In the early hours of one dismal, December day, I found out my husband was having an affair.  I was devastated.  Still am.  It turned my whole world up-side-down.  And after a year of sleepless nights and midnight journaling, I’ve decided to blog, in the hope that these posts will help someone else who is also going through this hell.

Married, Cheated-on, Died.  Separated, Divorced, Survived, is my story, my brain dump – a forty something year old trying to re-build her life, whilst looking after a tweenage daughter and a delightful dog, and incompetently tending to an emotionally exhausted brain, a bruised and broken heart, and a relentlessly vocal inner critic named Bronwyn.

“You didn’t just cheat on me; you cheated on us. You didn’t just break my heart; you broke our future.”

– Steve Maraboli

My story starts on 6th December 2022 at our annual work Christmas party. Being in a heavily female dominated health care profession, you can picture the scene – a few mulled wines in, the Christmas party mix playing in the background, Christmas jumpers in all their hideous glory, and a dozen or so women merrily chatting, predominantly about work and relationships. One pipes up with a story that sounds ‘juicy’ and so most of the breakout conversations naturally stop and we all tune-in to Juliette. She tells us that she’s found out her husband, who separated from her a few months ago, is seeing someone new. How do you know? We ask, intrigued and awaiting all the gory details, and she tells us – there’s a tracker in her car and when he hadn’t come home by 11pm last Monday night, she decided to track where he was.  To her disbelief, their car was outside a random house in a tiny village not far from us.

She rang her best friend, while panic, despair and uncertainty set-in, and her friend amazingly knew what to do.  (In case you ever need to know this, you type the address into the Land Registry website, you pay £6, and very straightforwardly, you have the name and address of the person who lives in the house where your car is parked!  You then, you type that name into social media, and you find out that a lady with the same name has lost her cat, and you then have the lady’s phone number too.  Genius).

But then what do you do?  Juliette decided she’d ring her darling dad for some ‘dadvice’.  He tells Juliette that if she doesn’t ring the woman’s number, he will disown her.  So sure enough, she rings it and a lady answers. “Hello” says Juliette. “Is James there?”.  “Yes” says the lady and hands the phone over.  “Hello James, it’s Juliette”.  Silence…  “Why are you ringing me?” he trembles.  “To find out where you are?” Juliette says.  “Well, you’ve found me now so goodbye”.  And he hangs up…

Wowzers!  ‘Holy Moly’, we exclaim. And on the conversation goes, well into the night, with other interesting relationship break-up stories, and lots of hugs and tears.

So, back to me.  A few hours later, in the early hours of the next day morning, I get up from bed to go to the loo and I start thinking about Juliette’s story.  There’s a tracker in our car I remember.  I haven’t looked at it in months.  But yeah, I’ll have a look to see where our car is right now.  And I press it.  And at this very moment, I say goodbye to the ‘married with 2.4 children’ life I’d become accustomed to.  My old life unimaginably starts to unravel, and my new life scarily begins…