If you found out just a handful of months after saying, “I do,” that your spouse lied to your face about their former affair partner, would you want a divorce?
A few months ago, this 32-year-old man got married to his 28-year-old wife following two years together. He thought their relationship was pretty amazing, but not too long ago, he learned something about her that has ruined his trust.
Back when he was dating his wife, she told him about a man in her professional network, and she hooked up with him one time many years ago.
“What she hid from me, and what I later found out, was that he wasn’t just a random hookup; he was an affair partner she had cheated with during her previous relationship; both of them were in a long-term relationship, which was the actual reason that relationship ended,” he explained.
“She lied to me about why her ex broke up with her to cover this up. At the time, believing he was just an old, irrelevant hookup, I simply asked her to maintain healthy boundaries and ‘keep her distance’ if they ever crossed paths at professional events.”
His wife went to a professional conference recently to try to find a part-time remote job. He then found out that her old affair partner was there.
Not only that, his wife called him, and this guy asked her to come by the conference the next day to meet up with him. She did, and they went to an evening event for networking purposes. Or so she says.
But his wife did not tell him the truth about that at all; she invested days into trying to spin the story to him. He came across private texts between her and her old affair partner talking about how she didn’t want him to find out.
His wife detailed to her old affair partner that she felt she was acting shady and doing something wrong. She still went ahead with hiding the truth regardless.
“We have only been married for [a] couple of months. She claims nothing physical happened this time, that the job was just a great flexible opportunity, and that she was ‘protecting my feelings,'” he added.
“However, to me, which I was clear about from the beginning, and we communicated it very well, taking private calls from a past affair partner/FWB, meeting him at an event, and calculating a cover story to hide his involvement breaks the fundamental trust of our marriage, especially after lying about their past history to begin with.”
“I no longer feel like I can believe anything she tells me. [Am I the jerk] for feeling that this pattern of calculated deception is a dealbreaker and wanting to end the marriage [a] couple of months in?…If I had known from the beginning that she cheated on her ex, I would never have gotten into this relationship. That’s something I always make clear on first dates.”
He laid out his dealbreaker on day one: he doesn’t date cheaters. His wife knew that if she told him the truth about her past, he would walk away.
So, she conveniently rewrote her own history and manipulated him down the aisle. That’s hardly a minor omission; to me, it’s a marriage built on fraud.
Her recent behavior only proves that her habit of calculated deception is alive and well. She’s a liar, and I would be worried about what else she’s hiding from him. Perhaps this old affair partner is someone she’s still active with. He has every right to divorce her.
What advice do you have for him?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
