Woman Asks What To Do After Discovering Her Husband Has Been Telling His Co-Workers That She's His Sister — 'It's So Weird & Embarrassing'
"Weird and embarrassing" is only the tip of the iceberg…
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock Denial is a strange thing. It's almost like a superpower that allows us to become confused about the most obvious of things and come up with umpteen potential explanations for the simplest situations possible.
Take, for example, a woman on Reddit who, when confronted with a truly bizarre secret of her husband's, went to great lengths to get to the bottom of it all — only to find that the explanation that was patently obvious to everyone was the correct one. Why else would he tell his co-workers his wife was his sister?
The woman asked what to do after discovering that her husband had been telling his coworkers that she was his sister.-
Like… the story pretty much ends there, right? It's basically a parable about Occam's Razor, the philosophical concept that when trying to solve a problem or mystery, the simplest explanation is usually the best one.
However, given the nature of the woman and her husband's relationship, it's easy to understand why this was so confusing. She wrote in her Reddit post that she and her husband, Josh, have a very open, communicative, easy-going relationship that is relatively drama-free. So secretiveness hasn't exactly been on her radar.
That is until an encounter she had at a bar with friends. One of her husband's co-workers, a man named Jake, came up to her to say hello. As they got to talking, he told her how wonderful he thought it was that she and Josh were "still so close" because he hadn't "talked to [his] brother in ages."
That was strange enough, but then, while walking her dog, she had an encounter with another of Josh's co-workers who recognized their dog and commented on what a good sister she was for walking him.
"I seriously don't know what to do, because what the [expletive]?????" she wrote. "Part of me is just assuming or hoping that it's a mistake, that he doesn't talk about me much at work, and they assume we are related because we both have brown hair (???)."
If you read that and said, "Oh honey…" you're not alone. People on Reddit immediately told her to do some digging into his work life, and sure enough, she found plenty of evidence for why he'd concocted such a ruse.
After finding incriminating messages in his phone, the woman confronted her husband about what turned out to be a years-long lie.
In a follow-up Reddit post, the woman explained that though she was uncomfortable doing so, she began going through her husband's phone while he was asleep and, as you've probably guessed, found years of messages with co-workers about his "sister," including flirtatious conversations with other female colleagues.
But she found one particularly galling. In a conversation with the aforementioned Jake about having run into her at the bar, Jake asked if his "sister" was single. "Nah, she's married," her husband replied.
"I literally almost burst into flames on the spot when I saw that," she wrote. "I was just in shock that he had the balls to tell this guy that I'M the one who is married because he doesn't want anyone having it on with me, but HE is allowed to coyly flirt with every woman in the office?"
She then confronted him about it, flatly asking, "Why have you been telling your co-workers I'm your sister?" At first, he denied knowing what she was talking about, but soon the jig was up and he explained that his working environment was "like a frat house" and married men get made fun of by their "finance bro" colleagues.
One female fellow Redditor who worked in the same industry confirmed that this is an accurate representation of the typical working environment, but some still found it hard to believe — the effort he'd have to have gone to keep up this ruse for three years made it seem implausible.
"I still don't know if I can trust what he said, and a lie that extreme is just baffling to me," the wife went on to say. "If he can lie like that for so long, what else could he be lying about??" Still, she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. "His explanation and apologies seemed so sincere and genuine, and I guess to an extent what he said is believable."
"I can't say whether I'm leaning towards forgiveness or divorce," she concluded, "but those are really the only options."
Psychologists say denial is one of our brain's protective mechanisms, and it is a very common response to cheating.
This woman may seem a bit too open-minded by half about this whole situation, but she is definitely not alone. Denial is almost universally a part of finding out a partner has been cheating, or at least dishonest, with you.
Therapist Chelli Pumphrey told us that denial "both helps and hinders us." It is a protective mechanism our brains employ to avoid the most destructive impacts of trauma and keep us safe from mentally crumbling under its weight.
But it also, of course, often keeps us from seeing the light and dealing with a situation at all. Pumphrey recommends that, particularly in cases of infidelity, it's important for people to first trust that they can handle the pain of the truth and then focus on the facts and their intuition.
What that adds up to for this woman is something deeply suspicious, and her fellow Redditors urged her to dig further. Many suggested getting in touch with Jake and engaging him in a conversation about whether her "brother" is "popular with the ladies."
But others felt like that kind of subterfuge wasn't necessary because her husband's actions already said it all. "Do keep in mind that he absolutely did try to gaslight you until it was clear that he wouldn’t get away with it," one person wrote. "He didn’t just tell a massive lie; he made you feel crazy, hoping to protect it."
That really does say it all. Like Pumphrey said, "Focus on the facts." Because when it comes to this kind of tap-dancing around the truth, they almost always don't add up in the most revealing way possible.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.