Cheating on my toxic husband made me feel alive again

It wasn’t love, but it wasn’t lust either

I was 23 and he was 25 when we got married. It was a love marriage, but I never thought that years later, I would be cheating on my husband. Our parents lived in Mumbai but he got a job in Pune so I moved there with him in a rented apartment, a space I poured myself into making a home. It was ours—until every Friday, when he would pack a bag and head to Mumbai to spend the weekend with his parents and friends.

The first couple of years were fine. We fought, we made up, we had a lot of sex. I noticed fairly early that I wasn’t just married to him—I was married to his mother, too. She knew everything. Every fight, every frustration, every thought he had, she was the first to know. I was somewhere much further down the list in his confidants, if at all.

My sex life died after my pregnancy

I started feeling lonely. We barely had any conversations and when I tried to communicate my issues, I was always dismissed.

The pressure to have a baby started three years after marriage. His mother kept taunting me for not putting my reproductive organs to use. Then came the fertility tests, the prodding and the endless cycle of appointments. After all my results showed up normal, my husband finally got tested, and they found out his sperm count was low. That was the moment his mother’s taunts fell silent.

Five years into our marriage, our daughter arrived. She was everything. She still is. After childbirth, our relationship got worse. My husband kept breaking my confidence, often shaming me for the changes my body went through due to the pregnancy. I was slowly giving up on having any expectations from him. We had sex only when he wanted it and it felt mechanical—like he was using me to fulfil his desires. When I felt aroused, he pushed me away, making excuses. My needs never mattered.

I wanted to feel like I mattered

When my daughter was a toddler, I signed up for a self-defence class. That’s where I met someone—my instructor. It started innocently enough, just polite conversation after class, a little small talk about life and kids. At first, I just enjoyed the attention. It was harmless, I told myself. It felt nice to be seen. To be spoken to like I mattered, like I wasn’t just a functional piece of machinery keeping a household running. It wasn’t my intention to be cheating on my husband. But slowly, conversations stretched longer. He asked about my interests, my life before marriage, things I’d long buried because no one ever asked. I could feel my mind waking up, like a limb that had fallen asleep.

I would lie awake at night thinking about our conversations—not because they were romantic, but because they were human. We started sharing how we felt, how I was trapped in the marriage like an invisible ghost in the house. He listened, he cared. Our conversations made me feel I was still someone under the layers of duty and resentment.

It didn’t take much for me to fall into something with him, something gentle and safe and fleeting. It wasn’t love but it wasn’t lust either. It was about the feeling of being held—not physically, but emotionally. It was the intimacy of feeling like I wasn’t invisible.

And yet, I was guilty of cheating on my husband. We are always told cheaters are bad people and when I was getting married, I never would have imagined myself developing a connection outside my marriage. I knew I had crossed a line there. I ended it quickly, but the loss of what he represented—a reminder that I was still capable of connection, and that I wanted more than survival—stayed with me.

My life was not going anywhere. I tried so hard to get my husband to see my perspective but he had no interest in making things right.

I cheated on my husband again

When we moved to Australia for a year due to his job, he started helping out at home, taking care of our daughter, and spending time with me. I felt that things were finally working out. After a year, we returned to India and with his renewed access to his mother and friends, I was shoved to the backseat again. His mother told me once that I shouldn’t feel too happy that he was treating me nicely in Australia. She said it was because she had asked him to not fight with me, and he was simply following orders.

I felt so shattered. Who was I married to? A puppet? I lost the last drop of respect and hope I had left in this marriage. I felt used, as a person, to give birth to a child and take care of the house. My marriage wasn’t a marriage anymore. It was a performance that was held together by duty and a shared address.

I met another man through a common contact. I was seeking his advice on some work I had to get done at home. We started talking, and developed a deeper connection. I wasn’t looking for an affair but this time, I fell hard for a man outside my marriage. I felt wanted, heard, and seen.

We started sexting each other, and I realised, this time the guilt never creeped in. How could I feel guilty for cheating on my husband now — guilty for breaking something that had already been shattered? How could I feel guilty for reaching for warmth after years of being left cold?

One day, my husband was going through my phone and found our chats. He called me every vile name he could think of. Each insult hit, but none of them stuck. His mother blamed my upbringing, the independent women I knew, the fact that I didn’t fit into her idea of what a wife should be. A few friends told me that I should have divorced him instead of cheating on my husband. But they have not been in my shoes.

Some of my friends and cousins had the courage to walk out of toxic marriages and built successful careers and happy lives for themselves. But I was not able to do the same. Over the years, I have lost my confidence to go outside, get a job, and raise a daughter by myself (read this if you’re looking to re-enter the workforce.) I don’t want my daughter to miss out on opportunities because of me. I don’t have enough family support either. My father was my anchor, my quiet champion, and when I lost him, I lost my biggest safety net. Now, it’s just my mother, whose health is fragile, and my daughter, who is my reason for everything. My one goal is to raise her to know her worth. To make sure she never believes that silence is the price of love.

Only for my daughter

My husband continues to be vile and now he’s hostile to my friends too. He has assassinated the character of women around me, saying they are all “loose”, “too independent”, and are negatively influencing me. He never took accountability, and I don’t have any respect for him—and he cannot force me to feel guilty.

I’ve trained myself not to care what my husband says, or what his mother thinks, or how my choices are judged. I am still trying to find my own voice after 17 years of muting it. If my daughter grows up knowing how to speak up for herself, I’ll consider that my greatest success.

This is an anonymous account as told to Akanksha Narang