'I was the other woman and I had no idea'. How 12 women found out their partners were cheating.

Whether you’d been together for a few months or few years, finding out your partner has cheated on you is a whole different world of hurt. 

For some, it's the smallest things that can tip you off like a questionable text or a story that doesn’t add up. But for others, the bad news might be delivered by a friend or worse, the person your partner is seeing.

Either way, discovering the truth about your partner's infidelity is never easy. 

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We decided to ask 10 women to share how they found out their partners were cheating on them. 

From a rogue sock to (literal) receipts, here’s what they had to say.

"I found a receipt for a helicopter flight and champagne breakfast." 

"I was doing my husband's BAS and found a receipt for a helicopter flight and champagne breakfast. He tried to tell me he'd booked it for friends to go on but it had his name and another lady. I just handed the receipt with the names clearly printed on them and asked for the truth. It caught him off guard and he eventually told me it was just someone he started talking to from work because he thought we in a rut or some crappy excuse..." - Chloe. 

"I was the 'other woman' I had no idea!"

"I was living in London and the guy I was with lived up north in another city called Peterborough. We worked for the same photography studio and I would often be sent to Peterborough for the week to shoot at their studio (which is how we met). One day a lady called the receptionist at the London office demanding she know why her boyfriend Josh had been sent to London to work so often. The receptionist was close with me and had to call me and say “I think Josh has a gf”... turned out they were living together and I was the 'other woman' I had no idea! He was visiting me in London on weekends and when I was sent up north to work he would stay at the hotel with me. I met my husband shortly later so everything works out for a reason." - Renee. 

"He had a lovebite on his neck."

"He once told a story to a group of us at work (we worked together) of a guy who was about to go home with love bites on his neck. 'Guys what am I going to do? My Mrs is going to kill me.' 'Dont worry just tell her we all held you down at work and gave them to you as a joke.' Roll on couple of months... My boyfriend (before we were married... YES I should have listened to all the gut feelings and signs) came home after a night out. He had a lovebite on his neck. He laughed and said 'oh it was a joke at work (different shifts by then) all the guys held me down and gave it to me as a joke!'" - Danie. 

"I found another woman’s socks."

"I found another woman’s socks in my bedroom. I was so in denial that I told myself they were mine. Omg! The crazy shit we do." - Rachel.

'I saw a message from a girl saying “I love you too, thanks for dinner.'"

"My ex came home one night after being at 'the pub with the boys'. He took his clothes off and jumped into bed, then asked me to get his phone out of his work pants to set an alarm. As I picked it out of his pocket, it was vibrating with a message from a girl saying 'I love you too, thanks for dinner x'. I confronted him, he was so drunk and admitted to it all. We broke up that night but I left him in my bed because he was too intoxicated to drive. I slept in my housemate's bed. The next morning he came in and kissed me goodbye and I didn’t say anything as I was taken aback and he left quickly (tradie, early morning). That night he came over again ready for our planned date night, but I was at home getting ready to go out with friends. He couldn’t remember us breaking up or even having the conversation he was very very surprised I knew anything and we broke up then and there." - Hannah.

"I found a card for a brothel/strip club in the pocket of a pair of pants." 

"My ex went away on a bucks weekend, came home and I found a card for a brothel/strip club in the pocket of a pair of pants. I thought they must have just gone to a strip club as they do on bucks nights. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I was going through his bank statements to enter in for BAS (tax) that I found charges of $350 plus for the same establishment at all hours of the night, all four nights he was away. I confronted him and was told I was just being stupid so my brother rang the number on the card for me and asked for prices. $350 got you two hours with an escort in a private room. Done." - Sarah. 

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"I sneaked a peek at his phone when he was in the shower."

"I woke up early one morning, super early for me, not early for my husband. I was in bed alongside him and I could see that he was looking at his phone. Not unusual as he always read the news when he woke up. After a minute I realised he was tapping away at messages. I could see that he was texting a work colleague and stupidly thought they were both workaholics, so if that’s what they needed to do to get on top of their work day... But then I saw the rose emoji, followed by the heat emoji. He wasn’t even an emoji user! I now had first hand knowledge of what it was like to feel your blood boil, and the physical effects of anxiety that immediately present themselves. Everything started to add up. 

"She’d casually dropped by on the way back from an outing with her kids (one of my kids told me as I hadn’t been home of course, hubby filled in the very casual details)... I sneaked a peek at his phone when he was in the shower, but he’d deleted the messages. That spoke volumes. But it was the emoji evidence that caught him out. As I calmly bid him a good day before he headed off to work, I made out I’d read the messages over his shoulder (referencing the emojis) and that if he wanted to come home and find his young family there that night, he’d tell her it was over and book the marriage counselling."

"My ex and I were playing a game."

"My ex and I were playing a game of 'what would you do if...' like, what would you do if I couldn’t speak, what would you do if we won the lotto, and he said 'What would you do if I cheated on you?' and I said I didn’t know, and he said 'Well I did'. Could have knocked me over with a feather."  - Emma.

"My ex partner went back to his ex girlfriend."

"My ex partner went back to his ex girlfriend pretty much as soon as we got together! I found out from his ex funnily enough as we became friends after it was all over. I had been dropping him at her house (I know very naive and very much in denial) as he would tell me he would be picking stuff up from there and then would text me when he got home. Turns out he was telling her myself and him were just friends as well. Fun times!" - Hannah.

"It was Christmas Eve and he got a message from his 'friend'."

"My husband cheated on me about eight months after my father died very suddenly... It was Christmas Eve and he got a message from his ‘friend’ Sarah who he had reconnected with as Facebook was new and it was still a novelty. The message said, 'what are you doing later?' I confronted him, watched his pupils dilate with fear, and tell me he didn’t know what she was on about.  I smelled a rat. I said, ‘you are a family man so the only place you are going is to put cake out for Santa'. And that I thought that was bullshit. Cut to the same night, up all night, a friend telling him things didn’t look good. But he stuck to the ‘we are friends' line. Until four in the morning, I was getting ready for Christmas morning and a voice popped in my head ‘look in his wallet’. I did and right at the back where you would hide a condom etc was a list of what she wanted for Christmas. This list included toys, massages, walks on the beach, anal and number 10 on her list in capital letters was ‘leave your wife!!!’" - Emma.

"He sent us both flowers on Valentines Day saying the same thing."

"I was dating a guy from work for about six months. I was totally in love with him - it was a fun secretive relationship because of the working together thing. He was very insistent that he needed to keep it a secret because of his career but we had a very serious relationship (lots of mid week sleepovers, met some of my family, went on lots of dates and walks together, met each other's friends). He was always acting as though he was quite 'damaged' and had a few trust issues and would never fully commit to me... One night, I was out drinking with some friends and a friend was chatting and said "Rachel is dating Harry" and I turned around and said "Rachel Who? What? I am dating Harry" and it spiralled from there. I messaged this girl Rachel and she ended up calling me and telling me everything. 

"For the last couple of months, she had been dating him and we compared notes and it turned out that she would be there on the nights that I wasn't. We even had been SHARING A TOOTHBRUSH!!!! He sent us both flowers on Valentines Day saying the same thing. We both sent him messages confronting him at the same time, and he blocked us both and told us we were psycho. We decided to meet up and ended up getting along like a house on fire. That was three years ago and to this day, Rachel is one of my best friends. To add a little more drama, around this time he was spotted around Brisbane with another girl (who I had been seeing him get coffees with in the city and he told me they were just family friends). The other girl and him had also overlapped with Rachel and myself. Rachel and I tossed up talking to her but we decided to leave it. They are currently engaged. I now have the most amazing boyfriend in the world who I met a couple of months after that horrific ordeal and have been with ever since."

Some names have been changed for privacy reasons. 

Feature Image: Getty.