Hello everyone. My story is a bit of an unusual one, I hope this is the right place.
My husband and I were married in 2009, we have three children. I found out three weeks ago that he has been having an affair with my best friend (who I will refer to as OW) for six years.
In 2018 I met OW, we spent a lot of time together as my youngest child was of a similar age to her eldest. In 2019 we introduced our husband's to each other and they immediately hit it off, this meant that we spent even more time together as families.
At some point in 2020, just after the birth of my OW's second child, my husband added her on social media and they began chatting. All through the first Covid lockdown their messaging increased, turning into an EA and when lockdown came to an end, their PA began quickly and has continued ever since.
Unware of this, towards the end of 2020 I became uncomfortable with my husband's behaviour around OW. I felt they were flirting and I raised it with him several times into the early months of 2021. To start with, I was met with flat out denial and heavy gaslighting, he called me delusional. At one point, while comforting me because I was crying, he offered to come with me to the doctor's to get some medication for my 'anxiety'.
I didn't back down from my insistence that my boundaries were being crossed so he changed tactic, he admitted he was flirting because he enjoyed the attention and promised he would stop. It certainly cooled off but I still couldn't shake the feeling something was wrong.
As a result of this I pulled away from the friendship group pretty hard, I found it too difficult to see them together. I isolated myself, I spent evenings in my bedroom instead of downstairs with my husband and our marriage became strained.
In May 2022 my husband told me that he was unhappy in our marriage and he was considering divorce. We talked a lot about the problems we were having, he said he felt that he was the only one making an effort and that I had abandoned him emotionally in the marriage. We agreed to work on things and things improved for a while but I was still experiencing a lot of 'anxiety' that I couldn't explain. Anxiety isn't really the right word, I could sense something was 'off' but I couldn't (or didn't want to) figure out what.
Towards the end of 2022 I felt a change in him and the emotional distance grew again. In January 2023 he asked me for a divorce. That year was hell, he stayed in the house flip flopping on whether or not he wanted to leave. Sometimes he would sleep downstairs for months at a time. He was never violent but his anger was loud and unpredictable, he would swing from angry to sad silence every few days. When he was angry he blamed me for everything, telling me I had been an awful wife and nothing I could do now would make a difference. When he was withdrawn and sad he would sometimes sleep upstairs again and we would reconnect with sex and intimacy but it was always quickly followed with more anger and arguing.
I went into IC at the start of 2023 and it helped me prepare for the end of our marriage, I did a lot of hard work and found it healing. I relied pretty heavily on OW for emotional support during this time and my husband's friendship with OBS deepened, they became very close.
In early 2024 during a discussion about our situation, I asked again if my husband's behaviour was due to cheating. He gave me his phone and told me to check it. I found nothing but just as I was about to hand it back, something made me check his WhatsApp chat with OW. The amount of messages was overwhelming. I didn't sit and read everything, there was too much. I scrolled and scrolled, checking to see if the messages went as far back as my suspicions in 2020. They did. Every time I stopped scrolling to read something, it wasn't damning evidence of an affair but over the line banter. I handed his phone back to him, told him he was disgusting and didn't speak about it again for about a month.
I sat on what I had found, figuring out what to do. I knew my husband would never admit to anything, I knew he would gaslight me. I decided that whatever was going on between them was too much of a breach of my boundaries. I sent a NC text to OW and asked my husband to move out. We have been separated ever since and are in the process of divorce.
Before Christmas 2025 while he was at my house dropping the children off, my stbx husband told me that he wished we could get back together. I had sensed he was finally feeling that the end of our marriage was a loss and his feelings towards me had changed, so I listened and was empathetic but made it very clear that was not an option.
Three weeks ago he messaged asking if he could come round as there was something important he needed to discuss. He disclosed the affair.
The affair had started on Christmas Eve 2019, a lingering kiss on the cheek with both of them feeling strong chemistry. Nothing happened for a few months as OW gave birth in January 2020 but soon after the EA began and as I detailed earlier, progressed to PA later that year and continued until Christmas 2025.
Stbx husband says that throughout 2025 he was becoming disillusioned with the affair. His life after leaving me was not what he imagined, he realised that he had contributed a lot more than he first thought to the breakdown of our marriage and that his affair was destructive so he got himself in IC. This lead to his confession to me.
When I separated from my stbx in 2024 I chose not to say anything to OBS. I didn't have any proof and I knew that stbx and OW went on the offensive, painting me as crazy and delusional. They told OBS I had found messages but I was reading too much into them and I was using them as an excuse to end the marriage.
On the evening that stbx disclosed, I messaged OW and told her that she had 48 hours to tell OBS or I would. After some initial push back, including OW turning up at stbx's house while the children were there in an attempt to get her story straight, she confessed.
In the weeks since, OBS and I have worked together trying to figure out exactly what happened and when. It has been an excruciating experience. Stbx has dissociative amnesia due to childhood trauma and OW is TT and minimising like a champ. Through messages on OW's phone and stbx husband's patchy memories (I believe he is being as honest as he can be and isn't holding anything back), we have a rough timeline but because the affair went on for so long, we are still discovering things and it's creating multiple D-Days for OBS. The double betrayal because the four of us and the children were all so close is so painful to navigate.
I'm struggling a little bit because despite following my gut instinct and ending my marriage, I am still on the rollercoaster. Some days I am devastated and others I am more angry than I have ever felt before. I know I don't have to explain to you guys the strength and depth of the emotions after d-day.
I feel stbx has re-written my history, I'm grieving the end of my marriage all over again because all the healing I did from it the first time was based on a lie. So many memories over so many years when I was at home with the children or when our families were all together are now tainted because of what they were doing secretly. Part of me feels the need to make sense of it in order to move on from it but the other part of me tells me I should just forget about it because we're already separated and it doesn't/shouldn't matter. I am trying to frame this as something that happened, not something that is happening but I'm not having much success.
Writing all this out has been cathartic but I'm not sure what I'm looking for really. Perhaps someone who has also found out about an affair after separation and can relate to what I'm feeling? Some validation that even though my marriage is over and my gut instinct was right, it's ok to be this upset by it? I don't know, it's hard to pin my thoughts down these days.
Sorry it's so long and incoherent, thanks for reading if you made it this far.
