The next day, coincidentally, happened to be Friday the 13th, and the day before Valentine’s Day.
I had thought Stephen and I would spend the weekend together.
Instead, I called the therapist and told her what I had discovered.
She felt sorry for me, but she didn’t seem particularly surprised. She told me that she believed Stephen might have some form of love or sex addiction.
I could understand why she thought that. When I looked back across everything I now knew, his behaviour certainly appeared compulsive at times.
And yet it never seemed to fit neatly into any explanation I could find.
That had become one of the most exhausting things about trying to understand Stephen. Every time I found an explanation that seemed to account for his behaviour, something else contradicted it. I kept searching for the thing that would make the whole picture come into focus.
There were always pieces left over.
I spoke to Stephen too.
Perhaps some part of me was still hoping for something from him — real remorse, urgency, an invitation to see him, some indication that the magnitude of what I had discovered had landed with him in the same way it had landed with me.
Instead, he seemed to be going about his normal life.
He was getting ready for a social event at the arts centre.
There was no invitation to join him. No real conversation about what we were going to do that weekend.
I had just discovered that the man I had loved for five years had been unfaithful with multiple women, and somehow we appeared to be experiencing that discovery on completely different scales.
So I repeated that I needed time and space.
I told him that I couldn’t possibly see how we could come back from this.
That evening, I asked to speak to my eldest son.
There was something else I needed to resolve.
For some time, I had been carrying what I perceived to be an ultimatum from him: choose Stephen and I would lose my son.
Now, after Stephen’s confession, that frightened me more than ever.
Because despite everything I had just discovered, I still hadn’t completely ruled out continuing to see Stephen.
My son came home after visiting the new house he and his girlfriend were buying.
I told him what Stephen had confessed.
He simply shook his head.
He wasn’t surprised at all.
Then I told him about something else.
I explained how frightened I had been by what I understood him to have said about Stephen. I needed to know what would actually happen if, despite all this new information, I chose to continue seeing him.
My son explained that I had misunderstood.
He had never intended to give me an ultimatum.
He wasn’t saying that if I chose Stephen, he would abandon me.
He was saying that he would have to step further away from my life.
Then he tried to explain why.
Watching me with Stephen, he said, had become like watching his mother struggle with an addiction.
He compared it to heroin.
If I were addicted to a drug that was destroying me, knowingly returning to it again and again, there would eventually be a limit to how closely he could stand beside me and watch.
Stephen, in his view, was holding me back.
Pulling me down.
And while I remained caught inside that relationship, the effects spread beyond Stephen and me.
My son had reached a point in his own life where he wanted to surround himself with people who were positive for him. People who added something to his life rather than continually drawing him into chaos and distress.
He didn’t believe Stephen was one of those people.
More painfully, he told me that while I remained consumed by the relationship, sometimes I wasn’t either.
That was difficult to hear.
But he articulated it so calmly that I understood.
And strangely, I felt an enormous sense of relief.
There had never been an ultimatum.
My son wasn’t going to stop loving me or disappear from my life because I made a decision he disagreed with.
He was simply entitled to protect his own wellbeing too.
But inadvertently, he had given me something much bigger to think about.
His philosophy about the people he chose to surround himself with made sense.
Yes, technically I could continue seeing Stephen without the terrifying certainty that I would lose my son.
But suddenly there was another question.
Why was I still considering choosing somebody who was so bad for me?
Why was I considering choosing somebody that would mean my son would step back?
When I had joined the dating site five years earlier, I had been very clear about what I wanted.
I wanted someone with whom I could thrive.
Was I thriving with Stephen?
The answer was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.
Whatever wonderful things Stephen had brought into my life, the relationship had also brought out some of the worst things in me.
Anxiety.
Obsession.
Jealousy.
Hypervigilance.
Shame.
Duplicity.
A version of myself that could spend hours analysing messages, checking details, trying to establish what was true.
It had affected my family.
My friendships.
My work.
My peace of mind.
Almost every part of my life had, at some point, been required to accommodate whatever was happening with Stephen.
My son had given me a great deal to think about.
But first I had to survive the weekend.
I felt emotionally destroyed.
All I could think about were the previous five years and what they had really meant.
Then the last two years.
Those were particularly difficult to comprehend now.
I had believed them to be the most settled period of our relationship.
Now I knew that Stephen had been unfaithful during them.
It felt as though I had been handed a new version of my own life and told to reinterpret it.
Memories that had once seemed uncomplicated suddenly had questions attached to them.
Where had Stephen actually been?
Who had he been talking to?
What had been happening alongside the life I thought we were living?
I sat with it largely alone.
I felt lonely.
Confused.
Fractured.
And then I thought about my ex.
When I had first met Stephen, I had wanted to remain friends with the man I had spent the previous fifteen years with.
We had stayed in contact for a while. I had even told him about some of the things that happened between Stephen and me during those first couple of years.
But Stephen had been jealous of the friendship.
He didn’t like me taking calls or receiving messages from my ex, and I had felt caught between two people I cared about.
Eventually, in an attempt to make my relationship with Stephen less complicated, I had allowed that friendship to disappear.
Now I thought about what my son had said.
About the people we choose to have around us.
My ex had always been grounded and rational. He had integrity. More importantly, he knew me and cared about me.
He had known me before all of this.
I wanted to talk to somebody who was detached from the chaos surrounding Stephen but who understood me well enough to recognise the person underneath it.
I wanted to bring someone positive back into my life.
And if I was completely truthful, I was curious about him too.
That curiosity had never entirely disappeared.
It had just gone quiet.
So I sent him a message.
Just:
“…”
Three dots.
A symbol of continuation, perhaps, although I doubt I was thinking quite so poetically when I sent them.
He had told me that if he ever developed an attraction to somebody else, he would tell me.
But it felt incredibly good to talk to somebody who cared about me, who wasn’t close enough to the situation to be consumed by it, and who remembered who I had once been.
They were vague enough not to reveal what I wanted.
I’m not even sure I knew what I wanted.
It was really just a test.
Would he respond?
He did.
Immediately.
And, given the timing, he joked about Valentine’s Day.
Was I really finally getting back in touch with him on Valentine’s weekend?
Then we talked.
And talked.
And talked.
I told him the whole sordid story about Stephen, although I allowed him to believe that some of what I was describing had happened further in the past than it actually had.
I didn’t want him to think I was reaching for him simply because Stephen had hurt me.
I didn’t want it to look as though I was on the rebound or using him as somewhere safe to land.
Because I could see how easily it might have looked that way.
We had spent fifteen years together.
He had seen many different versions of me during that time — good and bad — but he knew something fundamental about who I was at the heart of it all.
And I think I needed somebody to remind me.
After learning about Stephen’s affairs, I was becoming increasingly aware of just how far I had travelled from myself.
Some part of me wanted to find my way back.
It was good to hear about my ex too.
To discover what his life had been like and what he had been through during the years since we separated.
By the end of those conversations, I knew one thing with certainty.
We had re-established contact, and I wasn’t going to allow anyone to take that friendship away from me again.
I should never have allowed it to disappear in the first place.
He had reminded me who I was.
I didn’t know it then, but reconnecting with someone who had known me before Stephen would eventually play its own small part in finding my way back to myself.
But I wasn’t there yet.
I still wondered what Stephen was doing that weekend.
I imagined K turning up at the arts centre event.
I imagined them spending time together.
My mind continued creating scenes for which I had no evidence, because after everything I had discovered, almost anything now seemed possible.
And as the weekend went on, my devastation began turning into anger.
I was angry with Stephen.
This was the man who had made so many sincere-sounding promises over the years that he would never cheat on me.
For years, he had made me feel exceptional.
Special.
How could someone who had made me feel that way have done all of this without my knowing?
I was destabilised, panicking and, at times, vengeful.
I wanted some sense of control over a situation in which I suddenly seemed to have none.
And that was when I decided to contact U through the game app.
We had never spoken before.
Knowing Stephen as I did, I thought I knew what might happen next.
Now that I had withdrawn from him, I suspected he might renew his connection with U.
It was a pattern I thought I recognised.
Stephen seemed to find it extraordinarily difficult to be without a woman in some form. When one connection disappeared — permanently or even temporarily — another often seemed to take its place.
This time, I wanted to get there first.
My motives weren’t entirely straightforward.
Part of me wanted to warn U.
Part of me wanted to protect her.
And part of me, if I’m truthful, wanted the upper hand.
I asked whether she would be willing to talk to me woman to woman.
She replied.
She knew who I was and was willing to have the conversation.
I told her that I had recently discovered Stephen had cheated on me during our relationship and that I suspected he might make a beeline for her now.
I saw it as a warning.
At that point, I genuinely believed Stephen could be emotionally dangerous to women.
Look at what had happened to me.
And so many of the other women he had told me about had been described by him as vulnerable in one way or another.
I had always considered myself relatively stable and resilient.
None of that had protected me from the enormous emotional damage the relationship had caused.
U thanked me for the information and advice.
We left it there.
For the moment.
Reflection
Looking back, I think this weekend marked a subtle change in the questions I was asking. For years, so much of my energy had gone into trying to understand Stephen. Why did he do these things? What was he searching for? Was it his past, his mental health, some kind of compulsion, something missing inside him? Even the therapist’s suggestion of love or sex addiction gave me another possible explanation to examine. But increasingly, none of the explanations seemed capable of answering the question that mattered more: what was being with Stephen doing to me?
My conversation with my son forced me to look at that more directly. I had been so frightened by what I thought was an ultimatum that I had concentrated on whether choosing Stephen would cost me my son. Once that fear was removed, I was left with a much more uncomfortable question. If I was free to choose Stephen, why was I still considering choosing something that was making me so unhappy? I had gone looking for someone I could thrive with. Somewhere along the way, I had become so focused on whether Stephen could change that I had stopped asking whether I was thriving at all.
Reconnecting with my ex was significant for a different reason. He belonged to a version of my life that existed before Stephen. Talking to him reminded me that I had not always been this anxious, suspicious, hypervigilant woman endlessly trying to establish what was true. There was something unexpectedly reassuring about being seen by somebody who had known me for fifteen years and who remembered me outside the context of this relationship. I wasn’t trying to go backwards. I think I was beginning, very tentatively, to look for myself.
But I was still deeply entangled. I could have a conversation about surrounding myself with positive people, reconnect with someone who made me feel grounded, and still spend the weekend imagining what Stephen might be doing with K. And contacting U showed just how far I still had to go. Part of me genuinely wanted to warn her, but part of me wanted information, control and perhaps even some power in a situation that had made me feel powerless. I can see that more clearly now than I could then.
There was no sudden awakening that weekend. I didn’t discover my self-worth and calmly walk away. It was messier than that. But something had begun to turn. For perhaps the first time in a long time, the question was no longer only What is wrong with Stephen, and can it be fixed? Another question was beginning to compete with it: What has happened to me, and how do I find my way back?
