Less than a month ago, I had a mass removed from my body, and I found out it was cancerous. Now I’m finding out that the woman I’ve been married to for seven years is cheating on me. Isn’t that grand? I’m thirty-five, and Victoria is thirty-three.
We’ve been married for seven years, with the usual ups and downs, but nothing I ever considered out of the ordinary. We both thought our marriage was better than the ones our parents had, and I took that as a good sign. Maybe she was lying to me, or maybe I just wasn’t doing enough. I don’t know which one it is, and honestly, I’m not sure I want to know.
Victoria works as a journalist, and because of the sources she deals with, she keeps her phone guarded at all times. She’s never said I’m one of the people she’s guarding it from, but sometimes it really seems that way. I know her passcode, but I’ve always chosen not to go through her phone. I didn’t want to snoop into things that were supposed to be confidential.
The only times I ever used it were for quick calls or when I needed to look at a message she sent me and my own phone was somewhere else. That’s why what happened hurt so much. I noticed she had been acting weird for a while, but I didn’t think much of it. She works on all kinds of news stories, and sometimes when they’re dark, she keeps them to herself until close to release.
I assumed this was one of those cases. I tried to get her to open up about whatever was weighing on her, but she prefers to keep her emotions in because she thinks it helps her writing. So I knew something was off, but I chalked it up to the wrong thing. One day, I picked up her phone to check what we had discussed about new patio furniture.
My phone was upstairs, and she saw me grab hers, so she didn’t panic. When I got to the list of chats, mine was pinned to the top, but right under it, the most recent person who had messaged her said, “Do you want to make it a thing? ” The name was Will, someone I didn’t recognize. I was curious about the context.
I first thought it was someone annoyed by something she was doing at work, but I didn’t know Will as any of her colleagues. She wasn’t watching me, and the message was left on read, so I opened it and glanced through the conversation. After I digested what I saw, I couldn’t help but stare at the back of her head for several seconds. The context was someone appreciating the time they spent together, acknowledging that she was married and he was too, but asking if she would like to make it a regular thing.
From that, I could assume it had happened once, and this person wanted more. She hadn’t replied to those messages, though she had earlier mentioned wanting to interview him, and he said he didn’t mind. I don’t know the story she was working on. I knew it was possible I was misinterpreting things, but the way they talked about the time they spent together, the emphasis on being married, made it clear that whatever they were up to, it wasn’t appropriate for married people.
Even if she wasn’t physically cheating on me, those texts alone showed there was emotional cheating happening at the very least. I went back to the patio conversation after that. I didn’t want her to know I had gone beyond what I was supposed to look at. I haven’t been able to get my hands on her phone since then, so I don’t know if she ever responded to him.
I just know something was happening that didn’t look good. It made me feel sick because I thought we had a good foundation of trust, but it didn’t seem I had the right idea. I decided I was going to either dig deeper or confront her, probably both. I couldn’t keep thinking about it for much longer.
I needed to know if she no longer wanted to be with me. The quicker we ended things, the quicker I could move on and heal. Update one. I came back with the kind of clarity that doesn’t bring comfort.
The answers I got weren’t the ones I wanted, but it was the truth, and I suppose the truth was ultimately what I wanted. She really was cheating on me. After all these years of marriage, Victoria was cheating on me. It happens to a lot of people, so I don’t even think that’s the craziest part.
I don’t believe I’m immune to being cheated on, but I do think I made enough intentional moves as a husband that it shouldn’t have been my fate. Sometimes your actions have nothing to do with it at all. I thought about confronting her and getting the truth that way. Normally, I would have trusted her enough for that, but I realized I didn’t know enough about her anymore.
So I waited for the first opportunity to go through her phone, and I took it. I felt immense pressure because I didn’t want to get caught. The good thing is I didn’t, and it didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. She had replied to Will and told him, “I don’t think so.
That was a one-time thing. ” He tried to convince her to change her mind, telling her he would make it worth her time, but she refused to budge. That made me even more convinced it had been sexual. No one was explicit enough that I could be one hundred percent sure, but all I needed was common sense.
After that point, they only focused on scheduling the interview she wanted. I took screenshots of the messages and his phone number, sent them to myself, and deleted the paper trail. I didn’t want her to know I was onto her until I was ready to pull the trigger. I also had some preliminary discussions with a divorce lawyer so I knew what to expect if I had to go down that route.
Then I went straight to confronting her. I asked her what she had been up to with the story she was working on. She told me it was something very interesting, but she couldn’t tell me anything about it. I let her know I knew more about it than she might have reckoned.
She looked curious and asked what I knew. I told her I knew about her and Will and the interview she was scheduling. Her face changed. She asked if I went through her phone.
She wanted me to cower, but I didn’t. I nodded firmly and told her I did. She started to talk about how I was never supposed to go through her conversations with her sources, but she stopped mid-sentence and sighed. She wanted to know how much I had seen, and I told her all of it.
So it was up to her to explain what it was, because I had my conclusions. She wanted me to share my conclusions, but I wasn’t going to do that. She was in a spot where she could choose to negotiate with me. She had to come forth with the truth.
Well, she did, and even now I have trouble accepting it as truth. The only reason I believe it is because it’s so unflattering to her that I can’t understand why she would lie. She told me she was working on a story about women of the night. She had been doing a lot of work on it, which explained the late nights at work.
She got interviews from the women themselves and even watched how they did business sometimes. Then came the part I still find hard to believe. She decided to see how things went for them on an average night, but in a more interactive manner. She posed as one of them, got picked up by a man, and spent the night with him.
She told him at some point that she was a journalist, not actually one of those women, and he didn’t mind. It didn’t change anything. She got her first-hand experience of how the women booked and negotiated with men, and how the logistics of getting to the place where the act was going to happen worked. She also planned a more in-depth interview with Will to understand the mindset of a married man who engages in that kind of thing.
The first thing I thought was that if that story was true, she was incredibly stupid. Those women get hurt all the time. I don’t know why she would put herself in that position only to blindside the guy with her intent to write about him. That could have made things worse.
I’m glad he turned out to be a reasonable person, because it really could have gone left. I also noticed she was avoiding talking about exactly what they did when they got to their destination. I asked her what they had been up to. Not everyone who hires one of those people is looking for sex.
Some just want to talk. But I doubted this guy was one of those. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have harped on how they were married the way he did. She wouldn’t have told him it was a one-time thing either.
She didn’t want to speak. I could see how hesitant she was. I reminded her that I read her messages with him. She lifted up her phone like she wanted to reference them, which led me to bark at her to put it down.
I asked her again. She eventually told me they had slept together. I just nodded. She said it was just once.
He had worn protection, and it had been entirely physical. She hadn’t even gotten any pleasure out of it. You might understand now why I’m still having trouble believing this story. If not for the fact that it doesn’t paint her well at all, I wouldn’t even think it was true.
But there’s no reason for her to tell such an unflattering truth unless the actual truth is somehow worse. That’s something I’m not in the mood to consider, so I’m not. I had to ask her if she was serious a million times, but she didn’t budge. I flipped out.
I told her she knew she didn’t need that for a good story. Either she saw a John she found attractive, or she was horny, or both. She used “I’m a journalist” as an excuse to do it and act like it was some kind of cutting-edge research. I told her how ridiculous it was and how unforgivable it was.
Her story didn’t make it any better. In fact, it made it worse. I would have preferred to hear that she was horny and it meant nothing emotionally. That genuinely would have been better than “I was being a boots-on-the-ground journalist doing a story on hookers, so I decided to be one of them for a day, down to sleeping with a John.
”
I think she understood how dumb it was once I said that, because her face changed. She maintained it was the truth, so I told her we were getting divorced. That’s when she started to cry. She didn’t beg, because she was too smart for that, but she just kept crying.
I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I left her there and came back hours later when I knew she would have calmed down. She tried to speak to me, but I was too angry to hear it. I told her not to bother unless there was some new fact that would drastically change the shameful things she had told me. I wasn’t going to listen to begging or anything stupid like that.
She backed off. I had her served with papers. She refused to move out of the house, claiming she still had a legal right to live there. She wasn’t wrong.
That didn’t mean I was going to move out either. So we both existed in that space until the court decided who got the house. Highly uncomfortable. I do not recommend it.
Update two. Enough has happened for what I think should be the final update to this horrible story. I’ve tried not to be too emotional in telling it, but it hasn’t been a great time. A lot of emotions surfaced at the end, and I found it rough, but I’m glad to be done with it all.
We ended up getting divorced without too much fanfare. I had every right to try and milk her dry and make things as miserable as possible for her, but I didn’t do that. It seemed unnecessary because making the divorce difficult reflects on me too. I would have to deal with the headache, and that was one thing I didn’t want to handle.
She ended up getting the house, which was no surprise to me. I wish she could have kept it, but I don’t mind starting fresh somewhere else. Thankfully, we had never earned significantly less or more than each other for most of our marriage, so there wasn’t any alimony to worry about. Thank goodness, because I didn’t want anything tying me to her for the next several years.
Ultimately, we split as the court commanded, and we moved on to different places. But for some reason, I just didn’t feel satisfied. It felt like I had had something really good and it had all imploded because someone decided to sleep with a source for a story. And by the way, I’m still not sure I believe it.
Everyone I’ve told immediately talks about how incredibly ridiculous it is. People say don’t marry nurses and party girls, but was I supposed to be worried by a nerdy journalist? How was I meant to foresee that? After the divorce, the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.
I couldn’t get my mind off the entire thing and how I had been a good guy getting a faceful of crap. I had to hit back. I just had to. By that point, Victoria had already released her article, and to keep it entirely honest, it was a great piece.
But I already knew she was a great writer, so no surprise there. I saw her quotes from a regular patron who I knew was Will. I didn’t dwell too much on her writing. Our town loves a scandal, so I went to another publication, the one she loosely considered a rival, and I contacted one of their writers to see if they’d be interested in a little bit of gossip.
She didn’t make a commitment, but she said she would hear me out. I told her everything. My wife wrote that piece, and she had slept with one of the sources while being married. I could tell the writer was very interested.
She said she might not be the one writing it, but she knew someone who would be perfect for it. Long story short, I got connected with another writer, got interviewed about the whole situation, and that was it. A few weeks later, the article came out. It wasn’t anything extensive.
It was a piece questioning journalistic ethics. It didn’t name me explicitly as the source for any of it, but it claimed I was reached out to for comment. One of the comments I gave during the interview was inserted there, talking about how disappointed I was in her when I found out. That was pretty much my direct involvement.
She got wind of it a lot quicker than I expected, but that made sense since it’s her industry. She called me as soon as she found out and wanted to know if I had gone to the publication to get the piece written on her. I claimed I hadn’t. Her journalistic mind kicked in because she wanted to know how it was possible they knew what they knew if I hadn’t mentioned it.
I admitted I told friends, which she certainly couldn’t blame me for. I knew she had spoken to friends about the situation too. I also hadn’t been shy about what she had done during the court proceedings, so there were court workers who knew the situation. I told her any of them could have leaked things for a little paycheck.
After all, a lot of leaks come from government workers privy to that kind of stuff. She didn’t believe me, as she shouldn’t have, but I refused to admit to anything. She asked why I hadn’t protected her when I was called. My comment basically confirmed the outlandish claims.
But here’s the thing, I don’t have any reason to protect her from the press. She hurt me, and she wanted me to say things to protect her? Nah. I only told the truth when I was asked a direct question, and she shouldn’t have done what she did in the first place.
She was really mad. She told me the piece was going to last forever, and I didn’t care. She’d written critical pieces on others before, so this was her time to get similar treatment. She claimed she was going to get legal on them, but I told her not to bother.
I had text messages, and I knew the claims being made could be backed up. If she wanted to take them to court, I would take their side. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. But I told her I wasn’t.
I wasn’t looking for her life to be a smooth sail after what she had done, and I wanted her to know that. She was convinced I leaked the entire thing, but I just continued to deny it to frustrate and confuse her. I had a few people I know reach out to confirm whether the story they read had to do with Victoria, my wife, and it pleased me to tell them that it sadly did. I wasn’t sad.
It was the way some of them learned about the divorce, which was even funnier. I know this is going to last a long time, and that’s what makes me the happiest. I don’t want her to get away from this whole situation with zero payback. I like that I was able to get this one last hit on her.
May it follow her around forever. Hopefully, this is the last bit of drama I will need to endure with this woman. She’s put me through enough, and I’m ready to move on. Victoria’s explanation is something else.
I could understand “I made a terrible decision” or even “I was attracted to him and made a selfish choice,” but “I slept with a source because I was doing investigative journalism” is a level of commitment to the story nobody asked for. The fact that Will wanted to make it a thing afterward really didn’t help her case. Apparently, the Pulitzer Committee was very impressed with the research methodology. As for the article you helped get published after the divorce, was it petty?
Yes. Was it particularly mature? No. But after everything that happened, I can understand why you wanted her to experience at least a fraction of the consequences of her choices.
She’s spent her career writing about other people’s questionable decisions, and eventually, she became the subject of one herself. There’s a certain poetic irony there.
