Hi, my story is not too complicated. I’m 38, she’s 36, and we’ve been married for nine years. We have two beautiful girls, ages 9 and 5, who both attend school. My wife is a stay-at-home mom.
D-Day, as they like to call it, happened on August 12 of this year.
The story goes back to our friendship with another couple. The husband is my best friend, and I would consider his wife my wife’s best friend. We’ve been really good friends with them for about 10 years. Over the years, our friendship as married couples crossed a lot of boundaries, including skinny-dipping and talking about sexual things, all as a group. I had never found my friend’s wife attractive, although at times I could have imagined all of us having sex together in the same room. Crazy, I know.
I felt like we had toned down that kind of behavior over time, but I could tell that, over the past year or so, the communication between my wife and my best friend had started to change. I was becoming increasingly concerned about how they acted around each other. She took notice of my concerns, and I also feel like she was letting him know about them.
To this day, I wish I had told him to back off. I’m not sure it would have helped, though.
Anyway, my wife claims it started innocently through Snapchat. She says the moment she knew things had changed was when he told her he wished he had her and that he had always liked blondes. I guess she was feeding into his compliments and building up her self-image, which she struggles with.
I was increasingly putting pressure on her about their relationship, and that’s when she started deleting messages and phone calls from him. She claims they never once talked about having sex or sent nude pictures. At this point, though, what difference would that make?
Fast-forward to the night it happened.
My wife and I had completely unplanned plans to stop by their house one afternoon. We brought a case of beer, and we had our youngest daughter with us. I should also mention that they have a 9-year-old son.
We were all drinking together, and as the night went on, it got to the point where it was too late and we had all had a little too much to drink. My wife even mentioned that we could just go home, and I really wish I had taken her up on that offer.
We had all gone back inside, and, to our surprise, the kids were asleep. We laid our youngest daughter down in their spare bedroom and their son in his room, which was connected to the spare bedroom by a Jack-and-Jill bathroom.
Once that was taken care of, we decided to mix a few more drinks and go outside. Before we knew it, it was 3 a.m., and one of the kids woke up, so we decided to call it a night.
My wife went to lie down in the spare bedroom, and his wife went to lie down in their son’s room to help him get back to sleep. I never really knew where my best friend went, but I assumed he went to his bedroom.
I laid back down on their couch in the living room, thinking I would just close my eyes for a little while. It didn’t seem like long before I thought I should go check on my wife and daughter to make sure they were okay.
That’s when I noticed his bedroom light was still on. When I went to the spare bedroom, my wife wasn’t in bed.
The Jack-and-Jill bathroom’s pocket door was cracked open, and I could hear moaning. When I opened the door, there he was behind her. He was still clothed, I think, because I didn’t look down. My wife was naked and bent over the counter.
I completely freaked out. By this time, the kids were awake again, so I went to wake up his wife and tell her that her husband was having sex with my wife in the bathroom.
Needless to say, she was extremely upset, just as I was. I also had to deal with the trauma of actually witnessing it happen.
Looking back, I had already been feeling, based on my wife’s actions over the previous several months, that something like this could become a reality. I keep thinking that I should have tried harder to stop it, although I don’t know if that would have made any difference.
As for the aftermath, we attended a few counseling sessions. My wife has broken off all contact with him and given me access to all her accounts.
She claims she never loved him or wanted to be with him. He was also married to my wife’s former best friend, which has made the betrayal even more complicated. My wife has expressed extreme guilt over what she did, and she says she wants to reconcile and move forward.
The story she has given me about that night is that she had gone to bed and he came into the room and woke her up. She claims she initially thought it was me because we had all been drinking. She then heard him say something along the lines of, "I’m horny. Let’s go to the bathroom."
She asked where I was, and he told her I was sleeping on the couch. She then proceeded to go to the bathroom with him.
She says she never stopped to think about what it could do to her family or to her friend, who was sleeping in the bedroom right next to her.
When I asked her about it, she said it was like she had returned to her "slutty college days."
So far, I feel like she has answered everything I’ve asked without arguing or blaming anyone else. She seems to be taking full responsibility for her actions.
I don’t think she ever expected things to get to the point of becoming physical, but when I started noticing the way he looked at her and how they acted around each other, I knew where his intentions were headed.
They were having problems in their marriage, and he was confiding in my wife.
Meanwhile, I had thought—and according to her, she felt the same way—that we had a great marriage. We loved being around each other, sharing experiences, and splitting the workload pretty evenly.
Anyway, that’s my story. I’m stuck on what to do next and how to move past this. My trust in her is completely gone, and I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to try to work things out or simply move on and leave the marriage behind.
We have stopped seeing our counselor, mostly because of my decision. I felt like she was beating a dead horse, and I thought I already knew the whole story about what had been going on between the two of them.
Now I’m left wondering what to do. I still have a family and a marriage that I thought were strong, but I don’t know whether I can ever rebuild the trust that was lost.
