Many women have experienced the heartbreak of their husband having an affair with a younger woman. Photo / Getty Images
One tiny gesture foreshadowed the most seismic shift of my entire life and started my long and painful journey towards a defining moment
There’s a saying I adore and, unfortunately, now relate to all too well.
When a man of 40 falls for a girl of 20 , it’s not her youth he’s chasing, but his own. Well, this is my story – or at least part of it.
Mine is not a unique tale. It’s not one of those gripping sagas that makes me more interesting at cocktail parties.
There’s no headline screaming, “World Shocked: Man Trades in Older Wife for Younger Model”. Nope. This story is a tale as old as time.
Now, I know many of you have your own version of this story. Sure, the names and sordid details may differ. Maybe you didn’t catch your husband cheating with a 21-year-old “model” who would eventually become your daughters’ stepmother.
And before you ask if this is some sort of fictional romantic tragedy, nope, this is my real life. And if by chance that is your story too, DM me immediately. We’re starting a wine-drinking club for two.
So yes, details differ, but the theme – I suspect – is the same.
It began on the night of my office Christmas party. I ran a production company in Toronto that produced mostly television commercials, and my husband was one of my busiest directors.
The company had rented a charmingly shabby bar and a band, and everyone was drinking and dancing. I remember – because you don’t easily forget moments that change your life forever – standing at the bar chatting with my friend Marie when they walked in.
Two young women entered the bar dressed in shiny latex mini skirts, corsets, and stiletto boots. One was short and soft with dark hair, and the other, the more striking of the two, was tall, with long wavy hair that fell on her bare shoulder blades. Their faces, if you could see beyond the matte red lips and severe cheekbones, looked no more than 20.
I assumed they were lost, looking for a stag-do, or perhaps part of some elaborate office prank where at any moment someone would hit play on a boombox and the two dark mistresses would force some confused drunken sod on a chair and lip-sync to Spanked by Van Halen.
Then, out of the crowd, came my husband of seven years, then about 40, bounding toward them, encouraging them to come in and have a drink. I watched in complete bewilderment. He knew them. They were invited. They never moved from the doorway. They didn’t stay long. But as they left, I saw it.
A moment so small, so discreet, it would go unnoticed by most. My husband’s little finger lightly brushed against the hand of the tall striking girl with the long hair. Like a soft breeze barely touching her and then ever so gracefully pulling back.
I took a painful gasp. I just knew that that tiny gesture foreshadowed the most seismic shift of my entire life.
When I asked my husband who they were and why they were at our staff Christmas party, he explained they were talents on a show he was pitching. Call it female instinct, but I suspected something.
I don’t recall saying anything more. I didn’t have much to go on other than a gut feeling and a light graze of fingers. But a few days later, after some sleuthing – okay, hacking into my husband’s computer – I found emails that grabbed my heart and ripped it out through my throat.
They spoke of passion and carnal lust (my husband’s words, not mine). There were times and suggested places where they could secretly meet and be alone. These words blinded and gutted me in a way that only betrayal can do.
I knew that things had not been great after the birth of our second child, but I thought this was what all young couples go through. An adjustment period. He would say we were just in a rut, and that me and the girls were everything. But as I read those emails, love letters he wrote to another, there it was. My husband, the father of my two daughters, 5 and 2, was having an affair. Our marriage was over.
I was devastated. Gutted. Confused. How did my well-thought-out choices not result in roses around the door and happily ever after? How can you do everything right and still wake up screaming, “How did I get here? And more importantly, who can I blame?”
When I confronted him, standing with the freshly printed emails in my hand, he laughed nervously and said “It’s not what you think.” But here’s the thing: it is almost always exactly what you think.
Because it was Christmas and I didn’t want to ruin my daughters’ holiday, we decided to wait until after the holiday to tell them. He moved into the guest room, and I found a therapist who would help us draft the conversation we were to have with our very young daughters. This was hard.
There were tears, screaming (mostly from me) and long periods of silence that rattled and haunted our home. When I wasn’t a quivering puddle on the floor, I was angry. How could he do this to us, to his daughters, to his family – to me?
I think one of the hardest things I had to do was tell my children that mummy and daddy would not be living together anymore. I know some people stay together for the kids, but I didn’t believe staying in a broken marriage was what I wanted to model for my daughters. He moved out once the girls were told.
As I was sad, broken, and yes, humiliated, he was friendly, upbeat, saying we could still be good friends. For a while. I believed him. See, we had another layer that most don’t when a husband leaves his wife and children for a younger woman. We still worked together.
And although difficult, the hard part came after he left my company. Almost like he had been trying to be super-friendly as I, his producer, continued to book him work. We even co-drafted our separation agreement without the costly need for lawyers, and got it legalised. Of course, he completely disregarded it after he left my company, and with that commenced a painful and expensive divorce battle that went on for years.
Once I stopped crying – and trust me, nothing says self-pity like ugly crying in a bathtub – and blaming myself for not knowing what I didn’t know before I learned it (thank you, Maya Angelou), I started to understand that his actions did not define who I was or how I saw myself.
Nor do I believe I could have predicted it because life has taught me that adulthood is like looking both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by an aeroplane.
Break-ups are hard at the best of times. But being replaced by a younger, long-legged, taut, 20-something body?
That adds a whole other level of pain to the self-esteem issues that women can lug around from having babies, ageing gracefully, or comparing your insides to everyone else’s outsides.
I lost sight of who I was, who I really was, as my husband would body shame me and then try to pass it off as humour. I think we call that gaslighting now.
He was unkind as he spoke of my sagging breasts, my larger waistline, and the extra weight I carried around that “jiggled like jello” when we had sex. I had started seeing myself through his lens.
So, eventually, I asked myself this question: Was I ready to give up feeling crappy? And yes, that choice is yours to make. I didn’t want to become one of misery’s great graduates – nor continue to see myself through his unkind, cruel lens.
I would not give him and his new girl the satisfaction of seeing me crumble. I am more powerful than that. We all are.
He was someone else’s problem now. A girl from a different generation, someone too young to remember where she was when John Lennon was shot. And if she is really lucky, she, too, will get to experience the privilege of ageing.
I would like to say that was the end of my questionable man choices. But clearly, I had more lessons to learn. I fell in love (again) with an age-appropriate man, moved to London, and reinvented myself. I was with him for 10 years, and in London for three when I discovered he, too, was cheating on me.
I don’t have proof there was actual penetration, but I did find an online dating profile he was active on. And guess what, if you have to hide emails or text messages from your partner, that is cheating too.
But here is what all of this has gifted me. It taught me some things need to end for better things to begin. It gave me the sexy and ever-interesting city of London. And most interestingly, it allowed me to write an award-winning memoir, In Search of Mr Darcy: Lessons Learnt in the Pursuit of Happily Ever After. Because honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.
And in sharing my stories about love, heartache, single parenting, or even how sometimes a well-timed one-night stand can be more effective than years of therapy, it has repeatedly shown me the more we share, the more we realise how much we have in common.
I have learned that if anyone knows how to crawl out of a romantic disaster with their dignity somewhat intact, it’s me. And who knows, even if your husband hasn’t left you for a younger version of your former self, this might make you feel remarkably better about your own man choices, the ones who leave the toilet seat up and the used teabag in the sink.
So in closing, if I could impart just one brilliant insight I have gained, I would say: don’t trust that someone won’t betray you, trust that you can handle it if they do.
And knowing that some people marry prison inmates reminds me my man choices aren’t all bad.
In Search of Mr Darcy: Lessons Learnt in the Pursuit of Happily Ever After is published by Icon Books
New York Times: It turns out going silver comes with its own growing pains.