Welcome to our series, The Divorce Diaries. Today we hear from a woman whose husband visited sex workers while she was pregnant – and while he had her permission at first, he soon completely broke her trust.
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 had been trying for a baby for a year when he finally admitted he’d had a vasectomy years earlier.
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Caitlyn was 25 weeks pregnant and feeling beside herself, thanks to a case of extreme morning sickness which showed no signs of relenting, when her husband came to her with a proposal.
“I had hyperemesis gravidarum,” she tells, “which is when you have morning sickness extremely badly, around the clock, for the entire pregnancy – not just the first trimester. I was throwing up all day, every day. I ended up hospitalized a few times because of it and I lost more weight than I put on carrying the baby. It was bad.”
It was a strange, difficult time, that Caitlyn now barely remembers – with every day melting in the other as she tried to focus on just getting through the day.
But there’s one evening she can remember in quite vivid detail. She’d just come back to the couch from yet another bathroom visit when her husband started rubbing her back.
“At first it was like, ‘oh this is nice,’ but then it was obvious that he wanted more than to just rub my back,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever thrown up every day for 20 weeks straight, but it does curb your libido, I can assure you. And I guess besides that, everyone must have experienced throwing up before – would you want to have sex minutes later?”
She was used to tactfully rejecting his advances, and explaining – apologetically – that any movement was making her feel violently ill, but this time, he had a different response to normal – he said he had another idea.
“He said he couldn’t do another four or five months without sex, so, should we ‘outsource’ it to someone else.”
At first, Caitlyn said she felt quite horrified and upset. “I asked, ‘WHO?’ and he said a professional sex worker. It was a…. bizarre moment.”
“And then, a surge of sickness came over me again,” she tells. “While I was throwing up, exhausted, I gave in.”
But, she had some rules. “I didn’t want him having full sex, or kissing anyone else on the mouth.”
Her husband agreed. She also didn’t want to know when her husband was going and he could only go once, before having a conversation about when he would go next.
“I hated the idea of knowing he was there, stressing about it while I was throwing up.”
To her knowledge then, her husband went to see a sex worker once, and never went again.
“That was, until our baby was two and I was looking back through our bank statements,” she says. “I never looked at our accounts, but a friend bought concert tickets and I couldn’t remember if I’d paid her, so I was looking back through our history.”
There, she saw her husband had been withdrawing large sums of money on a regular basis. She wondered what they could possibly be for, and looked at when they started.
It was the same week they had the conversation about him seeing a sex worker.
“It was a huge amount, heaps more than I thought you’d have to pay for something that wasn’t even full sex,” she tells.
So she confronted her husband, but decided to not let on that she just had a hunch what was going on, and instead pretended she knew everything.
“I told him I knew he was still seeing a prostitute, and that he was having sex with her and I knew because she’d called.”
His reaction showed she was on the money.
“He said she was lying, so I told him she said she’d seen him just last week,” she tells. “He said, ‘I don’t know why she’s doing this, did she try to get money out of you or something? Why would she do this?”
“I said, ‘Fine, let’s get her on the phone now, shall we?’ and he panicked. I knew he was lying.”
It turned out her husband had been visiting a sex worker once a week – and going far beyond what they had agreed on.
“The only time he took a break was during lockdowns! So, that’s the day I told my husband to move out,” she tells.
In the aftermath, she told only two friends about the truth as to why she and her husband split.
“One of them didn’t think it was a big deal – she wondered if he might be a sex addict and thought I was being too harsh ending things without seeing a counsellor,” she says. “The other just made me feel more embarrassed than I already did. We barely speak now as a result!”
It’s been a year since the pair separated and in that year her husband has tried to win her back.
“I feel for him in some ways – he has gone to counselling and says he has never visited another sex worker, but the damage was done,” she says. “He broke my trust over and over again across several years and that can never be repaired.”
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