When TikToker Jess (@jlo_or_jess) found out that her husband was also married to another woman, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Not only was he married to someone else, but Jess was the other woman, even though they were married, too.
Jess and her husband have been together for a long time. They dated, lived together, and built a whole life. None of it felt fake at all. She started having suspicions when her husband began to guard his phone more. He would subtly turn the screen away so that she wouldn’t be able to see it.
At first, she explained away the slight change in his behavior. She chalked it up to stress from work and told herself she was overthinking. According to Jess, that’s just what you do when nothing else in your marriage feels wrong.
Over time, she felt more and more like her husband was physically there but was mentally somewhere else. She thought maybe this was what long-term marriage was supposed to be like.
One night, she was looking for an insurance document, so she searched for it in his email, which was already loaded up on the computer.
However, something else popped up. It was an email thread. The subject line wasn’t anything that stood out, so she almost didn’t even read it.
“I will say this, it didn’t sound like an affair; it sounded like a marriage,” said Jess. “It was the tone, the familiarity, like the way that she talked to him and the way he responded.”
“There wasn’t any secrecy in the language. There was nothing like, no, we shouldn’t be doing this. No guilt. It was definitely domestic plans, jokes, routines, travel, all of it.”
Jess recalls sitting there, dumbfounded, wondering why this woman was talking to her husband like they were a married couple. She thought she could be misunderstanding the content, so she kept reading.
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Her stomach dropped when Jess saw the woman mention a trip. It was a trip that her husband told her he went on alone.
As she scrolled further, she saw family pictures of her husband with this woman at the beach. She was a normal woman with features that were similar to Jess’s. They planned anniversaries, date nights, and mortgage payments together, so he must have another house.
Jess and her husband have been married for five years. She found out from an email receipt that her husband had been with the woman for six years.
“He built two marriages at the same time,” Jess said. “Two full lives, two women folding his laundry, cooking him dinner, doing all the things that married women do for their husbands.”
After snapping photos of all the evidence, she calmly closed the email and thought about her next steps. Her husband called that night from Alabama, which really meant he was with his wife. Jess played along, buying herself some more time to do research.
She looked up the woman’s social media and saw wedding photos. The same man officiated their weddings, but they got married in a different state. The next morning, Jess woke up to a notification from her bank.
A large transfer had been made to an account she didn’t recognize. The memo line read, “School deposit.” So, not only did her husband have another wife but possibly other children, too.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
