My husband came home with the homemade breads just days after promising me he’d stop accepting presents from her. I told him to stop taking gifts from his coworker. He agreed. Then he walked in with a variety of fresh loaves she’d baked for him, and I felt my stomach drop.
She was buying presents for our kids now too, and I kept asking myself whether I was overreacting or whether this was as inappropriate as it felt. It started about a year ago, when my husband hired a woman in her mid-twenties to work in his department. He was her supervisor. From the very beginning, I could tell by the way he talked about her that he had a little crush.
I didn’t feel threatened. Women were rare in his company, and the ones who worked there were older. It seemed natural for him to develop an innocent crush on the new cute young girl. Then, about a month after she started, things got weird.
He began coming home with homemade baked goods—cupcakes, cakes, breads—that she made specifically for him. Not for the office. For him. I got alarmed, but I’m not naturally a jealous person.
I assumed she was just trying to be nice, maybe trying to befriend her boss. A couple of months ago, it got worse. He bought her a birthday present and took her out to lunch alone. Two weeks later, he came home with clothing she’d bought him as a gift.
It wasn’t his birthday or a holiday. She just bought him clothes. My first reaction was, “What the hell? ” But I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t want to make accusations without proof. About a week later, his boss called him into the office and told him there were rumors that he and this girl were having an affair, and that it wasn’t appropriate. When he told me about that conversation, he acted like he genuinely couldn’t see anything wrong with any of it. The gifts.
The lunches. The baked goods. I told him to stop accepting presents from her. He agreed.
Then he came home with the breads. I posted about it online, asking if I was overreacting. The comments were clear. They said I was underreacting.
They said he was jeopardizing his marriage and his job, and that even if there was no physical affair, it wasn’t fair to me. They told me to be more direct, to stop bottling things up. What I didn’t mention in that first post was that I was pregnant. Due any day.
I gave birth to a healthy little boy not long after. A few days after that first post, I snooped in my husband’s laptop bag. I found things I didn’t like. Sex toys.
Obvious ones. All my suspicions were confirmed. He was having an affair with this girl. I confronted him the moment he got home.
He admitted they’d been having an affair for about two months. I kicked him out. A couple of days later, he wanted to talk. We did.
We talked for half a day, and it was brutal. We talked about the affair, about what drove him to it, about how neither of us had really been happy—just comfortable. We both admitted we’d grown apart. We’d made each other our last priority.
We functioned like roommates, not partners. We hadn’t had sex since our baby was conceived. He played video games and ignored his family while I took over and became a superparent. Neither of us felt appreciated or wanted.
Honestly, I had been planning to file for divorce soon after the birth. He had been planning the same. But when I kicked him out, we both got a glimpse of the life ahead of us, and it looked lonely. He moved back home.
We had the baby. We decided to rebuild. It was hard. Some days I questioned why I didn’t kick him out for good.
But we owed it to our kids to try. We went to marriage counseling. I let go of control and let him help with the kids, dinner, chores. He stepped up.
We made each other a priority again. We talked about everything and stopped letting things bottle up. He was transparent about his phone, his texts, his whereabouts. But I didn’t trust him.
He was trying to rebuild that trust, but it wasn’t there yet. As for the girl, I contacted her to let her know how her actions affected my family. She accepted no responsibility. She blamed my husband entirely, even though she knew he was married.
I cut contact. She was looking for a new job, but for the next two weeks, they were stuck working next to each other. He came home from work each day and told me about any communication they had. He showed me texts and messages.
It was difficult for him to sit ten feet from her at work. He started looking for a new job. I started stopping by the office a couple times a week so we could have lunch together, something we’d never done before. The day after Christmas, he was laid off.
We assumed there was an underlying reason beyond budget, but we weren’t sure. From the day he returned from paternity leave until the day he was let go, this girl had been messaging him. She insisted he leave me and the kids to be with her. She called me unkind names and said she was better than me.
She said she would make him a pot roast wearing nothing but an apron and her stripper shoes. On the day he was let go, she told him she looked forward to seeing him again, that his new life was going to suck, and that she would be waiting. He told her they would never speak or see each other again. The following Monday, he had to return to the office to drop off materials.
He asked me to go with him. Right in front of me, HR, and his manager, he confessed to the affair. His status was changed to terminated for violating the company’s sexual harassment policy. She kept her job because she was perceived as the victim.
He was her manager, and the company didn’t want to risk a lawsuit. He was out of a job, but he was marketable and had offers coming in. I was glad he was gone from that place. It was for the best that he left, and for the best that he admitted what he did.
Now he was seeing and feeling the consequences of his actions, and how they affected everyone around him. We stayed in therapy. We read a book called “Not Just Friends,” and he began to see how inappropriate his relationship with her was from the very beginning. We set boundaries for acceptable behavior at work.
We started getting up and going to bed together. We spent every morning from six to seven talking, just about anything, to keep our connection alive. We watched movies and talked in the evenings after the kids went to bed. He came clean about the entire affair and gave me the gritty details so I could stop imagining things.
He told me that on the night I kicked him out, she showed up at his crappy motel with bags of an entire wardrobe, shoes, and toiletries, ready to move in. She had a fantasy of moving into my house and taking care of my kids. She hated me and thought he could do better. He gave back every gift she’d ever given him.
He reflected on their relationship and saw how she used him to get ahead at work. He saw the lies and manipulation. We didn’t entirely blame her—he was more responsible—but she carried responsibility too. She had slept with two managers, had inappropriate contact with two others, slept with a vendor, and with two peers, all in a company of thirty people.
She stopped texting him after he confessed at work. She went a little crazy, calling and texting, until he told her never to contact him or his family again. He blocked her. We hadn’t heard from her since.
She had a new boyfriend, and we were fairly certain that after that relationship ended, she would try to contact him again. I was still working on forgiveness. It was a long process. But we were focused on ourselves, making our relationship stronger.
He started picking up parenting duties I’d done alone—cooking, laundry, daycare drop-off and pickup. He admitted it was ridiculous that I’d been doing all of it alone. He told me he never realized what he had, an awesome wife, until he almost lost her. I thought he meant it.
Around May, nine months after I busted him, I realized I was truly unhappy. That I would never bounce back from the affair. I’m just not built that way. It was like the wool had finally been pulled from my eyes.
Every day for five months, he had lied to me every time he opened his mouth. He used our child as a tool to continue the affair outside of work, pretending to take our kid to the park while texting her the whole time, paying more attention to her than to his own child. He brought our son into a very grown-up situation without any regard for his feelings or interests. He introduced our son to a woman he barely knew.
That was careless. Ten days ago, I asked him to move out. He moved out last Saturday. It’s just me and my two kids now.
He blamed me for everything. He said he did his best to rebuild and help me, but that apparently it wasn’t good enough. I tried to explain that folding laundry and hanging out with the kids didn’t erase his actions, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. He manipulated me, asking me to let him stay, telling me our son would suffer for my decision, that I didn’t try.
He was constantly criticizing me, telling me I didn’t load the dishwasher right, didn’t cook dinner right. He had a terrible temper and projected it onto the kids, yelling at them, stomping on toys, kicking them, threatening them over small things like spilled milk. On Friday, while I was feeding the baby, I left the room for a few minutes. I came back to him telling our four-year-old that mommy wanted him to move out and that mommy didn’t like him anymore.
My son yelled at me, crying, “Why do you not like daddy anymore? ” I was baffled. I felt like he was trying to turn my son against me. I sat with my son and explained it wasn’t his fault, that we both loved him, that we both tried hard to be a good family, and that his dad was moving out but we were still a family.
He’s fine now. He hasn’t asked about his husband since he left Saturday morning. I’m now doing basic renovations on our house. I’m finding a therapist for myself, and I have an appointment with an attorney for a support order and parenting plan.
I feel good about this. Since Saturday, I can finally breathe. And about the web history I found—he was looking at escort sites. He was stalking a female friend online that he’d wanted to sleep with a couple of years ago.
He had solicited her for sex, and she said no because he was married. I told him to have nothing to do with her anymore. He was jerking off to her pictures on Facebook and Tumblr. He had a Tinder account.
Our relationship didn’t fail because of the affair. It failed because we lacked communication. A lot of our issues could have been resolved if we’d talked better. But by the time we both realized we had major issues, the affair had already happened.
The affair was the final straw. I tried really hard. We both did right after the discovery. But the changes weren’t sustainable.
Some people can bounce back from an affair. I can’t.
