What it is like making an attempt to forgive an affair: PIPPA RICHMOND by no means believed her ‘tender, shy’ husband would betray her – however stayed when he did. With brutal truthfully, she now reveals the fallout…

Last summer I was walking down the local High Street with a friend when I saw my husband in a shop doorway, talking on his telephone.

I had just tried to call him but he rejected the call and he never does that. He was laughing. I said to my friend, jokingly: ‘Look! John looks so happy. He must be having an affair!’ I said it because there was no possibility in my mind that my husband would have an affair.

It turns out, he was.

Later that night, driving the car after dropping off our daughter for a swimming lesson, he looked straight ahead and said: ‘I slept with someone else.’ And then burst into tears. I felt two things: a sense of loss I could barely give shape to, which lived in the centre of my chest, and, more immediately and powerfully, a sense of utter stupidity. No one tells you how much like a film character (‘the classic fool’) you feel when your husband cheats on you.

I had been reading a romantic novel about a man – upstanding and kindly, rather like my husband – who cheats on his wife. I remember thinking, ‘John would never do that’. My husband is a tender, honest, shy man. I was in complete shock – it was like the dog had recited Shakespeare at me, or the garden was made of glass.

The first person I told was my mother. The following night, she took my eight-year-old daughter out and John and I had it out in the kitchen where we have cooked so many meals together, fought – usually about money or housework – and laughed.

He said that the woman, a friend of his 20 years younger than me, was going through a hard time. They had got drunk together, she had kissed him and it had gone further.

He has a lot of female friends, as he is a good listener. They go to comedy gigs and the cricket together.

I think these women are trivial and childish – none of them have children – and they resent me because, after we married, he was less available to them. Still, I accepted them because I trusted him.

He told me it had only happened once. I kept saying – I mean shouting – why? And smashing plates. Eventually he said, ‘because she desired me’. (The insinuation being: you don’t.)

Everything I hate about myself – my self-obsession, my body – loomed into my eyes and I sobbed.

That night I slept on the sofa in my study with the dog and the night after that, and the night after that. I didn’t want to sleep in our bed.

John and I have known each other since university, but we only started dating in our early 30s after we bumped into each other again while shopping at Selfridges. I tell my daughter it was a Sliding Doors moment – that it was magic. We got married 15 years ago and had our daughter in 2016.

He made me feel so loved. I have a terrible relationship with my father and the usual crocodile of psychopathic or emotionally unavailable ex-boyfriends.

John was the first man I had ever trusted and I found in him wells of tenderness that I hadn’t known existed in this world. I resisted it in so many ways – I am not good at being loved – but he let me resist him and I settled into him. I would tell people we have a great love. Now I wonder, was it all an idea that I had and he had no say in?

If you have been together for 15 years and have a child, and one of you cheats, you don’t just walk away. You have built a life together, centred around your child. So instead you enter a terrifying phase, which the small person you adore can only watch, realising something is wrong without knowing what.

I fantasised about running away, of course, but to where and with what? I had got used to loving him. I didn’t want to leave this man who had – cliches are everywhere here – become a stranger. We had built something together, why tear it down over just one night?

I soon found out that it wasn’t ‘just one night’.

Initially, and typically, I told him it was my fault. After our daughter was born, following a terrible birth in which I nearly died, sex became, for me, something other people did.

I felt unplugged from the very concept of desire, against my will.

We basically spent half a decade without sex and I refused to admit what this had done to us. It had turned us into flatmates, and co-carers to our child.

I didn’t do the things that might have helped me: exercise, nice clothes. I allowed myself to become a drudge who walked around in a dryrobe while wearing pyjamas.

The stupid thing was that in all those years I hadn’t even talked to him about my inability to make love. I didn’t want to hurt him and I was too ashamed and heartbroken myself. I just retreated.

That autumn, after he told me about his affair, I cooked his favourite foods and tried to be A Good Wife. I did things: tidied, cleaned, tried hard.

Then I got tired of trying hard and smashed more plates and sobbed. The dog hid under the furniture.

Our daughter asked me: ‘Are you OK, Mummy? Why are you crying?’

John retreated into a speechlessness that felt worse than being alone. We had one session of family therapy, both on Zoom in separate rooms at the therapist’s request. She told us we needed separate therapy, because we couldn’t sort our marriage out until we had fixed ourselves.

I admitted my physical detachment. He didn’t say much at all and at the end of the session we met in the hall and fell into each other’s arms, weeping, like our marriage was another child we were trying to keep alive. We said we would try.

As winter came, I realised he was still in touch with the other woman. I had assumed he wasn’t – but that was self-delusion.

I hadn’t insisted he stopped speaking to her; my pride forbade it. He said they were just friends. I said, fine, be friends, and then changed my mind when I found him hiding in the bathroom talking to her on the phone. This is weird, I said, this isn’t trying. His phone took on the dimensions of a horcrux, those sinister talismans from Harry Potter – it had become something awful, something I feared.

I found a drawing she had made of our dog on the wall of his study. I don’t know when she did it, or even when she met our dog.

Had she been in our home? I still can’t bear to ask.

But this wall has pictures of his family, our child and me on it. We call it The Wall Of John. I took down the pictures of me – they were taken when I was young and beautiful – and hid them where he couldn’t find them. I screamed at him: why can’t you hide the stupid dog picture she made, like a normal person?

He rang her on my birthday. I know this because I had a hunch and asked – and when I ask him a question, he tells the truth.

You might think this truthfulness admirable – he seemed to think it was – but I hated him for it.

I tried to cry as little as possible, to behave normally when our daughter was around. Rock bottom came one night in January. Our daughter hurt her leg, and we were sitting in A&E. My phone was dead and I was reading a magazine on his when the nurse called us into triage.

He stood up with our girl and put out his hand for the phone. I said I didn’t want to give it to him because I was reading. He scowled at me – and I knew, and he knew I knew, and he stalked off into triage, leaving me with the phone. It was, in retrospect, typical of him. 

I went to his WhatsApp and found messages with another female friend of his. He was telling her he loved this other woman, he couldn’t stop thinking about her, it was the best sex of his life. They had driven to a stone circle and made love. Driven. Not drunk then: he wouldn’t drive drunk. And not a one-off either.

I felt a great falling inside my chest and also – and perhaps this small piece of objectivity saved me – a sense of embarrassment that my husband would do something as naff as have sex with someone in a stone circle – and at his age.

The following day I smashed our wedding photograph (there is a great crack in it, just between us), tore up my wedding dress (now carefully packed away, in tatters) and threw my rings at his chest. Just like in the movies. You never wear them anyway, he said. It’s true. They feel tight on my fingers.

I collected his clothes – most of them gifts from me, do I dress him like a doll? – and threw them out the window. I screamed at him: ‘If you want to go, I’ll pack for you!’ And: ‘My father left when I was nine, do you think I can’t live without you?’

I felt he hated me, that he wanted to punish me and I was losing my mind. He was in love with someone else and that was far worse than having sex. I stared at her picture online, imagining them in bed. She is 20 years younger than me – how could I compare?

Eventually, I logged into his email and emailed her from his address. ‘That fell apart fast,’ I wrote, ‘he’s all yours now.’ He later told me she blocked him that day and I felt weirdly pleased because I had frightened her away. I still don’t know exactly when the affair ended, although as far as I know they really were only friends by that point. But the ‘friendship’ is now over.

We both work from home and after our daughter went to school, the days were awful. I would weep, or shout, or both. I would demand to know what he wanted. ‘I want to stay with you,’ he would say. But why? ‘Because we are married,’ he would say, ‘and because I love you.’

What about her? ‘It’s a fantasy,’ he said. But I do think he loves her, or thinks he does. ‘Come into bed with me,’ he would say when I told him I was lonely, offering me a hug that might become more. I would look at the single bed in the spare room where he sleeps – I am in our bedroom – and say: there is no space for me there.

I dreamed of moving away from all the pain. I made an appointment to have the house valued and cancelled it. I spoke to a lawyer. Can he make me stay with him? Can he take our child? (No, and no.)

I searched properties for Divorced Me – three beds, practical – and, astonishingly, properties for Divorced Him. I felt like an idiot – who looks for suitable properties for their ex-husband?

The answer is, a person who can’t see a life beyond him. However angry I am, I still love him for all the stupid reasons: the fall of sunlight on his hair, his idiosyncrasies, his ridiculous laugh. If I leave him, I will take the grief I am carrying with me.

I don’t want a new husband. I want my old one back.

Eventually, in spring, we decided that we would both do therapy separately for a year and at the end of it would see where we are. We are now seven months in to that year, with Christmas looming. 

Sometimes, I rail against him to my therapist. At other times I say that I just want John to come back to me. I want him to forgive me for all the ways in which I have forgotten him and I want him to forgive himself.

I know I can be self-obsessed and monomaniacal. I hide in TV and food, and in my work.

Three things have sustained me this year. Firstly, there is the tenderness of a very small number of friends who have asked me, ‘are you OK?’ without needing me to answer yes, because the answer is no. I do tell the people I am close to as I can’t hide the pain inside myself.

Another is my child. I am terrified she will blame herself, so I tell her partial truths, such as sometimes adults fight.

It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other. It has nothing to do with you. And the rest.

Another is hope: that we can get back what we had. My therapist advocates kindness, so we try. We look for the places between us where there is no pain and we try them out, slowly. We spend time together when we do not have to, going to the garden centre and doing the recycling. Reading together in the evenings, not watching TV, so we have something to say to each other. (Only an idiot has a strong opinion about Shetland. Watch it and your marriage may be dying.) Playing board games with our child. Lying together in bed talking and hugging, though we still sleep in separate rooms.

He complains that he is living inside a woman’s magazine ‘guide to saving your marriage’, but then he has always been able to make me laugh. 

I am not good at giving up on things and the idea of dating again makes me feel sick.

But I wonder, did we ever really know each other or are we just fantasists? A friend once told me: you make him sound fictional, as if he isn’t real. Now I think we have to learn to have a real marriage.

I suppose I should end with some homily but I don’t have one. The truth is I mostly feel humbled and, in my better moments, I know there are worse things.

I think a lot about Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If: ‘Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.’

I genuinely don’t know what will happen to us, but I am not leaving without a fight.

• Pippa Richmond is a pseudonym and names in this article have been changed.