Finding Peace

About three years before I learned that my husband had been involved in a long-term relationship with another woman, I found evidence that he had been having secret sexual encounters with other men. At the time, I did not fully understand what I had found: "glory hole" was a new term for me. I did not confront him. Instead, I minimized it and turned a blind eye. I told myself that those encounters with men did not threaten our marriage.

About a year later, I found an online post in which he was seeking a woman for “friendship and more.” He described our marriage as unhappy and portrayed me as career-focused and unavailable.
 

I was devastated not only by the search for another partner, but by the story he used to justify it.

After reading the post, I found a topless photograph of a young woman on my husband’s computer. I remember staring at the image and feeling like I wanted to vomit, I started to cry uncontrollably. The encounter dated back to 2019. 

I thought I could soothe myself, but after two sleepless nights, I confronted him. 

These were his messages, that he wrote me:
 

​

“I'm really sorry you went through all this needless emotional pain. It's much ado about nothing.

Every coin has two sides. In that period, I really felt completely neglected and deprived, all your time and attention was dedicated to work, the kids, and intellectual things like reading books. Had I felt loved, respected, desired and satisfied, I would not have to look somewhere else. I posted that ad but got no replies, did not meet any woman, certainly did not have a ‘girlfriend,’ and I have no idea what's that photo.”

Reading this was devastating. It was denial, minimization, and blame-shifting. The message did not acknowledge the evidence I had found or the pain I was carrying. Instead, it suggested that his choices were caused by my work, parenting, or my other supposed failures as a partner, and, he gaslit me, about the photo that I had clearly seen.  
 

​

I needed accountability. I needed empathy. I needed truth. Instead, I was being asked to accept an explanation that contradicted what I had seen and to take responsibility for actions that were not mine.

He continued:

​

“I do believe that most of my criticism on your conduct is valid and justified, and I also accept and respect your criticism of me. We're only human. As I've said countless times, I do respect and appreciate you, I often thank you or compliment you on good things, and I believe our love is strong enough to overcome these bumps on the road.

Take a deep breath and take it easy, I love you.”
 

​

I heard that message as another request to move on without full acknowledgment of the harm. My feelings, and the photograph that had shattered my trust, were treated as a minor obstacle rather than a serious rupture.
 

After I confronted him about the woman, instead of stopping the affairs and recognizing my pain, he proposed an open marriage. He told me that the woman “meant nothing”. I did not want an open marriage. I said that I believed it would be disastrous for us, but I trusted him, and I believed in him and I believed in our marriage. When he hugged me, I felt safe. When he said that he loved me, I took that to mean that he would never hurt me again in this way, not that this would be permission to twist the knife deeper. Forgiveness is a gift and he took that gift to hurt me more. 
 

Looking back, his proposal of an open marriage was another manipulation tactic. It was an attempt to obtain a “hall pass” to pursue other relationships without confronting the guilt, responsibility, or consequences of the harm it caused me. If I agreed, he could describe his actions as consensual and later argue that he had not broken my trust.
 

What I did not know was that I was being asked to consider an open marriage without knowing that he was already involved with someone else, and had been maintaining another relationship with a woman for approximately ten years. They met in 2015, I was at the event where they met.

 A message from one of my children marked the beginning of the end:

​

“Mom, Dad is deleting his text messages.”

The next morning my reality crumbled.

On my husband’s phone, I saw an image of a woman in lingerie. I recognized her from our wider community. I learned later that my husband had asked her for her phone number during the community event that we had attended with our families. I did not immediately understand all the connections, but in that moment, I felt myself collapse.

My legs went limp. My heart raced. My whole body shook uncontrollably. It was the first panic attack I had ever experienced. In the months that followed, I had similar panic attacks more than once.

For the next two months, I barely slept. It felt like a kind of death. I was grieving not only the relationship, but also the reality I had believed was true. 
 

What made this discovery especially painful was that, unlike the men my husband had seen, this woman knew my family, she knew me, and knew that this multi-year relationship would destroy us. 

Over the years, I heard her name from time to time without understanding the full context. My husband suggested that she provide college tutoring to one of my children and attempted to introduce them. Years after we first met, she became a teacher at our middle school.

While she was teaching my youngest, she tried to facilitate a connection between her child and mine. Unbeknownst to me she was orchestrating a wedge in my family. The thought of my teenage son becoming romantically involved with her daughter would have been devastating. It would have forced my son to have divided loyalty between his mother and the family of his father's mistress. What hurt further was that my husband knew about the attempted connection and did not try to stop it, or even recognize it as a serious boundary violation.
 

I also discovered that my husband had shared our digital family photo albums with her. After several family trips, I saw that photographs from at least two trips had been shared through Google Photos.

Those images contained our private family life: our children, our travels, our celebrations, and memories that I believed belonged within our family.

I felt exposed. It was as though he had undressed me in front of someone I did not know. I felt humiliated, violated, and stripped of control over intimate parts of our family life.
 

When I raised the issue about the shared photo albums, he quickly removed the email address and minimized what had happened. 
 

By then, I had learned that I could not confront him alone, I needed support.

I searched for a therapist. In my first session, I cried for the entire hour. I told the therapist that I had forgiven him. At the end of the session, the therapist said something close to:

​

“You have clearly forgiven him, I have forgiven him too.”
 

That response did not help me. I did not need someone else to forgive him. I needed space to understand what had happened, to process my own pain, and to decide what I needed for my future.

I found another therapist and eventually confronted my husband in that therapist’s office, crying again the entire session. 

And then came the excuses and rationalizations, he said:

​

“If I knew this would hurt you, I wouldn’t have done it.”
 

But I struggled to accept that explanation because the first time I confronted him, I was clearly hurt. Further, he was hiding the relationship because he knew it would hurt me, and, I had seen a message where he wrote to the mistress: "I think Abby knows, we need to be careful". He needed to be careful because if I saw the relationship it would obviously hurt me. 
 

There was no plan to stop the relationship; rather, his plan to hide the relationship more effectively. 

​

Our marriage was a facade, and he used me to create that facade, so he could maintain the appearance of a devoted husband and father. In front of friends, he would "love bomb", he could be attentive and affectionate, offer elaborate praise, and present himself as deeply committed to our family. All the while being involved with other people. The contrast was devastating. The public displays of love made it hard for others, and for me to see what was happening privately. There is little more damaging to a family than a pattern of dishonesty hidden beneath the appearance of devotion.

Our marriage counseling sessions were exhausting, he spent the entire session talking over me and explaining why we should stay married. I stated clearly and firmly that I wanted a divorce, and he spent the session making me feel badly for asserting my boundaries.

At the beginning of nearly every therapy session, he would say:

​

“For the record, I want to save the marriage.”
 

He told me that he had done his own therapy work, that he had changed, and that we should try again. But in the same breath, he made it clear that if we divorced, he would tell our friends that the marriage ended because I did not want to work on it.

That framing was deeply painful because it erased the reason for the divorce.

It presented him as the person trying to save the family and me as the person who had chosen to walk away. He wanted to rewrite the narrative so that he could be the victim.
 

I was not leaving because I had casually given up or refused to “work on the marriage.” I was leaving because the foundation of the marriage had been repeatedly broken.

The narrative also placed responsibility for the outcome on me. If I chose divorce after betrayal, I was told that I was the one breaking the family.
 

Yes, I did want a divorce. But the reason mattered.

I wanted a divorce because I had experienced repeated betrayal, multiple outside relationships, deception, manipulation, repeated boundary violations, and a long pattern in which my pain was minimized while I was blamed for choices that were not my own.
 

For a time, I believed I had become stronger. Eight months after the discovery of the long-term mistress, we were still living in the same home and attempting to maintain ordinary social routines, including hosting friends.

Then, one day, before mutual friends were coming to dinner, I broke down.

I knew that the friends had heard only one version of the story: a husband who wanted to save the marriage and a wife who wanted to leave. They did not know the context or the reasons I could no longer stay.

I felt ambushed in my own home. He had triangulated mutual friends against me. 

The first wound was the betrayal itself.
The second wound was the public story about why the marriage was ending: a story that removed the betrayal, concealed the pattern of broken trust, and made me appear to be the person responsible for breaking the family, all so that he could play the victim. 

The third wound was the pain of the divorce. His financial demands were one more effort to cast himself as the victim and shift the consequences onto me. In the end he wanted a financial reward for his secrecy, infidelity, and blame-shifting. He sought an outcome where he would not have any financial liability to his family: the people he spent years saying that he loved. 

If you are reading this and questioning whether your hurt “counts,” I want you to know that it does. You do not need another person’s permission to recognize a violation of trust. You are allowed to set boundaries. You are allowed to seek support. And you are allowed to leave a situation that continues to harm you, even when others insist that you should stay.