A t the advice of my father in law, we left the house and went for an epic dog walk. The idea was to chat openly and with complete honesty, leaving no stone left unturned. Talk and talk until there was nothing left to say. And that is what we did. It was intense and passers by must’ve thought that someone had died because all we did was sob.

D told me that she was 32, 17 years his junior, and that she was training to be an accountant. She was a hair and make up kind type of person. I am not. And that she dressed smartly and sexily.  She dressed to impress and liked impressing him. She was from an Eastern European country and had come to the UK when she was 20 or so because she had an intense crush on Alan Rickman. She liked older men.

When she and D met, she was in a relationship with someone she’d been with for 10 years.  So they were both ‘playing away from home’, both two-timing, although she had now left this partner since meeting D. He had originally left his partner for Natalia, 10 years prior.  They had had a house together but she wasn’t happy with him, and their sex life was boring.

He told me that she was very sexual and her kink was being pinned down by D as if he was raping her. D had been taking her ex partner’s viagra on the times he’d been there because he couldn’t get it up. He told me that was because he felt guilty about cheating on me when he was having sex with her. She’d sent him photos for her in the bath and dressed up in sexy lingerie. He told me that didn’t do much for him. He told me she liked him but he had no feelings for her, although when pushed, he said he must have had some feelings for her because he’d wanted to meet her again. He said she was the polar opposite to me. A hard person. Not likeable and was proud that someone at work had called her a bitch in the way she handled a colleague.  He told me he had an ‘animal attraction’ to her.  WTF.

He told me he’d met her 5 times. He could recount each time:

1 – the time they met in a night club. D was on his own (he used to go to night clubs on his own) and she was with a friend. They had been talking at the bar and had stayed in the club until it ended. They’d left together, kissed and swapped numbers. D then texted her first because he had fancied her so much and he thought that I would never find out.

2 – they met for a dog walk in the day time. She’d parked in Waitrose car park and they snogged again.

3 – he went to stay with her for the night and they had sex. He enjoyed having sex with her. He said he’d bought her a present of a hedgehog he’d spotted in our local shopping centre because she liked them.

4 – they went to a party together and they had spent the night in a yurt. He met her friends and they’d gone to bed early so they could have sex again.

5 – (the night before I found out). He had parked in her town and caught the train to the closest large city because she’d just finished an accountancy exam. He’d taken her a box of chocolates as a congratulatory gift and they’d had a few drinks and caught the train home. They’d arrived at her home (she had now moved in with a friend of hers) and the flat mate was awake. She was very very chatty and they sat and watched sewing bee together. She was an author of sex books.

Hearing this was agonising and revolting.  He told me not to refer to it as an affair and that we shouldn’t tell anyone because outside influences would be unhelpful and we would be compelled to act in a way that my may not be to our choosing.  And on and on it went. I was obsessed with finding out more. I wanted to know everything. Though I realise now that once you know something, you can never un-know that information and when you ask a question, you really have to decide whether you want to know the answer before you ask it. I did not do this.

I asked him why. He said freedom, adventure, desire. He later told his mum he was bored.  It pained my heart. It broke my heart. It shattered my heart and I just couldn’t handle the fact that this was real and it was happening to me. Sadness beyond. How could he do this? We had a good marriage. I loved him ridiculously. And we cried and cried, and at one  point on that walk, he took my hand. I snatched it away. But the second time he reached for me I allowed him and as I sobbed the hugged me. It was so awful. Such a devastatingly confusing day.

“Cheating is the most disrespectful thing one human being can do to another. If you aren’t happy in a relationship end it before starting another one.”

– Abhishek Tiwari

That night we went to a school music concert. He and our daughter left at half time because they’d had enough, but I stayed there on my own to cry. I am crying now as I write. It was horrible. It is still horrible and the hurt is physically painful.

And you know what?  I slept in that same bed as him that night. I wanted to talk him more. We didn’t touch each other but there was so much to sort out. Our marriage was over, we had to get an apartment for him to move into sharpish, we had to tell our daughter and our families, and we were going to New York for a family holiday for 5 nights three days later.  WTF.  WTF.  WTF.  Someone please help me…