The end of Lynley’s marriage came as a complete surprise – when she was shocked to find out he was having an affair, and worse, she says, “he blamed ME for his affair”.
In our past instalments over the last year 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.
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Lynley had been dreading her 50th for months, if not a couple of years.
“I’m embarrassed to say that now, to be honest,” she says. “Because that same year I went to two funerals of people I knew who were the same age as me. Getting to grow old is a blessing, but I couldn’t see it back then.”
Back then, Lynley felt like 50 sounded old. She still felt so young, well, mostly. But she didn’t always like what she saw in the mirror.
“I’d always thought I looked pretty young for my age, until I hit 40,” she says. “Something happened then and my metabolism went out the window and my face started crumbling. Every time I’d look in the mirror, I’d see a new wrinkle. I was getting obsessed with it. I got Botox in the end, which I actually rather liked.”
Her husband Martin had told her not to do it – he thought all those lines she could see were in her imagination. “He kept telling me how perfect I was,” says Lynley. “I had a big birthday party for my 50th and he did this big speech about how beautiful I was, inside and out. He even got teary, talking about what a great mother and wife I am. He said he was so hopelessly in love with me.”
It’s a speech that would later feel like a kick to the guts, when Lynley learned that at that time, he’d been having an affair.
“By the time I found out about it, the affair had been going on for eight months,” says Lynley. “When he gave that speech, he’d been seeing her for six months. What a nerve.”
She’d had a few gnawing thoughts about the possibility of him having an affair over that time, but she’d quickly brushed them off.
“I figured my self-esteem was a bit in the toilet, so I was jumping to conclusions, or just making up stuff,” says Lynley.
But some of the red flags were there.
Martin – who never seemed to give a toss about what he wore – was suddenly buying new clothes. He’d stand in front of the mirror and work on his hair for a while before leaving the house in the morning – something Lynley had never seen him do in the 15 years they’d been married.
Then he said he’d joined the gym. Next, he was training for a half-marathon.
He seemed to be spending less and less time at home, between working late and going to the gym every day.
“When I saw him in the mirror doing his hair one morning, I said something like, ‘oh, who are you trying to impress?’ Purely just ribbing him,” says Lynley. “He gave me a look then went back to it. I’d just been to his work Christmas party, so I said, ‘Hmm… maybe it’s Jane. I can see you wanting to shag her.’ He was real angry about me saying that!”
Jane was a pretty young woman – maybe mid-thirties – who had started working at his office. “She had amazing skin – I think that’s why I really noticed her, because I was obsessed with my own face at the time,” says Lynley. “I didn’t think about Martin having an affair with her, at all. He wouldn’t have an affair with her, or anyone. I knew he wasn’t the type.”
But then, a few months after her 50th, Lynley was back thinking more about those gnawing thoughts. He was spending a ridiculous amount of time at the gym. Something felt off. Was it a midlife crisis? Or something worse?
“One night he said he’d be home for dinner, so I’d made it, when I got a message saying he was working late and would just eat there,” she says. “Our son was out and needed to be picked up at some point, so I figured I’d drop Martin in some dinner and then pick up our kid on the way home. I thought maybe I might catch him out, but if not, I’d just done something to be a good wife.”
But when Lynley arrived at his work, his car wasn’t there and neither was he. A colleague said he’d left hours earlier.
“I called him and left a message saying I knew about the affair so it was time to come home,” she says.
When Martin finally did come home, their son was asleep.
“He just crumbled,” she says. “He totally confessed to it, which was a surprise.”
But, for Lynley, the worst part was still to come.
“I was absolutely in shock,” she says. “It was horrible. I said to him, ‘why did you do this?’ And he cried and said I was the one who put it in his head.”
Martin explained that it was Jane he was having an affair with. “He said it was only after I said that about me thinking he’d want to shag her that he saw her like that. It was like it was my fault. I’d caused it. He also said that he’d turned her down so many times but she was too persistent. It was everyone’s fault but his, apparently.”
Lynley says the next year was a blur – a very upsetting one, as she and Martin split.
“If it was a one-night thing, or making a couple of nights, we might have patched it up – or, if he hadn’t of tried to blame it on me,” she says. “That was it for me.”
She saw a therapist for about four years. “First to get over it, then to get over the fact he had a baby with Jane a year later, then to navigate me getting into a new relationship,” she says.
Lynley remarried last year – a few months after she turned 56. “This is the happiest chapter of my life,” she says. “Martin isn’t with Jane anymore, or the girl he started seeing after her – I think he’s with someone new now, but the great thing is, I really don’t care. Good luck to her, the poor girl.”
