From the abduction of Helen of Troy to the betrayal of Dr Foster, the tales told by our culture – in our literature, television, theatre and film industries – have thrived on affairs since the day we started telling each other stories about ourselves. Of course, not all of these stories suggest that affairs are […]
Tag: lies
Fair
A couple of days ago, a friend at work asked me if I was writing this blog for E to read. My answer was a rather surprised ‘no’. There were a few reasons I started writing this blog. The first was to explore what had happened to me, to pull at strands of the tangled […]
Peace
I noticed today that I started this blog on 19th February 2018. By sheer coincidence this was the 10th anniversary of the day that I found out about E’s first affair. I didn’t deliberately choose the date, but it now seems strangely serendipitous that the date that everything started to fall apart ten years ago, […]
In his words
Today, I’m doing something I didn’t think I would ever do. I’m handing today’s blog over to E. I thought long and hard before doing this. After all, this blog is all about me finding MY voice and trying to give a voice to other people who have had their lives blighted by infidelity. The […]
Soft Focus
The picture Youngest Son had found was E’s updated WhatsApp profile picture. It was a wedding photograph. It’s a sideways on shot of P (in one of her two wedding dresses), puckering up to E in some sort of tropical cabana. You can’t really see their faces, it’s all soft focus and gentle waves and […]
Giving Up
E’s response, or lack thereof, to what had happened with Youngest Daughter was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of my perception of him. Until that point, I’d still sort of hoped he was a decent person who was acting out of character (an otherwise good man who was a bit of a […]
First Christmas
If I’d struggled during Christmas 2016, because I knew about E’s affairs and I knew that we would have to split up, I was equally challenged, although for completely different reasons, by Christmas 2017. We’d faced down a whole year of ‘firsts’ as a family of five, not six, but Christmas was the big one. […]
Drill
This weekend was yet another one that was good for the soul. I spent it gardening, baking with Oldest Son and reading. It was also one, where, thanks largely to my garden, I began to reconsider what I was ‘good’ at and what I could and couldn’t do. I spent Saturday morning weeding, mowing the […]
Rose Petal Perfume
When my sister and I were little we used to make perfume out of rose petals. We’d carefully pick the petals and mix them with cold water in plastic teacups. In my head, we’d made a beautiful thing, although in actuality, our perfume was just muddy water with slimy bits of rose petal gloomily sinking […]
He-total: Life without Ex 