'I trusted my husband completely, until he left me and I uncovered 8 years of lies.'

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As told to Ann DeGrey

When my husband Matt* left me, I wasn't completely shocked. We'd been married for eight years, and things had grown pretty distant between us.

Still, I thought we'd ride through the storms and stay together. I felt like we still had love for each other. But instead, one morning he simply told me he was leaving. He said he'd fallen in love with someone else: his personal assistant.

I didn't cry, I didn't rant and rave. I just felt very sad. And, strangely enough, I still held onto a bit of hope that if things didn't work out with his PA, then maybe he'd come back. I didn't realise how deep the betrayal actually ran.

Matt left in a hurry, packing a few bags, and he moved in with her. He didn't clear out his study or most of his clothes, so the house still felt like he was still there.

I avoided the study for a while, but one day I decided to go in and start boxing things up. That's when everything changed.

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At first, it was just receipts. Dinners, hotels, jewellery I definitely didn't receive. Then I found a folder full of printed emails and handwritten notes, things he'd clearly tucked away without thinking I'd ever find them.

But the real discovery was his journal.

It wasn't like a normal diary, more like scattered thoughts and memories. I read a line that said, "Had to shower at the beach club. Buy Annie* Chanel perfume."

That was me, Annie. He'd bought me a Chanel perfume and I used it for months thinking it was something he liked. Now I realise he probably just didn't want his mistress and wife smelling like two different people.

As I pieced everything together, I realised Melissa* wasn't the only one. There were names I recognised; friends of friends, women from his gym. There was even someone he'd met on a business trip.

He'd actually told me about her. I remember him telling me a story about her son trying out for a role in a movie. Why on earth did he mention that? It became clear that, for every year we were married, there was someone else.

Eight women. Eight secrets he kept from me.

Among the things tucked away in drawers and folders, I also discovered a collection of cards from restaurants I'd never been to, scribbled notes that didn't make sense at first, i.e. "Parked at gym, B. wore red," "Need to cancel dinner w A., tell work excuse."

He even wrote directions to random hotels on folded A4 paper. There was a photo with a woman I didn't recognise, him kissing her cheek.

Some of the women's names appeared more than once, marked with dates and little comments like "fun, but too clingy" or "might get suspicious."

It started to read like a weird logbook of his secret life. I'd always known Matt was organised; now I realised how methodical he had been about lying to me.

I was so horrified, I had to ask my sister and closest friend to stay with me. They shared my horror about how he'd been living a completely separate life while lying to my face for years.

I'd spent so much of our marriage second-guessing myself; wondering why he came home late, or why he never wanted to go away on weekends anymore. Any time I questioned him, he'd brush me off, saying I was "too paranoid."

Now I know my instincts had been right all along. When I confronted him over the phone, he really didn't care. He told me I was being "dramatic" for going through his things.

He didn't deny the affairs. He just said things like, "We weren't happy." He also said, "You probably had affairs too." But I didn't; I'd been 100 percent faithful. He told me he still cared about me, but I said eight affairs was a strange way to show care.

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After that, I cut all contact, got a lawyer and I filed for divorce. In the months that followed, I really struggled. I'd built my life around someone who'd been a stranger the whole time.

The most upsetting was finding out he'd had an affair in the first year of our marriage. I thought we'd been happy in those first few years, but clearly he wasn't.

I questioned everything; my judgment, my ability to trust anyone again. But I also did the hard work and went to therapy and reconnected with old friends. I found a new place to live and decorated the house the way I wanted it to look.

It was nice to look after myself again.

It's now been just over a year since Matt left. I still think about what I found in that study. I'm not blaming myself because, even though I knew our marriage was rocky, his affairs were not my fault.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Feature image: Getty. (Stock image for illustrative purposes only).