I (32m) have been married to my wife (30f) for five years, and it feels like in the last year she's become a complete stranger. We were both established when we met, and at first it felt like we shared the same values. I went to a trade school and learned a very technical job.
I worked crap entry-level jobs before i roved myself and built a reputation in coding, to the point where my references trumped my education. My wife has a graduate degree and works in a management position. This created a bit of what i thought was ‘friendly tension’ at the time. Early on, I complained about middle management. I saw them as roadblocks between me and finishing tasks.
My wife saw middle management as necessary for directing personnel and resources. Personally, I was stuck it personally i was stuck with a bad string of middle managers that thought code developers were modular and replaceable. They set unreasonable deadlines, promised features to clients and created scope creep.
Every time I told her about the next boneheaded thing my manager instituted, she always took his side. Note: She never met him. “He sees things you don't” she said. After about a year of dating, I learned to stop telling her about my day at work if it doesn't involve days off or raises.
I always felt like she resented the fact I didn't go back to school for a four year of graduate degree. She pushed about it early on before marriage, but when I broke down the loans and debt, she dropped it. She was relatively debt free when we married as I was. As I said, we were pretty close in earning power as well.
About two years ago, I started working for a company that had an owner that talked to me directly. He saw value in me and my potential. I now make 50% more than my wife, and my manager is a guy that works well with me. While not a technical lead, he embodies what a scrum master should be. I would say he knows how to stay out of my way, but that makes it sound adversarial. He's a great supervisor.
The first four years of marriage went great, overall. I didn't complain about managers from work and she didn't push me to dump thousands into a piece of paper and debt. We had fun, went on date nights several times a month, shared hobbies, cooked together, read books together and watched movies together.
When the first lock-down hit, we both worked from home. Our house is really nice, with three spare bedrooms for if we eventually had kids. One was already converted into an office for me, and when the lock-down started, we converted the second into an office for her.
We both telecommuted but we both had very different philosophies about it. I would get up, make breakfast, shower, shave, dress in a suit then walk into my home office. I hate suits and ties by the way, but it does put me in the mental state of ‘Ok this is work time’.
My wife, however, rolls out of bed, eats breakfast, brushes her teeth, puts on a t-shirt and sweatpants and goes into her office with the Ipad to play candy crush between emails. I guess i see it as ‘work from home’ and she sees it as ‘work from home’. I digress.
It's the weirdest thing how proximity can create distance. She has several meetings a day and i can tell because she keeps her door wide open and i can hear them. I have one meeting a day, a SCRUM and it's short. I close my door for mine. Five months ago she said she felt insulted that i closed my door for the daily SCRUM. I explained it for peace and to keep my mind focused on work. She said she felt like i was hiding something.
I tried to keep up our hobbies together but she brushed it off as “We see each other all day as it is.”. I should have pressed but i didn't. I treated the lock-down as temporary and maybe i shouldn't have.
It got really bad when her company instituted a partial office re-opening. She jumped at the chance to be part of the 50% of the company back in the re-arranged office to allow social distancing. I don't blame her; I miss working at the office too but my company hasn't opened up the offices yet and as long as i have access to my dev environment, it really isn't needed.
I think several of her other co-workers got into her head. She should stay after work to hang out with them, have drinks at a co-worker's place. I pressed and wanted to know more but she was secretive and guarded. She became colder and colder too. It felt like I had a roommate and not a wife at that point.
Last month, on a weekend, she put her old Ipad on the desk and said “Can you wipe this? I want to gift this to my niece.” I shrugged, I often do that sort of thing for the family and didn't think much about it. Off she went to another ‘company gathering’ and I switched on the Ipad.
Maybe my wife was becoming so brazen, maybe she thought i wouldn't check it and just do a factory reset. Point is, I checked it and saw her messages app. Pics, videos, IMs with her boss. They've been having an affair for two months.
I can't describe the feeling in my veins. It was like blood turned to ice. It reminded me of the scene in ‘Equilibrium’ where the polygraph flat-lined. I copied everything, packaged it into cloud storage i used for dev projects separate from work and started looking for a lawyer.
I didn't confront it first because i wasn't sure what i would do. The new sensation in my body felt like i was both numb and walking through water. She didn't notice or didn't care. By that point we were already dead bedroom. We were really in the roommate stage I guess.
I contacted a lawyer and he wanted to keep investigating and me to keep my mouth shut. He suggested I get a private investigator and suggested a good one. For the last four weeks we were gathering evidence and he was preparing the filing for divorce.
“Be patient” he kept telling me. And my ice-filled veins and her indifference made it easy at first. Yesterday, my lawyer told me he had the filing almost ready. Our state is at-fault and the PI got photos, videos, plus the texts.
It was pretty much a slam dunk. Then, last night, I don't know what happened to me but the ice turned to fire. She came home, late of course and i don't even remember what she said to me but i went off. I said I hoped it was worth F***ing her boss.
She turned mean, nasty and vindictive. She said i wasn't there for her emotionally. I was just ‘lounging all day’ at home, even if i was earning the lion's share at home. I wasn't ‘intellectually stimulating’ (even though i worked a highly technical job).
I told her I had a lawyer and she laughed, LAUGHED. She said my bluff was pathetic. There was no way i was leaving her. That even if i divorced her, she would get half my paycheck. If i stayed with her, at least i would get to occasionally have sex, so i shouldn't mess this up. She was a different person.
I said to her “That's not a marriage.” She laughed again. “Honey, this is the 21st century. A woman can have her cake and eat it too!” She laughed again and she went to bed. I emailed my boss and said i needed a week off to handle a family issue. He of course granted it. I slept on the couch in my office. This morning, she left as i was getting dressed and only said “Don't wait up.”
I went to my lawyer's office and he said he had the papers ready. He had a process server with him and asked how i wanted the paper served. I told him. My lawyer, bless him, laughed and said “You better not. I've had so many people want to do a cutesy or revenge serving and i always talk them out of it. Judges don't have a sense of humor.” He told me this could cost me alimony or assets. I didn't care. Her words burned me. I wanted her burned back. The lawyer did his best to keep telling me not to, but he relented when he saw how serious i was about this.
The process server, he heard my idea. He laughed as well and said “You're my hero.” I had to special order something, with a rush cost. Sent the process over to pick it up and deliver that with the papers to my wife's work. The process server told me what happened when he was done. He said he had to. He said he showed up at her office with the large box and papers.
He found my wife talking and laughing with a group of co-workers and friends and asked her name. She confirmed and asked what it was about. He put the box on a nearby desk and opened it. It was a cake, one that you could get a custom image printed on and frosting. I didn't even know it was a thing until this morning. The image was an image of my wife and her boss in an embrace. Clothed but obvious what they were doing with the words “Here's your cake! Eat it!” piped and icing above the image. Process server put the papers next to the cake on the table. “You've been served.”
He said what happened next was a loud screech from her. At least eight people in the office saw the cake. My wife freaked and swatted the large cake box off the table, where it fell on the carpet but with the image still visible. Several of her co-workers started berating her and she started crying and screaming.
The process server took a hasty retreat. My phone blew up and I just kept sending her to voicemail. I don't bother reading her texts. She hasn't come home but her mother texted me saying she is going to stay over there for now. The euphoric rush of the cake felt great. But as the hours pass I'm considering my lawyer's words now. Did I F*** this up?
Days Later:
My boss decided to give me two weeks instead of the one I requested. Good man, he is. I've already split our savings in half, put my half in an account in my name and changed auto-pay for the mortgage, credit freezes, etc, everything my lawyer advised me to do with the household funds.
First off, we have no kids. Second I'm seeing a therapist to help me. I found one that is well versed in helping with infidelity. Seen him twice and I am feeling a lot more balanced out. Still some weird low points but nowhere near the same amount of swing between the two. After the cake stunt, I'm definitely taking my lawyer's advice on anything from this point forward. He said “You can be happy or you can be right” in regards to taking his advice and i get that now.
He told me that if my wife wants to return home that I'm not legally allowed to kick her out, but I should record all interactions with her. She's not staying at home again, still at her mom's but she did want to come by Saturday to talk.
My lawyer told me i could but said he would prefer if she wants to talk to have it done at his office, with her own lawyer present as well as himself. I presented this to her, in email of course and she responded that she didn't have a lawyer.
My lawyer said, barring showing up at his office have witnesses and record the meeting. I let my wife know this was my condition to talking with her. She actually accepted. So, I had two mutual friends come in, all three of us with our phones on the table ready to record.
She felt that she owed that much to me and told me. She said that when she started going back to the office when it re-opened, she got really close to three female co-workers, each a few years older than her and two of them divorced. She said they wormed their way into her head, told her about how she's owed more than she's getting.
They asked her constantly about her home life. The ringleader apparently was psycho-analyzing me for my wife's stories. My wife told them about my issues with managers back in my early career and the ringleader took this to mean I'm threatened by educated people. The ringleader told her that I was a submissive male and she needed to take charge man in her life.
That if i found out, i might have shouted and threatened but get in line. My wife still has her job for now but only just. The people that saw the cake was my wife, the three witches, her affair partner or boss and according to her two other co-workers that were lateral to her.
The boss immediately ended the affair, told her to only communicate with him in email and that if she ever tried to show up in his office alone he would call in a co-worker immediately. The three witches turned on her immediately and publicly berated her for ‘doing such an awful thing’. The other co-workers according to her didn't want to get involved with her ‘soap opera’.
So, no reports to HR. She said her three ‘friends’ doing a 180 on her immediately sort of shook her out of her fog. She seemed really ashamed and said she had to ask for five grand. I was confused, because there was money left in her account. I made it a point that she had it. She was living with her mom, she didn't have any major expenses. It turns out the ringleader and the two other witches wanted to be paid for their silence.
They're blackmailing her and giving her a deadline, lest HR will know all the sordid details. She was pleading for help. I told her that there is no going back to normal after this. Everything will change. That if she bends now, it will be more money later.
Best for her to report herself, her boss and her co-workers. It would work better than having sleepless nights waiting for the knife to fall. She seemed to hem and haw on that but she did finally ask the big question. “What about us? Where does that leave us?” I told her there was no ‘us’. That's done and she best get herself that lawyer to go over the divorce.
The best I can do is
tell her how to handle her work situation but she most likely needs
to find another career after this. I also said she needs to go to
therapy herself because someone who would go to laughing in my face
to pleading for help a week later needs help sorting themselves out.
She pointed out the cake and all I said to that was “Yeah, and I'm
seeing someone for that.” She left soon after that. No word on if
she will follow my advice or try to pay her co-workers ‘blackmail’.
Why is it always the co-workers.
Thank You!
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