used to also beat her too. And her mum never intervened with either.

She also said her Dad would speak harshly about her body growing up, like one day she remembers him saying with disgust how huge her bum was. Not that it matters but she was actually always slim but is more pear shaped and has wide hips. His obsession with her being tiny caused some body issues for her in adult life. And is probably why her mum made sure she stayed very thin.

There’s definitely a severely unhealthy dynamic within her family, which most likely affected her choices in men, but in her eyes she doesn’t have “daddy issues” and comes from a good stable middle class background.

I think it is called “parental idolisation”. People develop it in order to survive and believe they were loved, however this doesn’t allow them to open their eyes, change and grow.

I have very similar examples to yours with women/men saying “my parents were great”. And then you look closer and think “really?”.

@Christl78 Yeah I think it’s definitely a survival thing. A friend I grew up with was treated quite poorly by her (adoptive) parents. It was even noticeable to me as an outsider.

I didn’t bring it to her attention of course, but she seemed to have an epiphany about it all in her 30s.

When you’re being told by society that you’re lucky your “wonderful” parents rescued you from your drug addicted biological parents etc, it must be quite hard to come to the realisation that you were failed by both sets of parents.

OR (here's a thought) instead of constantly searching for self blame or the easy parental blame we could put the blame fairly where it should be at the hands of the - at that moment - abusive partner who cheats!

I am all for working through FOO issues but I worked hard through my daddy issues (distant, always seeking approval blah blah blah) to meet my lovely, kind, thoughtful, present husband who STILL cheated basically because of HIS selfishness and entitlement.

My 'codependency' or whatever (and there is plenty out there debunking this theory - it's very interesting reading) did not mean I chose a poor partner so need to do 'better next time'.

It meant I was a victim of his poor choices and behaviours. End of.

People are fallible and good people (and he is a good person to this day) do awful things for a multitude of reasons.

But anyway I really hope OP is ok. It is an absolutely awful time for her and I notice she has not been back.

I agree with each viewpoint and have come across similar experiences and situations, but with people there are always those who disprove a theory as well as those who prove it.
In any case we’re derailing so to get back on track I think OP should concentrate on getting through each day currently and not add to her worries with whether or not she’s a good judge of character or questioning her family background’s contribution to that.
I just hope she’s got some support in real life and that her husband has realised he needs to put his wife and children before his own selfishness currently.

My 'codependency' or whatever (and there is plenty out there debunking this theory - it's very interesting reading) did not mean I chose a poor partner so need to do 'better next time'.It meant I was a victim of his poor choices and behaviours. End of

This is so true. People tie themselves in knots on this site, trying to blame the person who's been cheated on for their bad choices and/or for what obviously was going on behind closed doors that meant they were horrible to be with and forced the husband into cheating. The support for people who've been cheated on is very superficial.

Hope you're doing OK, OP. There are people who understand, keep posting.