This week, another seven women tell: “How I knew my husband was having an affair” From the husband who just told his wife outright, to the woman who followed her husband’s car after work one day, to the woman who found out when she tested positive for an STI, all of these brave women have a shocking story to tell.
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. 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.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
“My Daughter and I Walked in On Him Having an Affair”
Meg left work and headed straight to her daughter’s school when she got the call that she had developed a temperature. She was in a rush, so didn’t bother calling her husband. They headed home and her six-year-old daughter got out of the car and went ahead to the house as Meg got her bags. As she walked up to the front door, she was shocked to see it was open and her daughter had run inside.
“I started imagining that we were being burgled and she was walking into that, so I ran inside, where I discovered my husband having an affair in our kitchen.”
“I Suspected He Was Lying, So I Followed Him After Work One Friday Night”
Rachel knew something was off in her marriage – she and her husband had been growing apart, particularly after having children. She had begun suspecting he was having an affair – some of his stories hadn’t been adding up lately. So, when he said he had a client dinner one Friday night and not to wait up for him, she decided to put the kids in the car, drive to his work and find out where he was really going. She tailed his car after work where he picked up another woman – a woman she recognised…
“My husband was having a f***ing affair with a B-list celebrity,” she says. “I told him I knew all about the affair, and I’ll never forget the look on his face. He was like a deer in the headlights, but when I said I knew it was her, ohmigod, he just – ugh – he looked almost proud. Like he’d been wanting to brag to someone about how he was sleeping with a celebrity. Thank god I found him so repulsive, so the whole thing was that bit easier.”
“He Got My SISTER Pregnant… My Brother Forced Her to Tell Me”
Anne moved to NZ to get away from what happened to her, back in her hometown in the States. She hasn’t spoken to her sister since the day she found out that she was pregnant with Anne’s husband’s baby. She and her husband had separated three months earlier. Her sister was already five months pregnant.
“I didn’t know about it [the affair] until there was a commotion outside my house one day and I looked out the window to see my brother pushing my sister towards my front door,” she tells. “He’d found out she’d been having an affair with my husband and was pregnant, and – essentially – forced her to tell me. We’d been broken up for seven weeks. She was five months pregnant and showing.”
“He Just Straight Out Told Me”
When Jacqui’s found out that her husband had been unfaithful, it wasn’t in a dramatic, fiery scene like she’d seen in the movies. There was no ‘gotcha’ moment, where she discovered evidence of an affair, or a screaming match as she walked in on him with another woman. Instead, it was a quiet, low-key conversation, which came after months of feeling like her marriage was unravelling. She knew something was wrong, they felt like they were drifting apart – but she couldn’t get things back on track.
So, after a week of feeling like they’d been ships in the night, she sat across from him at a very solemn dinner and almost whispered, “You’re leaving me, aren’t you.” It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when he began to cry and said, “No, I don’t want our marriage to end. But I have something I have to tell you.”
Jacqui says she felt herself physically brace for the news, while she said, “You’ve been having an affair, haven’t you?” There were more tears as he hung his head and said, “Yes. I’m so sorry, yes.”
“This is going to sound odd, but at first, that news came as a relief,” she says. “I can’t explain it, but it felt like I hadn’t done something wrong after all? I’d been asking to go to a therapist together for months – I’d been going myself and I felt like I was failing him and our marriage in some way. It’s sad, but it made me relieved that I wasn’t the one in the wrong, and I hadn’t been imagining things.”
“I Found the Christmas Present That Went to His Lover, Not Me (Yip, Just Like in Love, Actually)”
In the lead up to Christmas Michelle found a beautiful Zoe & Morgan necklace (her favourite brand), along with black lingerie. Only, come Christmas Day, she only received a fluffy robe and slippers. Then, when she confronted him he said he’d taken the gift back to work to wrap it and had left it there by mistake… but then when she said they should go to his office and pick it up he told another story – that he’d given to his friend to give to his wife because he’d forgotten to buy something and it was too late to pick up a proper present.
“I think I’ve learned to listen to my gut more,” she says. “There were signs that he was cheating on me for years and I didn’t wanna acknowledge it. I didn’t even pause and think about it, it’s like my subconscious just chose to ignore it. Now I won’t get into that situation again because I let myself think and feel things and question them. I’m much more reliant on listening to my gut.”
“I Found Out When I Tested Positive For an STI’
Mel had been married to her husband for five years when they decided to start trying for a baby – she was 34 and figured it would be good to start trying before 35. But, when the months passed by and they were having no luck, her GP organised a slew of preliminary tests before referring her to a specialist. One of those tests was for STIs… which she was then shocked to find she had tested positive for, for Chlamydia. She’d had an STI test when she and her husband had first started dating, about a decade earlier, but still she hoped that there had been a mistake. Until, he admitted he’d slept with someone else – but then, the story got even worse when she spoke to the woman he said he’d slept with. She hadn’t slept with him, but, he was having an affair with someone else they worked with…
“I woke up to a normal day, but by lunch time I had chlamydia that had potentially seriously damaged by ability to have a child,” says Mel. “And by dinner time, my husband had told me he had a one-night stand affair, which by bed time turned out to be a lie and that woman had told me he was actually having a full-blown affair that everyone seemed to know about.”
“I Found Out By Setting a Trap On Facebook”
Kelsey’s husband of six years began having an affair with a co-worker. She suspected something was off when she went to his workplace’s Christmas party. Something didn’t feel right, and he was defensive when she brought up the co-worker. After stewing on it, she thought up a plan while he was asleep on the couch to create a trap of sorts to find out for sure.
Her husband had zero social media accounts. No Facebook, no Instagram. So, she created a Facebook account pretending to be him. She then searched for Rachel and sent her a friend request. “I got a reply back almost immediately,” she says. “She messaged, ‘Well, well, well… look who’s doing what they said they never would!’” Kelsey says she tried to speak the way her husband would – not great punctuation, and short, straight to the point sentences. “’Heh I caved. What you up to?” she wrote back. “Weeeeell, if you’d checked phone messages you would see that I am home alone. Hubby is out for a late one. Can you sneak out?” came the reply.
“It was exactly what I was expecting,” says Kelsey. “But it still came as a horrible shock.”
