A Husband Shares Exactly Why He Divorced His Cheating Wife — And It Had Nothing To Do With The Affair
It wasn't her affair that put the nail in the coffin, it was something else entirely.
simona pilolla 2 / Shutterstock After a Reddit post asked people “What did you do to figure out that your boyfriend or girlfriend was cheating on you?” someone posted their reply with the strategy they employed to get their girlfriend to admit to an affair.
According to the man, he had already been suspicious, but he didn’t divorce her because of her affair — there was something else that bothered him far more.
After a direct approach and failed marriage counseling didn’t work, he asked his friend who worked as an investigator with an insurance firm what he should do. The advice he was given helped him figure out the truth of his wife’s affair, and what she was withholding from him.
He was told to ask open-ended questions and not let her give 'yes' or 'no' answers.
“A friend is an investigator with an insurance firm, and he goes about finding frauds and rooting out their dastardly plans,” the story read. “I asked him how he would go about it. He said, don’t ask yes or no questions until you get a hit on the open-ended ones, but always ask open-ended ones.”
He made sure to tell his friends to watch their behavior. “Do they fidget? Watch the door? Do strange things they don’t normally do in a conversation? Like they are uncomfortable?”
His friend claimed that asking yes or no questions lets her off too easy, and that open-ended questions are a lot harder to answer, especially in the moment. Employing this information, he also thought back to their time in marriage counseling.
“My main complaint was that she had never paired up with me as a couple. She was her thing and I was my thing,” the man wrote. “She takes sides against me even when she knows I’m right.” He said it was like “breathing” for her, but she claimed she never took sides against him.
Photo: Shutterstock / fizkes
A week later, he had to stay late at work and the couple fought.
“When I got home [I] was treated to the usual barrage of ‘who else was there? Who was the last one to leave before you?’” he revealed. “Hmm. These were open-ended questions. No wonder I felt so naked.”
Next, he decided to flip the script onto her and finally dig into asking her about the affair she was having. “So I asked her where she had been and hit her with my first. ‘When was the last time you were intimate with a man besides me?’ She stared at me. Silence.”
The answer lay within the silence, but the conversation continued as the man was intent on finding out the information that she was keeping from him.
She asked him to define what “intimate” meant. He gave a broad definition, and she asked, “Does it include oral lovemaking?” Since it seemed like she was having trouble with the definition, he decided he would modify it.
“When was the last time you gave oral lovemaking to a man besides me?” he asked her. “Her face contorted like her cranium was about to explode. After another deafening silence, I said, ‘Who are you protecting?’”
The wife refused to respond, but her body language gave everything away.
She jolted at his last question and stared at him more. “‘Is he married?’ She jolted again, like stepping on a tack,” he continued. “‘Are you afraid of incriminating yourself?’ No response. ‘Or are you protecting his family?’ She swallowed and the look on her face was like she wanted this to be over.” He just wasn’t sure if she felt that way about the conversation or the affair.
At this point is where he employed his main gripe with their relationship. “I said, ‘Here’s what I think. You’re protecting him from me. You think I’ll confront him, maybe in front of his wife, and you don’t want that. You’re protecting him because you’re more loyal to him than to me.’”
She was expressing her emotions a little more physically but remained silent, and then he told her why he was going to divorce her.
He wouldn’t divorce her for cheating, but he would divorce her for taking the other man’s side.
“I won’t divorce you for cheating,” he told her, “but this taking sides with him against me. He must be pretty valuable. For this kind of loyalty, you must love him.” Finally, she “exploded into a rant,” yet still, she was withholding the information about this man’s identity.
“‘We could never reconcile anything unless you gave up on these other men,’” he told her. “‘Other men’ was just enough bait to get her talking, and she talked herself into a hole. She’s the type of person who can’t stand it when there is a narrative coming from my mouth, she always has to correct it.”
By using her attitude toward him against her, he was able to divulge a bunch of information and finally landed on his decision once more. When he said he was divorcing her one last time, she jolted much harder. “I said, ‘not because you cheated, but because you took sides with him against me, and this conversation was about our marriage. I know where your true loyalties lie.’”
Three days later, she found him in their bedroom and spun him this complex tale about the man she had an affair with, but it was too little too late. “I slow-clapped and told her it was a fine performance, but her chance to tell me the real truth was back when we discussed it because she would not have had enough time to fabricate a tale.”
He dismantled her tale, as it was a lie. All she had to do was side with him for once and tell him what was going on when they initially talked about it and maybe they could have reconciled. But there was no way to fix what had already been broken. It wasn’t about the affair, it was about her loyalty never being his in the first place.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.