The cause of divorce – as we’ve learned here at Capsule through our Divorce Diaries – can vary so, so greatly. It can be a single moment, one action that changes everything. Or, it can be the build up of many, many little moments, until a final straw breaks the marriage. This week we hear from Capsule reader Kate, who separated from her husband a year ago. In her case, one moment changed everything and began the unravelling of her marriage…
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances (?!) and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
It was one of those glorious spring mornings: not a cloud in the sky, not a wisp of wind.
Kate had already managed to get two loads of washing through and out on the line before she’d dropped the kids at school, picked up a takeaway coffee and then fired up her laptop for a morning meeting.
Wednesdays were her work from home day – she loved the way it broke up the week and how it gave her the chance to catch up on some life admin at home (as well as getting to avoid traffic for the day, of course).
Instead of setting up at her desk at home, she moved to the floor of the lounge, propped up against the couch, where she could position her winter-white legs into the sun streaming through the ranch-slider doors. She did her first meeting from there. Everyone was in such a good mood – it’s amazing what a little sun can do.
As the meeting came to an end, her mind was wandering back to the washing – did she have space on the line to put through one more load? Enough time to run it through? Maybe if she hurried.
She was in the midst of picking up clothes, almost robotically turning them inside out, checking pockets, unrolling socks, when something out of the ordinary happened.
While her mind was on work, her hands reached into a pair of pants to check the pockets, when she felt something.
As she pulled it out to put on the bench, setting it alongside the items she’d already rescued – a tissue, a half-empty packet of gum and a marble – she caught sight of what was in the pocket: two condoms.
They’d come from her husband’s pants.
“If it had of been one single condom, that would have been one thing,” says Kate. “But it was two and a bit. Along one of the perforated edge bits was the remnants of another one. Like it had been ripped, and part of an opened one was still attached. I don’t know why I found that particular detail so disturbing, but… no, I know why, really. That slither of wrapper meant there had been another attached, but it had been opened.”
The fact that there were any condoms in her husband’s pants was very out of the ordinary.
“I had a Mirena,” says Kate. “I hadn’t seen a condom in the flesh like that since my husband Josh and I were first dating, like, maybe 15 years earlier.”
So, where did this condom come from and why was it in her husband’s pocket?
“Maybe because I was in work mode, I went straight into being very analytical about the situation,” says Kate. “My first thought was, obviously this is evidence of an affair. My second was that my husband simply didn’t have time to have an affair – we have busy lives and two children, but I remembered that, well, really, no one on the planet is too busy to for an affair to be impossible.”
Kate thought about the pants – her husband was wearing them yesterday.
“The night before was Tuesday and on Tuesday the kids go to gymnastics at 5.15, so I take them and we have this tradition of having pizza afterwards. Traffic was bad, so we got in the door at 7pm. Josh had been in the shower when we got home. I’d assumed he’d gone to the gym after work, because he often does that on a Tuesday and he prefers to shower at home. I’d said, ‘how was the gym?’ when he got out and he said something like, ‘fine’ or ‘good’ or ‘busy’.”
She searched through the washing basket to see if his gym clothes were there. He had two pairs of shorts that he’d wear to the gym – he seemed to wear any kind of t-shirt, but if he’d been at the gym, his shorts would be in the wash.
“I couldn’t find any in there,” she says. “I went into the bathroom, thinking, maybe they’d be balled up in the corner there where he’d kick them off before having a shower, but they weren’t there.”
Instead, she found both pairs in his drawer, clean and untouched from when she’d folded them and put them in there on the weekend.
“That was the moment, I reckon,” she says. “I felt it then, that he was definitely having an affair.”
Somehow, she then logged back into work and did two back-to-back meetings.
Immediately, Kate reached for her phone.
“I called Josh and as soon as he said hi, I asked, ‘How come you have condoms in your pocket?’ He was all, ‘what are you talking about’ and didn’t know what I was on about. I said, ‘I found two condoms in your pants, I’m doing the washing. Are you having an affair?’ He kept saying he didn’t know what I was talking about, but then he said, ‘Ohhhh, god, that’s right. I picked them up off the floor at work!’”
Her husband then explained how he’d seen them next to his desk at work, and without really thinking, picked them up and put them in his pocket. He figured someone had dropped them by mistake by his desk, but felt embarrassed and so just picked them up, then forgot all about it.
“It was strange, but I could see how that could happen, so I took him at his word,” she says.
Kate had absolutely no reason to think her husband might be lying. “Josh was the last person to have an affair,” she says. “I felt really safe believing him, because I didn’t think he had it in him. He couldn’t lie to save himself, he couldn’t keep a secret. Our marriage was strong and we were all so busy. He wouldn’t cheat.”
A few months passed. Life kept moving forward as always – well, not exactly as always, if Kate was honest. Something had felt a little different.
“Josh was about to go away for work for a night, and there was something weird going on,” says Kate. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he was different. He was going into too much detail about where he was going and what was happening. He was explaining too much.”
After the kids had gone to bed that night, Kate found herself alone, lost in her thoughts. Something was off, she knew it.
She thought back to that day a few months back, when she’d found those condoms in Josh’s pockets. She thought about the months since.
“When I thought about it, for a few weeks after I found them, he had been super attentive,” she says. “He was coming home earlier from work, he was around on the weekend. We’d gone out for dinner together, just us – we got a babysitter – for no real reason.”
But then, things had gone back to the way they were – Josh was busier again. He said work had picked up again.
That night, alone with her thoughts, Kate had a persistent, nagging thought: Maybe her husband really was having an affair.
She found herself going through his things in their room, the bathroom, everywhere, looking for some sort of proof.
“I think I lost it a little, because I was pulling out drawers looking for secret compartments, or for a usb or a burner phone or something taped under the drawers like in the movies.”
Kate found no evidence of an affair, or that anything may be amiss in her marriage – but it didn’t bring her any sense of peace. Those nagging thoughts continued, but at some point during the night, she came up with a plan.
When her husband arrived home late the next night, she was waiting for him in their room.
“I told him that I knew the truth, that Trish – the wife of one of his colleagues, who I’m friends with – had come over and told me that he was having an affair. I knew everything,” she says.
To Kate’s surprise, Josh immediately began crying.
“I didn’t really think it would work,” she says. “And, although I felt it in my gut that he was having an affair, I really didn’t want it to be true.”
Josh said that he’d made a mistake and he’d broken it off. He’d been having an affair with a colleague. He called it off after the condom incident, but in a moment of weakness she’d “tricked him” into starting it up again. He was worried she was going to go to HR – she’d threatened to. He didn’t know what to do, but it was over.
“I felt disgusted,” she says. “And humiliated. He cried again when I said that Trish had never called – I just knew he was cheating.”
Kate asked Josh to stay somewhere else until she could get her head straight. He agreed – still crying – telling her over and over again that he was sorry and would make it up to her. He said he’d do anything at all to stay together.
Josh suggested they go to couple’s counselling and she agreed. Kate wanted Josh to leave his job, immediately. He agreed that he would look for a new job – as soon as he had one, he’d resign. He promised he’d cut contact with the woman.
“I was still working out if I could stay in the marriage,” says Kate. “I still loved him and I wanted it to work so badly. I didn’t want to be divorced. I didn’t want that to happen to our kids either. I didn’t want to only see them half the time.”
But six weeks into therapy, Kate was making dinner when she saw her husband’s phone light up with a message from someone, who was saved in his phone as just an emoji – the sun.
“I opened his phone – it was the first message from her,” she says. “He must have deleted messages as they came in – it said, ‘Any chance you can get free tonight?’”
Kate saw red.
“It still makes me emotional talking about it, but that was it, that was the end,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he’d do that to me, that he’d do that to our family.”
She told Josh it was over, as he burst into tears again.
“He turned it around and said this woman was basically stalking him and he didn’t have any contact with her,” she says. “But, it was six weeks and Josh still hadn’t applied for a single job. We could have made it work if he just quit, but he wouldn’t.”
Kate stood strong in her decision.
It’s a year down the track for Kate and, although it’s still very, very painful, she knows it was right to end things when she did.
“I don’t know the full story, obviously, but Josh is with the woman he called a ‘stalker’,” says Kate. “I think he was probably with her the whole time, while we were trying to make it work.”
Kate says she’s never discussed exactly what happened with the kids, and has done her best to be positive about her ex-husband.
“They’ve mentioned seeing her a few times though – it can’t be a coincidence that she has the same name as his colleague,” she says. “It hurts like hell, but, I guess at least I found that evidence and listened to my gut – otherwise I’d probably still be with him, while he continued to cheat.”
