I thought my wife and I had a great marriage. Nine years, no real problems, and we still kept things exciting in the bedroom. Then, out of nowhere, she sat me down and said she wanted to try an…

“So, that’s why you’re being all dramatic like this? Really? You had to have me served at work? ”

My wife Catalina threw the divorce papers at my face.

She kept pushing me, getting in my space, demanding answers she wouldn’t let me give. We had been married for nine years, and in all that time, I thought I knew her completely. I thought we had a good life, a good marriage, and that cheating was something that happened to other people. I was wrong.

It started about a month earlier. She sat me down one evening, pretty casually, and told me she wanted to explore the idea of an open marriage. It came out of nowhere. The night before, we had made love and it was fantastic.

So my mind went to the obvious place. I asked if I wasn’t satisfying her. She said it had nothing to do with that. She said our marriage was getting older and at risk of getting stale, and she wanted to recapture the excitement of being young and uncommitted.

I told her that didn’t make sense to me. I told her that before she answered, she needed to think about whether whatever she wanted was worth the risk to us. She said it was purely physical, that our emotions would still belong to each other. I told her I didn’t like the sound of that, that it sounded like I was being cucked, sitting at home while she was out with other men.

She said I had it backwards because I could do the same things she was doing. She kept pushing, saying we could try it for a month or two. I told her the truth. The concept of an open marriage is something I will never be okay with.

I told her it felt like I wasn’t doing my job right or that she missed the life she had before she committed to me. She claimed that wasn’t it at all. I also pointed out the obvious: she’d have no trouble finding partners, while I’d probably struggle to find anyone. A woman could walk down the street and declare she wanted sex and find takers.

That would never happen for a guy. She insisted I would enjoy it. I asked her why she was so insistent. We had been married for nine years, and things had been fine the whole time.

Why now? She said it wasn’t the first time she thought about it, just the first time she was saying it out loud. She had seen videos about it on Instagram and thought it could be interesting. I asked her directly if there was already someone she had her eye on, because that would make sense of all this.

She acted like I had accused her of cheating. She said I was calling her disloyal. I told her I was just trying to understand why we were having this conversation. Then I told her I would think about it, just to end the discussion.

I already knew my answer was going to be no. I have read enough stories to know that when a wife asks for an open marriage, it never bodes well. It usually means she is already cheating and wants to legalize it, or she has a specific person in mind and needs an indirect go-ahead. All her reasons seemed like excuses to me.

Because I had those thoughts in my head, I realized the only way to find out the truth was to go through her phone. She wasn’t going to be honest with me. A private investigator seemed too expensive, so I decided to do it myself. It took a week to find the right opportunity.

She had asked me three times for an answer, and by the third time, she was starting to get irritated. I brushed it off. I knew my answer would only come after I saw what was on her phone. One night, she was particularly tired and had some wine to help her sleep.

As soon as I heard her snoring, I grabbed her phone and went straight to her messages with her friends. I had to scroll up a lot to find anything interesting. I eventually got to a conversation about open relationships. Half of the women in the group chat weren’t into the idea.

Half of them were. My wife was one of them. The other women who liked the idea pointed out that it was always a win-win for a woman. You get your pick of who you want to sleep with, and you know your husband will always be struggling to match your numbers.

When I scrolled higher, I saw the conversation started with my wife asking what they thought about open relationships. Then a name came up: Fabian. I could tell that was the person she had her eye on. I had never heard the name before.

I searched her contacts and found him. I put two and two together. He was a client with a business she worked with. It had started professionally, but about three weeks into their working relationship, she had started making mild flirty comments about his looks, his height, his body.

She asked him out to dinner using work discussions as an excuse, and it apparently happened. She jokingly referred to it as a date afterward. A few days later, she brought up the idea of an open marriage to me. She had kept talking to him after that.

The part that broke me was that two days earlier, the flow of their messages made it clear something had happened between them. It was obvious they had slept together. I thought back, and it was the same night she came home almost two hours late with some excuse. Fabian hadn’t seemed comfortable with what happened.

Their conversation went like this:

“You have a husband, don’t you? ”
“I do, but I don’t mind. ”
“That was fantastic. But I mind.

”
“It’s not a big deal, Fabian. We’re about to open our marriage anyway. I’m not even lying about that. ”
“If it’s not open yet, we shouldn’t have been doing that.

It wasn’t right. ”

She didn’t answer for almost thirty minutes before replying, “Okay, that doesn’t change that I loved it and I’m open to it if you ever get over yourself. ”

That snippet broke me. It was bad enough that she proposed an open marriage.

To see that she asked and then went ahead and did it anyway showed how stupid I was to have even considered letting things slide. I documented everything, including her conversation with her friends in the group chat. I knew I was going to get a divorce. I went to get an attorney first.

I had to shop around a bit because I wanted someone I could really trust. It cost me more than I hoped, but I found the right person. What cost me even more was hiring a private investigator to find out more about Fabian. I only knew his first name and phone number.

The PI found him quickly, giving me his full name, his address, and his place of work. I almost made the stupid move of going to his house. Common sense took over, and I went to his workplace instead. He worked in a high role at a construction company.

That made sense. Catalina had mentioned having a construction company as a client. She was directly communicating with him, and that’s how it happened. I went to his office knowing he had acknowledged that what they did was wrong.

I hoped he was a sensible guy. I made sure to record the whole conversation on my phone. I told the receptionist I wanted to meet with him, and I made it clear I didn’t have an appointment, but he would want to see me. He came out to see who I was.

When I shook his hand and introduced myself as Catalina’s husband, I saw the shock on his face. He said we should talk in his office. The first thing I did was let him know I wasn’t there for a fight or to make a scene. I told him Catalina had asked for an open marriage, I hadn’t given her an answer yet, and she went ahead and slept with him anyway.

I told him I respected him because he had acknowledged what they did was wrong. Even though he knew she was married before they slept together, it wasn’t his responsibility to be loyal to me. That was hers. I came to tell him that I knew, and that was it.

He was very apologetic. At the end of the day, he’s still the guy who slept with my wife, so I only had so much sympathy for him, but he was a decent guy under the circumstances. I told him I needed his help. He couldn’t tell Catalina I had come around until after I had served her with papers.

He said that wasn’t a problem because they had gone entirely professional. After he shut her down, she started getting overly formal and giving him attitude whenever she could. I also asked him for a big favor. I asked him to end the business relationship with her company.

He said that would be hard. I told him it was better for him because I could go ahead and expose their affair to both his company and hers. That would sever the work relationship anyway. I was essentially threatening him, but he didn’t make a fuss about it.

He said he would consider it. About six days later, Catalina came home in a horrible mood. I found out that one of her company’s biggest clients had dropped them for pretty much no reason. She said it was because one of the people there didn’t like her for some reason.

I asked why anyone wouldn’t like her, but she didn’t expand on that. She was trying to cover things up. I added salt to the wound by having her served at work the very next day. She called me almost twenty times before she got home.

When she walked in, she was borderline violent. She threw the papers at my face. When I stood up, she kept pushing me and getting in my space. She kept asking what I was doing, but she never gave me a chance to answer.

I managed to start recording somewhere in the middle of it all. I told her she had been sleeping with a client, and she was in the wrong, so it made no sense for her to be acting aggressive. I think it shocked her that I knew. I told her Fabian hadn’t told me.

I found out after her open marriage stunt. I told her it all made sense to me now, and she didn’t need to try to explain herself. That’s when she asked why I was being so dramatic, why I had to have her served at work. I ignored all of that and told her she had cheated on me, and that was all she needed to worry about.

Our marriage was going to end, and it was on her head. She would have gotten away with making an open marriage request, but she just had to mess things up. She tried to argue with me, but I walked out on her. I had no interest in a long argument about something she had done and couldn’t fix.

The divorce process moved along. She got the house because I left her living in it through the post-confrontation period. I didn’t mind that too much. I earn more than she does, but thankfully, I got off without having to pay alimony.

My lawyer used my evidence to justify why she didn’t deserve any money from me. The part I really liked was asking Fabian whether he was willing to admit to her company that she had slept with a client. He wanted no part of it, and I didn’t blame him. I used my evidence instead.

I had a whole lot of it. It wasn’t difficult to prove that she and Fabian had a sexual relationship. I sent everything as part of an email to her boss. I’m sure that before an initial investigation started, her boss gave her a heads-up, because she attacked me over text messages.

She said I was out to ruin her life as if it wasn’t already hard enough for her. I told her she had made it hard for herself. She was paying a mortgage for two all by herself. She wasn’t getting alimony, and her job was on the line.

She was right about that last part. She ended up being fired. Her company was too big to deal with someone who could sleep with important clients on a whim. Even worse, they believed the construction company’s sudden departure had to do with her affair gone wrong.

All her hard work at the company was gone, just like that, the same way all my hard work in the marriage was gone. I don’t feel bad about that at all. All she does on social media now is complain. She posts sad quotes about life being unfair and hard work not amounting to anything.

Hard work amounts to a lot, but when you mix it with dishonesty, sometimes you deserve for things to fall apart. The best part is that while things are getting worse for her, they’re getting better for me. I can’t complain about that, can I? Just be faithful, and life might turn out all right.

Losing her job, her reputation, and her marriage all at once, that’s what happens when you act like a complete fool and assume the world won’t notice. Every flirt, every lie, every harmless little stunt she pulled stacked up, and the whole house of cards came down. It wasn’t life being cruel to her.

She was just terrible at life.