'To the woman who tried to ruin my 16-year marriage, your plan failed miserably.'

The author of this story has chosen to stay anonymous, but is known to Mamamia. 

An open letter to the other woman,

For so many years, my husband and I struggled with our marriage. Raising our children was our priority and we had lost who we each were except for a mother and a father and provider for our children.

Then, we were blindsided when I was diagnosed with cancer. Multiple surgeries, hospital visits and having to provide unwavering support had taken its toll on him and my insecurities pushed him away.

I guess I didn’t see how a man could still find me attractive with hideous scars and anxiety gripping my every thought.

He stood by me and was the first person I saw when I came out of each surgery but I had put a wall up between us and it was hard for him to break through.

The way your affair started with him was so cliché. I had been working an 80-hour week, exhausted and angry and so terribly sad at my circumstances. It was the holidays and he was looking after the kids, feeling lonely and shut out. And you told him all the words a man wants to hear when his wife is too tired or too absent from the marriage to say to him.

You put him on the pedestal that I had dragged him down from. He told you his marriage was failing, he loved his kids and loved me but didn’t think he was in love with me anymore but didn’t know how to fix it.

You told him he was amazing, such a kind person and he had been through hell, you understood he had given it his all and told him that maybe if he took a chance on you it would all be so much better.

I knew the first time he slept with you. Even though I was exhausted and on edge, I wasn’t blind.

I noticed his attitude shift, his new sense of confidence, how he started to hide his phone, he even changed the pin code so I couldn’t get into it to read the messages you were sending back and forth.

I confronted him about it but he said you were his friend, someone he could talk to. Our daughters were friends and I was stupid to think that anything was going on because he wasn’t physically attracted to you; it was just someone different he could open up to.

Of course, it helped that you didn’t work and were always available to chat. Over the following months he and I fought. A lot.

I would accuse him of sleeping with you and I even confronted you several times but you looked me in the eye and told me nothing was going on.

But I knew.

Women’s intuition is an amazing tool we are all given from birth and mine was screaming loudly. He came home one day after being with you, told me he was no longer in love with me and it broke me.

Here was the man I had spent 16 years with, raised a family with and beaten cancer with, and he wanted to throw it all away.

I cried that day. I sobbed so loudly I became another person, weak, falling to the floor and asking him to please give us another chance.

He said he wouldn’t move out and that we could take each day and see what happened. I withdrew from him even further, stopped asking how his day was, stopped accusing him of being with you, basically showed him I didn’t need him and could make a life for my children and myself without him.

No man wants to be thought of as anything less than needed, a provider, a warrior I guess. He feared I had given up and was happy to move on.

But you made a mistake which I am so grateful for because you almost ruined my marriage and ended up with my husband.

You became the one thing he was trying to escape from. You became needy, constantly texting him, fighting with him over not leaving me, begging him to move out with you, giving him ultimatum posts on Facebook ultimatum.

It overwhelmed him. I guess in essence you became the stereotypical nagging wife. You see he had no intention of leaving me, he refused to move out, there were times I would yell at him to just go, leave and never come back but he wouldn’t.

You were cheap, all it took was a few words and he had you in bed, not even taking you out for coffee first. It is sad that you felt so worthless you would open your legs and heart to the first man who told you what you wanted to hear.

You saved our marriage. We have become stronger, we have found ourselves and each other again and you have given me a strength and a voice I hadn’t had for a very long time.

We are moving forward and at first, it wasn’t easy with all the what if’s.

You made sure you sent me the videos he had sent to you; intimate videos of him showing you how you made him feel. And it hurt, but it also made me more resilient.

You see I have the one thing you will never have. I have a family with this man and a past, which is more than a few months of sneaking around and fumbling in a bedroom.

This man is proud to show me off in public instead of behind closed doors and I have class and grace which is something you will never have.

You told me once I didn’t know how easy it was to fall in love with him. I looked at you incredulously and laughed at the absurdity of your statement as I was his wife and I had fallen in love with him deeply enough to start a family with him and a promise of forever.

So whilst I genuinely do feel sorry for you, I want to thank you. We have found each other again and are stronger than ever, and I know it would never have happened without you.

This article was originally published in January 2019 and has since been updated.

Feature image: Getty.