I sat in a lodge foyer for an hour earlier than catching my spouse kissing one other man. Six months later, that is the humiliating motive we’re STILL collectively… and the bed room signal that you just’re cuckolded too: STEFAN TAVY

Early one evening, I was sitting in the lobby of a well-known London hotel, hiding behind a newspaper. I’d been there for an hour or so when a woman strode in wearing a low-cut, strappy dress. I watched as she kissed a tall, muscular man on the lips before ­getting into a lift with him, ­presumably to take him to bed.

The pain felt like a physical blow to the chest. My worst fears had been confirmed: my wife Amelia was having an affair.

If I’d been the confrontational type I would have run after them, punched the man and pulled Amelia away. But I’m not, and anyway I was too paralysed by shock to move.

It’s one thing to harbour suspicions but to actually witness the love of your life betraying you is utterly devastating.

I’d read text messages on her phone about this rendezvous and had decided to stake out the hotel lobby.

Afterwards, I took the Tube home, feeling a mix of despair, sadness and anger. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep, imagining my wife with this other man.

She had told me she had gone out with friends, and returned home in the early hours of the morning. Disgusted, I ­pretended to be asleep.

You might wonder why I didn’t just bundle all her belongings into bin bags and dump them in the street, before filing for divorce. Or confront her the moment she returned.

Call it male ego or denial but I decided to keep it to myself.

Typically, it’s thought to be husbands who stray. Wives who stay with cheating husbands are often seen as doormats. Little is said about – or by – husbands who’ve been betrayed by their wives.

You might imagine a man wouldn’t stand for it. That he would walk away without a second glance. But we’re not all as strong or decisive as we might seem.

Six months after that hotel lobby revelation, Amelia and I are still together. We haven’t yet had the children we dream of having – so it’s not a case of staying together for the kids.

It’s partly because I still love her – but there are other, less romantic, reasons. Chiefly that I can’t face the humiliation of everyone knowing I wasn’t enough to keep my wife faithful.

That’s how my mates would see it. Where a woman would receive champagne and sympathy from the sisterhood, I can only imagine the ribbing I’d get from my friends down the pub.

Married for seven years, with a three-bed cottage in Richmond, south-west London, and good careers, from the outside Amelia and I look as though we have it all. And that’s the way I want it to stay, which is why I haven’t breathed a word to anybody.

Introduced by mutual friends at a party in 2015, we started talking about marriage within months of our first date. I was punching above my weight looks-wise, but when I proposed two years later, she said yes.

Before we married, we discussed everything, from our mutual desire to one day have kids to finances. I worked out what our household expenditure would be.

As a senior project manager for a global tech company, I earn around £20,000 more than Amelia, who’s a theatrical costume designer, and was happy to contribute more.

We were deliriously happy on our wedding day in February 2019, when I was 31 and she was 29, and honeymooned in Africa.

For five years, life was good. I’ve always been as attracted to her ambition, vibrant personality and caring nature as I am to her beauty. And she liked the fact I’m dependable: I can cook and clean (a legacy of years living as a bachelor) and care deeply about the people in my life.

But it’s often said the things we first fall in love with about our partners can end up being the very traits that irritate the hell out of us in years to come.

Towards the end of 2024, Amelia started to complain I didn’t spend enough money on her. Her friends went to fancier restaurants, on more exotic holidays and their husbands were as ­generous with compliments as they were with gifts, she said.

Whenever I explained it was better to save for our future, it erupted into a row. Soon I noticed she began to pull away when I tried to initiate sex, which felt like a punishment.

I ended up buying her a Gucci bag costing £300 in an end-of-season sale. I was unexpectedly excited, naively hoping it might make her appreciate me more – and want to reignite our sex life.

But she slammed the bag down on the kitchen table and said: ‘It’s out of season because you penny-pinched and bought it in the sale! I can’t do anything with it.’

Fuming, I thrust the receipt into her hand and told her to return it, adding: ‘I give up.’

A few weeks later, in May last year, Amelia announced she was going to start working overtime, taking on extra costume design projects with one of her colleagues. From then on she returned later and even ‘worked’ on Saturdays, too.

Every instinct told me that she was seeing someone else. I decided to turn detective. On one of her days off, I went into her workplace pretending I didn’t know she wasn’t there.

I said to her colleague: ‘I hope you’re not too worn out from working all these extra hours with Amelia?’

‘Oh, we haven’t been working late,’ she replied – before realising she’d dropped my wife in it.

But I needed more evidence before I could confront Amelia.

That week, when she was in the shower, I opened her phone – we’ve always been open about our passcodes – only to find sickening messages and explicit photos between her and another man. That’s when I discovered their plan to meet in the London hotel in July, where I then spotted them embracing in the lobby.

For several weeks, I said nothing about it to anyone – including Amelia. But at home we barely spoke, stopped cooking for each other and couldn’t even stand to be in the same room together, let alone have sex.

Every time Amelia claimed she was working late over the summer, I knew she was lying.

Then she came home with expensive perfume, a watch and sunglasses, claiming she’d bought them with her extra income – more lies. Last August, after a particularly stressful day at work, she was moaning about something and I snapped.

‘I know you’re having an affair!’ I shouted. ‘I saw you together at the hotel.’

Initially, she tried to deny it, until I read out the messages from her phone that I’d forwarded to my own. With nowhere to hide, she started sobbing.

She said she regretted it, was sorry and that the affair was over. It turned out she’d met him in the gym four months before that day in the hotel. She tried to blame me at first, saying I spent too much time at work. She went to hug me but I backed away.

I felt like crying but I didn’t want to waste tears on her or give her the satisfaction.

She told me: ‘I’m sorry, I want to make our marriage work.’

And deep down, so do I.

My feelings are confusing. I still love and desire my wife but I just can’t bring myself to touch her. Whenever she tries to touch me, I flinch – all I can see is her in the arms of another man.

So, here we are, five months on, trying to piece our relationship back together. I’m scared to go for the counselling that we clearly need, because what if we do all that work only for her to betray me again? At the same time, I know that without some help, we’ll struggle to move forward.

Now 38 and 36, there’s a lot of life ahead of us. I need to figure out what I want – and if my future includes Amelia or not.

Stefan Tavy is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed.

As told to Sadie Nicholas