Shock as man discovers his wife has had a 10-year affair with his best friend

Dear Coleen

I’ve discovered my wife has had an affair for several years with my best friend, who was also one of her dental patients.

It started while I was working away from home. She wanted to stay behind so she could be there for her elderly mother who lived in a nursing home near us.

We agreed that when her mother passed away we would sell our family home and she would then relocate to where I was working.

But when her mother died, she said wanted to stay on and ‘get to know’ her daughter from her previous marriage.

She would fly out to see me on a Thursday night and go back home on a Sunday night.

This went on for three years until I retired and my wife and I moved to be nearer my elderly mother, who was in bad health.

It was after she passed away that I found out my wife was having an affair that started 10 years earlier.

Now she frequently visits her daughter back in our old home town, only now I’m not so sure that it is her daughter she is visiting.

How should I confront my wife about this affair and how I’m feeling.

It’s eating away at me and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Coleen says

You don’t say how you found out and if you have concrete proof of the affair but, if you do, then you have to confront her. Why haven’t you already done it? Are you frightened she’ll turn around and say it’s all true and that she wants to be with your friend?

You can’t just ignore this and carry on pretending everything is fine. How can your marriage survive if you don’t trust her? And you clearly don’t trust her because you don’t believe she’s visiting her daughter.

If you want your relationship to carry on, the only way is for it to come out in the open and then she has to work really hard at building that trust again.

This is all supposing that she wants it to work out.

You’ve been betrayed in the worst way possible – by the person you’re in love with and have been married to for years and also by your best friend. That’s devastating but, trust me, you won’t solve anything by hiding from it.

It will just keep eating away at you until you know the truth from her and start talking about what you’re going to do about it.