It’s one horrible thing to say you’ve caught your husband cheating on Facebook… but for Capsule reader Kelsey, the twist was that she caught him, after setting up a trap herself, which sadly proved her suspicions to be true…
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.
Kelsey had a sickening feeling that her husband of six years was cheating on her.
The thought had never entered her mind before, but now, as she was at her husband’s work Christmas party, it was all she could think about. There was something about the way he was interacting – or, almost not interacting – with one of his female colleagues, Rachel, that made her feel suspicious and ill.
“They were nervous around each other,” she says. “Something about their eye contact. Like, they’d not look each other in the eye. Or every now and then they would and there was a… hmm… like a quick coy smile?”
A couple of the women who were obviously very close with her, acted in a similar way – they avoided Kelsey at all costs. They never made eye contact. Kelsey wondered if this woman’s husband had noticed anything.
After two very uncomfortable hours at the party, they got home, where Kelsey confronted her husband. He denied anything was going on.
“I think his exact words were, ‘Are you crazy? Of course not!” she says. “He said some mean things about her appearance and how he could never be attracted to her… which, didn’t make any sense. She is a good-looking woman.”
For the next week Kelsey felt sick about it. Even more so, because her husband’s behaviour had changed. He’d gone from being very, very busy, to suddenly being home every evening at a reasonable hour, and leaving for work late. He made her breakfast in bed on the weekend.
“He said he wanted to do something nice for me because it was so busy that time of year,” she says. “But obviously, it only made me think he was guilty and didn’t want to do anything that week that might make me suspicious that he was with Rachel.”
That night, they watched a Christmas movie on the couch with their daughter. “I went to put my daughter to bed and my husband said he was going to make popcorn and we could watch the A Bad Mom’s Christmas together, because he knew I liked it. This made me more suspicious, obviously.”
When she got upstairs, he’d been true to his word and they began watching the movie. But, only 20 minutes in, her husband had fallen asleep. Kelsey hadn’t been able to pay attention to the movie anyway.
“I had made a plan,” she says. “Him falling asleep created the perfect opportunity.”
Kelsey got off the couch and went to table where she pulled out her laptop. 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.”
She somehow decided to press on though and continue the conversation to get as much info as possible.
“So I wrote back and said my wife was forcing me to watch a bad Christmas chick flick, but that I had no phone messages from her,” says Kelsey. “I looked through his phone, and there was nothing.”
A few seconds later Rachel messaged back and asked if I was being a numbskull and checking the right phone.
“That’s when I realised my husband must have a separate phone for his affair,” says Kelsey.
Kelsey then continued to message Rachel, suggesting she could come over.
“I said a few quite explicit things,” she says. “Which she replied to quite graphically. I just made myself disassociate.”
Then, Kelsey had a search for the phone – but 10 mins in, she gave up to come back to the lounge. There, she decided she had enough proof, so she picked up the laptop with the Messenger conversation up, and took it over to her husband.
“I put the laptop down in his lap, told him to wake up because his girlfriend was expecting him to come over,” she says.
She then watched the colour drain out of his face as he read what was on the screen before snapping it shut.
Kelsey then told him that no, she clearly wasn’t crazy.
She was adamant that she wanted a divorce, but, after a couple of days away from her husband – and maybe because it was nearly Christmas – she agreed to try to make it work.
“We called around therapists and managed to find one who could meet us in mid-January,” she says. “He said he’d broken it off with Rachel and had just made a horrible mistake.”
They limped their way through Christmas and the New Year – although putting on a brave show of things whenever their daughter was near – and then finally, went to therapy.
But, unfortunately, that’s where things really fell apart.
“My husband said to the therapist that he never loved Rachel, it was a stupid fliing and he was going to end it,” says Kelsey.
His use of “was going to” was what did it for Kelsey, who thought he had ended things already, because, well, that’s what he’d told her.
“He first said he’d just used the wrong words, but of course it was over,” says Kelsey. “But then, the therapist pushed him and he admitted that they had still seen each other a few times in the last month.”
For Kelsey, that was it. Her already extremely eroded trust in him, had vanished.
“It was absolutely humiliating,” says Kelsey. “I’m sure therapists see this all the time but, no, I was so embarrassed. I was already embarrassed thinking about what I would have to tell my family and friends.”
Kelsey says she’s continued seeing a therapist – but opted a new start with a different one to who she and her ex-husband saw.
“A lot of it is processing what happened,” she says. “And working on my impulse to look at Rachel’s social media or, the very large urge to tell her husband. I assume he has no idea. It’s a very, very hard time, but I am getting through it.”
