Right After Her Husband Passed, She Found Out He’d Been Cheating On Her With A Much Younger Woman
This woman’s husband struggled with alcoholism and trying to stay sober.
Not long ago, he relapsed and passed away after getting into a car accident while intoxicated. His car was the only one involved in the accident.
Over the years, her husband’s alcoholism was a constant issue for them and caused her an immense amount of anger, so learning that his drinking was what led to his death was deeply upsetting.
Several days after her husband died, she was looking through his phone for photos, and she discovered text messages between him and a woman.
Through these conversations, it became evident that he had been having an affair with this woman for a year or more.
She also realized that the woman her husband was cheating with was clearly much younger, and she guessed that the woman was no older than 19 while she and her husband were in their mid to late 30s.
This made everything so much worse because she was already enraged that her husband relapsed, drove drunk, and got into an accident that caused his death.
Now, she had to cope with the fact that he had been hiding an affair from her. It crushed her because he was fully aware that one of her past partners had been unfaithful to her and how much pain she experienced due to the cheating.
When she’d had conversations about this with her husband, he talked about his past experience with being cheated on as well, claiming that he knew how painful it was to go through that. He told her that he would exercise patience with her and that she deserved to be with someone who treated her with respect.
zinkevych – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
She pointed out the irony of him saying that and then going on to cheat on her with someone significantly younger than him.
Once she found out the truth of what her husband had been doing behind her back for the last year of his life, something changed in her.
Understandably, she was already dealing with a lot of conflicting emotions due to this loss. She was mad at her husband because he had relapsed, and they also had an argument not long before his death.
“When I saw those messages, I was just…done. My pain evaporated, and my grief shriveled up as I felt the man I had been mourning was not the man I knew after all. My emotions just switched to being FURIOUS at the cheating instead. To be honest, the closest thing I can describe to how I feel about now is hatred,” she said.
She acknowledged this is a brutal word to use in regard to her deceased husband, whom she used to feel love for, but it’s the most accurate word she has been able to think of to express how she’s feeling.
Her husband’s family is heartbroken, and there has been a history of family members passing away due to their addictions. Her husband’s father, one of his sisters, and one of his cousins have all passed away after their battles with addiction.
His family has already been through so much trauma, so his mother, other sisters, and his brothers have been struggling to cope with this recent loss.
For the funeral, she tried to be strong, wore black, and she ended up sobbing a ton throughout the service.
In her view, she was crying not only because her husband was gone but because of all of his secrets that she’d since discovered, but his family didn’t know about the affair.
Now, less than three months after her husband’s death, she’s been doing okay despite walking through the complicated feelings related to her husband betraying her trust.
This healing process takes time, and she has continued to feel furious and stung by her husband’s actions.
Along with the rage she’s experienced, she’s also felt guilty for being mad at a person who is no longer here. Plus, her mind has been so focused on her fury that she has been avoiding her grief entirely.
“I’ve even started, very cautiously, casually dating again, but mostly just for some fun. I definitely am not ready for something serious again anytime soon, if ever,” she explained.
Her career has been going smoothly; she gets together with her friends as often as she’s able to, and her life has been going better than you would think it would for someone who lost her spouse just mere months ago.
From the outside, you would never know that she recently became a widow. She hadn’t told her husband’s family that she had started going out on dates again. They all live in a tiny town that only has two bars.
“My sister-in-law caught me out on one of those dates a few nights ago, and she went OFF on me,” she shared.
“Going on about how I’m betraying her brother’s memory, that, clearly, I never really loved him to have moved on so fast, calling me every name in the book and just causing this massive scene and scaring my date off.”
While this was happening, she was pretty drunk, so she felt more willing to turn off her filter and be blunt with her sister-in-law.
In response to her sister-in-law’s rant, she told her that it was true that she no longer loved her husband after she discovered that he obviously didn’t love her, either.
She went on to say that her husband didn’t love her because he decided to go against their wedding vows and cheated on her with a woman who was barely an adult.
Continuing her rant, she said it didn’t make sense for her to care about a man who had known how horribly betrayed she’d been in the past but chose to have an affair behind her back anyway.
“I told her he’s dead and that he broke my heart on his way out, destroying any affection I’d had for him before, and I’m over it. I’m living my life now,” she added.
Then, she told her husband’s sister to leave her alone. After the incident, she knew that she was wrong for telling off her sister-in-law in a public space.
Her sister-in-law reacted to the situation by telling the rest of the family. From there, her husband’s family members proceeded to contact her with a barrage of insults.
They told her she was cold, cruel, and “loveless,” shamed her for not forgiving her husband in death after he passed away in such a tragic way, and even asked her how she could discard her husband with what seemed like not a second thought.
Obviously, these words hurled at her haven’t aided in coping with the feelings of guilt she’s been trying to cope with.
Now, she feels self-conscious about not grieving the death of her husband, and she’s concerned that it’s wrong for her not to be mourning. She worries that his family is onto something and that she is a cold person for how she’s been feeling.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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