Three days before Valentine’s Day in 2018, my husband of 13 years sent me a text that seemed completely innocent.
He was on a work trip and told me he’d gone to a church in North Carolina that he really enjoyed. He even sent me photos of the service, pointing out a singer he thought I’d like.
He said he attended with a coworker and wanted to share the experience with me because it had been so moving.
At first, I thought nothing of it. I even replied that he was lucky to have experienced something so special.
But something about it stuck with me, and I couldn’t let it go.
A quick Google search of the singer’s name and the date of the event revealed that the church wasn’t in North Carolina. It was in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Knoxville wasn’t just some random city to us. We had lived there before, so I knew my husband was very familiar with the area.
I couldn’t understand why he would lie about where he was.
Then I found a video of the church service online. In the crowd, I spotted my husband.
He was wearing a yellow sweater vest I had bought for him, standing there with his phone in one hand—texting me—and holding another woman’s hand with the other.
In that moment, everything inside me froze. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. It felt like if I exhaled, my entire world would fall apart.
Discovering the Truth
That moment marked the beginning of what would become the most excruciating months of my life.
Instead of confronting him immediately, I quietly began digging for the truth. I became my own investigator, determined to find out just how deep his lies went.
For years, I had let my husband handle the bills. He said he was better at finances and managing paperwork, so I trusted him with it.
Now, I wondered what I didn’t know. I began opening stacks of mail that were neatly piled in our kitchen, office, and even by his bedside.
What I found shocked me: multiple credit card accounts opened in my name that I knew nothing about.
The statements told their own story. They revealed charges for dinners at fancy restaurants, shopping trips, and tickets to out-of-state concerts.
There were no explanations needed—these were dates with other women.
Then, I found a holiday card that thanked him for spending Christmas with another woman’s family in Tennessee.
That Christmas, he had told me he had to work out of state. He made it sound like a noble sacrifice, something he was doing to take care of our family’s finances.
He even called and texted me and his daughters (my stepdaughters) to check on us, pretending to be the loving, hardworking husband and father.
It was all a lie. He hadn’t been working; he had been spending Christmas with someone else’s family.
Years of Betrayal
As I continued digging, I turned to his old computers and cell phones. What I found there was even worse.
Explicit photos, graphic text messages, and years of emails documented his infidelity in shocking detail.
He had been cheating for almost our entire marriage. By my estimate, there were at least 15 other women.
Some of them clearly knew about me, and I even suspected that a few of them knew about each other.
What hurt the most was reading how he talked about me to these women. He shared intimate details of our lives, even talking about my struggles with infertility.
He used my pain to build connections with them.
The man I thought I had known and loved for over a decade was a stranger.
Seeing It for Myself
Even with all the evidence, part of me was still in denial. I couldn’t fully accept what I had discovered. I needed to see it with my own eyes.
I rented a car and drove to Knoxville. My husband often used my SUV for his work trips because it was more fuel-efficient than his truck, and I had enabled GPS tracking on it. Using that, I followed him to a dog park in Farragut.
I parked on a hill overlooking the park and watched as he arrived with another woman. They walked hand in hand, laughing together as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
I sat there in my car, recording a video of myself talking through my emotions as I watched him.
Somehow, documenting the moment helped me stay calm. It felt poetic—just as I had discovered his betrayal through a video, I began my healing process by making my own.
The Final Straw
After seeing the truth for myself, I decided I couldn’t keep his secret any longer. I told the people closest to me—his daughters and his sisters—what I had discovered.
They deserved to hear it from me.
My husband found out I was leaving him through his family. I refused to waste my breath confronting him directly.
When we did communicate, it was only through text, and even then, he continued to deny everything.
He insisted that our relationship would improve once his “training” was over.
Before our divorce was finalized, he had a baby with one of the women he had been seeing.
To make matters worse, when I transferred my health insurance to a new policy, the company mistakenly listed that baby under my account.
Seeing the baby’s name broke me.
My husband and I had been trying to conceive for years, and he had given my favorite baby name to his child with another woman.
It felt like there was nothing left for him to take from me.
Rebuilding My Life
The months following our separation were some of the hardest I’ve ever experienced. I cried until I was dehydrated.
I had constant headaches and felt like I was on the verge of collapse.
But slowly, I began to rebuild. I made it my mission to erase his presence from my life, starting with my social media.
I deleted every photo and post about him. It wasn’t perfect—I stayed connected with some of his family members and couldn’t remove him from group photos on other people’s pages—but it was a start.
For the first time in my adult life, I took control of my finances. I bought my own car and paid my own bills.
I also started dating again, cautiously and slowly. My new partner is everything my ex wasn’t—kind, patient, and honest.
He leaves his phone unlocked and his laptop open, not because I demand it but because he wants me to feel secure.
Moving Forward
My ex-husband passed away last year, and I sometimes wonder if he ever truly understood how much I had uncovered.
Part of me wishes I had told him, but another part feels empathy for the pain he must have felt at the end of his life.
Love, betrayal, and loss are complicated. Healing isn’t linear, and some wounds may never fully close. But I am moving forward.
Some people think it’s ironic that I teach “Couples & Family Therapy” after everything I’ve been through.
But just like an oncologist isn’t immune to cancer, therapists aren’t immune to personal struggles. What matters is how we respond to those challenges.
For me, the key has been living the truths I teach and learning to trust again—both others and myself.