Woman Says Husband and Friend Carried on a 20-Year Emotional Affair. Now They Want Her to Co-Parent ‘Amicably’

A woman turned to Reddit for support after her marriage — and a friendship she thought was real — unraveled in a matter of days.

She shared that she and her soon-to-be ex-husband had been together since high school, building nearly 20 years of shared history. They dated as teenagers, eventually married, bought a home, and had three children together.

In her post, she recalled that “the only true moment I ever questioned our relationship was a couple of years into it when I felt like he was losing interest in me,” a doubt she now sees in a very different light.

During that early rough patch, he reassured her and insisted that he still loved her. She remembered telling him he could leave if he no longer had feelings for her, but he refused and instead became “very attentive to proving he loved me.” With hindsight, she said those gestures now feel less like renewed commitment and more like an attempt to hide what was really going on.

As time went on, she also grew close to a woman who had originally been part of her husband’s wider social circle. To her, it felt like a shared friendship — someone connected to both of them, not an especially close friend of her husband alone.

What she didn’t realize was that this friendship was bound up with something far more intimate and devastating.

The truth began to surface when her husband told her they needed to talk, after she had noticed he seemed “off” and worried he might be struggling with his mental health. When she pushed him to explain, he finally admitted he’d been having an emotional affair for six months — and that he had slept with the friend shortly before his behavior changed.

Even that confession turned out not to be the full story. As she kept asking questions, she learned that the affair stretched back almost the entire length of their relationship. The friend had even attended their wedding.

He confessed that “they had moments throughout my relationship with him, starting with the time years ago when I thought he had stopped liking me.”

After this revelation, she and her husband separated, though she wrote that they have kept their split a secret from family and friends so far. Both her husband and the friend tried to justify what they had done.

They also began pushing for an amicable relationship with her going forward. She said her husband argued that he didn’t want their children to grow up with parents who hated each other, but for her, “it was far too late for that.” She made it clear she would remain civil for the sake of the children — and “for no other reason.”

To her, their sudden desire for harmony felt like yet another way to control the story instead of truly acknowledging the damage they caused, even as he repeatedly asked her to “think of the kids.”

She stressed that she loves her children deeply and wants the best for them, but the sense of betrayal and the feeling that nearly 20 years had been wasted made the idea of friendliness impossible. “It’s made me question everything,” she wrote, adding that she is in therapy and still wondering “what I missed that could have saved all of this heartache.”

Reddit commenters rallied around her in the thread. One person wrote that her husband and the friend were “deceitful and selfish,” and reminded her that she hadn’t failed to notice anything — it’s simply that “you don’t think like them.”

Another urged her not to keep their secret from her loved ones, warning that protecting them would “eventually break you emotionally.”

“No, you’re not the a——. The only a——- here are the two people who colluded together to ruin your marriage and who are now trying to force you to play nice and happy with them,” another commenter said. “You do not have to engage with them, you do not have to play pretend, and you certainly aren’t harming your children by teaching them to have strong boundaries, as well as the fact that actions have consequences.”