Infidelity: My Story

What happened in the Summer of 2022 broke me open. I can still feel the shock of it in my body - the heaviness, the disbelief, the sharp sting of betrayal. I never saw it coming and had no idea how to navigate the fallout, yet somehow, I found my way through. 

What you’re about to read is written from the scar, not the wound, and I’m deeply proud of the strength and self-trust I cultivated to reach this place.

For those of you still living inside the pain, I want you to know this:  You can’t rewrite the beginning - but you can write the legacy, the part that becomes yours again, shaped by healing rather than hurt.

When two worlds collide - How we met: 

Rick and I met by pure chance in 2010 - two strangers, he 23 and I 36 thrown together in a random online chatroom. He was in New York, I was in Manchester, and neither of us had any reason to believe that one unexpected click would change everything. But it did. And seven months later, we were married, and he had left behind the only life he’d ever known to cross an ocean and build a new one with me.

Four years later our daughter was born and we were living our very own ‘happy ever after’.

The beginning of the storm: 

In July 2022 we set off on a big American road trip – three weeks of quality time with friends and family scattered across several states. I couldn’t wait! 

We had both been super busy with work in the run up to the trip and although something between us felt ‘off’, I was just too busy and preoccupied with life to really give it any proper thought.

The road trip itself was great, and with the space that time away gave me, I now had the bandwidth to notice that Rick was spending a lot of time on his phone. I tried not to make it ‘mean anything’ but was becoming increasingly more aware that maybe something wasn’t right.

I continued to brush off any doubts until the last leg of the road trip which we spent in Florida visiting my mother in law. By now, the red flags were really starting to appear as he was even taking the phone into the bathroom with him.

We made the long trip back from Miami to Manchester and arrived home on the 10th August. Within hours, my life and marriage would come crashing down around me.

By now I knew this wasn’t paranoia, nor was it normal behaviour for him - I’d spent weeks trying to convince myself it was!

So I confronted him…

The Epicentre: 

And his face in that moment told me, not everything I needed to know, but everything I was painfully and distressingly about to find out.

Much to my shock and dismay, he admitted everything right there and then.

I felt physically ill. Like I’d been punched hard in the stomach.

He went on to explain, carefully and haltingly, when and how it all unfolded. I remember sitting there, consumed by fear and despair, as he tried to put words to what had been happening - doing everything he could to soften a truth that was already breaking me.

I was blindsided, holding myself together only because our daughter, who was eight at the time was around. Later that night, once she was asleep, the dam broke. And on the nights that followed, it became less a conversation and more an interrogation. I was desperate for every detail, every answer, every scrap of truth.

Truth be told, I had gleamed a small amount of solace from the fact that it was at least now ‘all out in the open’ and we could start to move forward, whatever that might look like.

But things were about to get a whole lot worse…

He didn't just 'end it' once I found out. He was talking about how he 'wasn't sure how he felt' about this woman and that she had got 'under his skin'. And he needed to figure out if he wanted to be with her or not.

I struggled to reconcile how we had gone from a happy, healthy, stable family and marriage to conflict, dysfunction, hostility and at times pure hatred in the space of a few weeks.

Turbulence was the exception, rather than the rule for us but overnight it had become our stark, painful reality.

He continued to have contact with her, a fact that tormented me daily. I gathered whatever strength I could just to put one foot in front of the other, trying to navigate an excruciatingly painful time. I was utterly at the mercy of the thoughts and feelings that crashed over me without warning.

Despite our marriage being in freefall, Rick and I still had to communicate for the sake of our daughter, and because our lives were, in so many ways, still intertwined even as they were coming apart.

Then just as things were getting to the point of ‘no return’. He messaged me one day and said he was going to ‘end it’ with her. 

The Reckoning:

The weeks that followed were a blur of turmoil, despair, and broken trust, yet we both agreed that we wanted to try and work through it. By then I was barely functioning - emotionally hollow, physically depleted, not eating or sleeping properly. I felt like a shell of myself.

At first, I believed it was entirely Rick’s job to fix what had been broken. But one day, in the middle of yet another emotional spiral, I had a moment of brutal clarity: it was now my behaviour, not his, that was sabotaging repairing the damage that had been done! I remember thinking, “Right now, I wouldn’t want to come home to me either.”

That moment was the beginning of my own healing.

After a disappointing experience with traditional marriage counselling, I went on to have some coaching – just myself. And it changed everything. My mindset, my emotional regulation, my sense of self and my ability to move forward.

The True Lessons: 

I don’t blame Rick. I genuinely forgive him. It’s easy to judge someone who’s cheated, but I’ve learned first-hand that infidelity is rarely a simple moral failing. The truth is far more complex and human than the snap judgements we tend to make.

Staying in a victim mindset only keeps us stuck. Real change begins when we recognise that we’re the ones who shape our lives. Blaming others hands our power away; turning inward is how we reclaim it.

Many couples who have experienced infidelity stay together. Some of them will merely survive, but others will actually turn this crisis into an opportunity. Some couples find the strength to transform infidelity into growth, resilience, reconnection and emerge stronger - I am one of those people.

My Final Word: 

Through my own infidelity journey, I learned the real cheat code — whether you stay together or not, infidelity doesn’t define you. Your comeback does.