Rebecca Meyer
This 36-year-old woman and her husband, 37, have been together for 14 years and have a daughter. Six months ago, he suggested they open their marriage, but she wasn’t in favor of it. Unfortunately, he’d only brought it up because he’d already been cheating on her with one of his co-workers. Her husband has had two previous affairs that she’s been aware of.
“I tried to at least set some boundaries around what this ‘open relationship’ would look like, but he violated every single one. He then decided we would have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ open relationship,” she said.
Two months ago, her husband said he would file for divorce to be with the woman with whom he’d had an affair. They still live together and haven’t taken any steps toward divorce, but only due to finances.
She finally felt like she’d reached acceptance with their marriage ending, and even though the living situation was awkward, she and her husband were civil. That all changed last week. Not long after her husband expressed his hopes of divorcing her, she met another man when she wasn’t expecting it.
“It’s progressed into something romantic within the past couple of weeks, and nothing physical has happened yet (nor will anytime soon). I assumed my husband suspected something,” she explained.
However, because she and her husband were separated, and he was in a relationship with his affair partner, she didn’t tell him the details of the situation with the man she’d started talking to. In the early afternoon one day, she was talking on the phone with this man in her bedroom and locked the door.
Her husband suddenly demanded that she let him into the room because he supposedly wanted to find out her plans for dinner. She didn’t believe this was why he tried to interrupt her phone conversation; he’d already planned to have dinner with their daughter.
“He must have been standing outside the door because he overheard some of the (admittedly spicy) conversation on the phone. He was furious with me and has mostly been giving me the silent treatment since,” she shared.
Even though it was hypocritical, her husband was angry that she was having this kind of conversation while their daughter was home, but he’d done the same thing with his affair partner. He was furious she’d started talking to someone else, in his opinion, so quickly.
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