I discovered my husband had been leading a double life for 10 years

Francesca*, 59, a marketing manager from Surrey, thought she had a wonderful marriage and family life until a message on Facebook revealed her husband had been having an affair for over a decade. Here she shares the day her whole life unravelled...

'You don’t know me, but I think it’s time you knew the truth about your husband,' was Jane*'s opening line on Facebook messenger. 'I went to school with him and in 2010 we had a school reunion and began an affair.'

How I managed to act so calm, I’ll never know. But when I received a Facebook message out of the blue three years ago from a woman telling me she’d been having an affair with my husband, Richard*, for nearly 10 years, I somehow kept my cool. Outwardly at least... inside I was crushed.

I felt sick. He’d been lying to me, sleeping with another woman and maintaining the pretence of a happy family life for over a decade. All the birthdays and milestones we'd celebrated with our daughter Ellie*, who’s now 21, all the wonderful holidays to the Caribbean, America and our second home in Europe – every bit of it was a sham.

Yet, I was angry with myself too because the red flags had been there on and off for years – and it wasn't the first time he'd been unfaithful to me.

Last-chance love

I was 36 when I first met Richard, then 30, in a pub and later at a party. Being mid-thirties, I'd already given up all hope of marriage and children, so it was a huge surprise when we fell in love. We married three years later and had Ellie, but we desperately wanted another child and when I couldn't get pregnant naturally, we went through IVF.

As for so many couples, IVF was a gruelling process and, sadly, it didn’t work out for us. Then, unexpectedly, I fell pregnant again naturally. We were over the moon, but then devastated to lose our baby at nine weeks.

I went through a very dark patch, a form of deep grief, retreating from my social life and focussing on work. It put a huge strain on my marriage and eventually, my girlfriends whisked me away on holiday with our respective children to help get me back on track.

First signs of suspicion

When I returned a week later, I felt a bit more like my old self again, but it niggled away at me that something wasn’t quite right with Richard, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I wondered if he was resentful that I’d been away with my friends, or maybe struggling with the miscarriage himself.

Still, when I questioned him over dinner in a restaurant a few weeks later he assured me that everything was fine. "I know this has been a difficult period for us, IVF was a strain, but I want us to move forward," I told him, hoping he'd open up to me.

He replied that he was delighted I felt so much better, but my intuition told me something was wrong. Throughout the evening, I kept asking him if he was sure he was committed to us, and even whether he still loved me.

"Of course I do, darling, why would you even ask such a thing?" he insisted, but I wasn't entirely convinced.

A nasty shock

As the evening wore on, with heavy hearts, we agreed to accept that a second baby wasn’t going to happen and to focus our energies on Ellie. But that night he got blind drunk and ended up passing out on our bed when we got home, leaving me free to read a text message that pinged on his phone.

‘Don’t worry, everything between us will work out just fine,’ it read. The sender was our 19-year-old au pair who was texting him from her bedroom in our house.

I was furious and burst straight into her room to ask if she’d been sleeping with my husband. She admitted that while I’d been abroad with my friends, the two of them had had a fling. I threw her out of the house that night, calling her parents in Sweden to tell them to book her a flight home. This was the young woman who was looking after my three-year-old daughter. She’d told me I’d been a mother figure to her since she moved to England.

Bombshell news

Filled with rage, I then threw Richard out of the front door. For a year we lived apart and had weekly marriage counselling before I took him back. He was full of remorse and repeatedly told me, "I'll spend the rest of my days making this up to you, it was just a moment of madness."

With the help of the counsellor, I agreed to put the episode behind us. We moved on to have what I thought was a lovely family life and marriage. I was at the top of my game in corporate life earning a good salary which enabled me to set Richard up with his own property company.

When that too became extremely successful, we bought a beautiful house with a swimming pool abroad, had fabulous holidays and a fantastic lifestyle. My daughter’s memories of that time are exactly the same as mine – we were a happy little family.

But our bubble was regularly burst by Richard’s terrible mood swings, which could last for days at a time. I could never quite work them out, always putting them down to stress, his difficult personality or a combination of the two.

Arguing constantly

Then Covid hit. Like millions of couples, suddenly cooped up at home, we started to row more often. Still, we reasoned that the world and life as we knew it had gone into freefall and that pretty much every other family we knew were going through similar frustrations.

But my gut instinct started to niggle away at me again, prompted by a phone call during lockdown from my oldest friend who lives in Australia. Distraught, she'd just discovered that her husband had had an affair and an illegitimate child, 15 years earlier.

In the days and weeks that followed, I comforted her on the phone, but our conversations about infidelity triggered all the old pain I felt about Richard’s fling with our au pair. I was honest with him about these feelings resurfacing, but he then immediately began to withdraw from me.

When lockdown restrictions eased during the summer of 2020, we had friends over for a barbecue in the garden and I remember him nit-picking at me all afternoon, making snappy comments about the food, the wine, and telling me to hurry up and serve lunch.

Ending our marriage

After they all went home, Richard picked a horrible row with me, yelling: "You’ve never forgiven me, you’ve obviously kept this burning inside all these years, the marriage is over, I’m done!"

His mind seemed to be made up. Both Ellie and I were devastated. Four months later, in November 2020, he was still living with us in the family home, even though we were no longer a couple. He kept telling all our friends that there was no one else involved. I thought maybe he was having a midlife crisis.

Then, in March 2021, came the bombshell message from Jane and suddenly all those little red flags made sense. He’d been living a double life for over 10 years, having sex with her and with me. People may find it unbelievable but I'd never had an inkling that he was cheating again. If you take someone back after infidelity, as I did, you have to go into it trusting them again or else there's no point.

I never checked Richard's phone or laptop, as I believed he was truly sorry and fully committed to making our marriage work. And he never once slipped up – never called me by the wrong name or left clues that he was living a duplicitous life.

When I asked Jane why she’d crawled out of the woodwork after all this time, she wrote back, ‘Richard’s ended our affair and I think it's because he wants to come back to you, but he doesn’t deserve you after the lies he’s told, so I wanted to make sure you slammed that door firmly in his face.’

When we ended up speaking on the phone, she told me she was very sorry for what she’d done and that she’d been married with two young sons when she and Richard were in the early years of their affair. Unable to live with her own guilt, she'd divorced her husband and had put up with Richard assuring her for years that one day he would leave me for her.

Ellie was revising for her A levels when our lives were blown apart but her teachers were very supportive, immediately arranging counselling to help her, while I had therapy of my own.

Too devastated to eat

But I was so crushed by Richard’s deception that I felt like I couldn’t chew or eat anything solid for six months – a psychological reaction to the shock. I lost a stone and a half in weight, dropping to just eight stone.

Two years on, I’m still caught up in stressful divorce proceedings and have been left £20,000 in debt with legal fees.

All those old memories of happy family times feel grubby now that we know Richard was having an affair with Jane, so Ellie and I are on a mission to create new ones, just the two of us. We recently had a lovely holiday together in the Caribbean and we’ll fly to New York at the end of the year for my birthday.

One thing I won’t be doing anytime soon – if ever – is dating. I can’t ever imagine trusting a man again. But what I should have trusted is those little red flags telling me something was amiss years ago.

*All names have been changed to protect identities.