A woman has opened up about the heartbreaking way she discovered her husband of 13 years was cheating on her.
In a piece written for HuffPost, Dr. Samantha Gray - an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Indianapolis - recalled how she realized her partner was being unfaithful three days before Valentine's Day in 2018.
The discovery began when her husband sent her a seemingly innocent text about a church he visited while on a work trip. Although the text appeared to be a sweet gesture - her husband sending over pictures of the singers who performed at the service - Dr. Gray noticed something was off about the message.
It only took a quick Google for her to confirm that the church in her husband's picture wasn't in North Carolina, as he had said - it was in Knoxville, Tennessee. Scrolling through videos that she found on one of the singer's Facebook page, Gray came across a video of the service her husband had attended.
However, as she watched, she saw something which shocked her to her core.
"I saw my husband standing big as day in a yellow sweater vest I bought him, texting me with one hand, and holding another woman’s hand with the other," Dr. Gray recalled.
She described feeling utterly floored by the video, saying: "I was so stunned ― I realized my body was completely still, and I was holding my breath. It felt as though the world was going to fall apart if I exhaled."
Rather than immediately confronting her husband, Dr. Gray decided to do some digging. Unfortunately, the situation was about to go from bad to worse, as what she found next made her question whether she had ever known her husband at all.
First, she discovered he had opened multiple cred cards in her name. The bills for the cards provided evidence of shopping trips, dinner dates, and concerts in different states.
Next, she found a Happy Holiday cards thanking her husband for spending Christmas with another woman's family in Tennessee - on the same year that he had said he could not spend the holidays with Dr. Gray and his two daughters from a previous marriage due to work commitments.
But the worst discoveries were still to come. On her husband's old computers and cell phones, there was evidence that he had been cheating since only a few months after they tied the knot. As well as receipts for flowers, there were sexually graphic pictures and text messages between him and up to 15 other women. Worst of all, he had openly discussed Dr. Gray's fertility issue with many of his mistresses.
"The sheer amount of data I discovered, which spanned numerous years, was overwhelming," she wrote.
In the aftermath of her discovery, Dr. Gray followed her husband to Tennessee and secretly watched him out with another woman. After that, she decided enough was enough and left him.
"I was heartbroken and embarrassed that I had never known about his infidelity, but I trusted and loved him, and I couldn’t believe he had done ― was doing ― this to me," she recalled.
However, even after they were separated, her husband still had one more way to hurt her. Not long after she had left him, Dr. Gray discovered he had had a baby with the other woman he was seeing - and that he had named the child the same name she had been reserving for her firstborn child.
"I felt as though there was nothing else this man could take from me," she said.
Dr. Gray concluded by saying that, after several years, she has managed to heal and has a wonderful partner. However, the trauma of her first husband's betrayal is something she is unsure she will ever truly recover from.
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