My husband cheated on me with my best friend

I found out years later, when another woman sent me the evidence

It was a regular afternoon at home. I had just finished lunch and was scrolling through my holistic practice’s Instagram page, when a woman messaged me saying she wanted to meet for a session. I gave her an appointment. Moments later, she sent me another message saying she didn’t actually want an appointment, but just wanted to tell me something.

She then sent me 25 screenshots of chats between her and my ex-husband, followed by a single line: “I thought you should know.”

I went cold. And as I began to read them one by one, my world shifted. I was so stunned by the things he was telling this woman, who he was flirting with on Instagram. Things about my body. My performance in bed. And the revelation that left me reeling: how he had had an affair with my best friend.

We had been divorced for a year, but all the closure I had given myself came crashing down. Could this really be the man I had lived with for 14 years? The father of my children? And the betrayal wasn’t just his, either. The woman I had called my closest friend had been in on it too. What do you believe in after that?

Marriage changed everything

Ours was not an arranged marriage, or I could have blamed what happened on not knowing my husband well enough before. I had known him since we were children. We went to the same school in Delhi, before my family moved to Abu Dhabi. We reconnected in the US, where we were both studying; he’d seen a post of mine about being there and reached out immediately.

When we met, we relived old memories and created new ones. And before we knew it, we had fallen in love. We got married in 2004 after dating for seven years, and I moved to Delhi for him.

After marriage, however, I immediately began to see a different side of him. He was more invested in pleasing people in his social circles than spending time with me. He avoided responsibility, both domestic and financial. When we had our first daughter in 2006, the cracks really began to show. In arguments, in time not spent together, in emotional needs that went unmet. But things truly started falling apart after our second daughter was born in 2011.

The slow breakdown

My husband’s textile business had failed and I suggested we start a catering service. My parents loaned us the money to get started, and in some time, the business began to take off and thrive. Our marriage, meanwhile, ruptured further.

On the outside, we looked like a strong team, building a great life together with two beautiful daughters, a successful family business. But on the inside, I was carrying all the weight alone.

He never treated the catering business with seriousness. He’d arrive late, leave early, drift in and out, skip client meetings because he had partied the night before. He took no real responsibility, not for inventory, not for operations, not for bringing in new clients. You would expect he would at least take the lead at home, in the care of the children. But no. I was the one taking them to school, to classes, ensuring homework was done.

I began to see that nothing was going to change, no matter how tired and overwhelmed I was. Maybe it hurt his male ego that my parents had helped us financially. Maybe he couldn’t handle the fact that I was running a business successfully when he hadn’t been able to. Whatever his reasons, it became harder and harder to live with someone who showed such little regard for me.

Loneliness and lies

I was deeply lonely. Our house in Delhi was close to his parents, but far from mine. I didn’t like his friends either, a group only interested in late-night parties and gambling. And it was clear that, to my husband, I was no more than the woman raising his children and funding his lifestyle. I didn’t want to burden my parents with my marital issues; I knew they would worry.

I would take our kids to the park sometimes, and that’s where I met a woman from our building, who was there with her kid. In time, the children became good friends, and so did we. We’d end up talking while they played—about our lives, our marriages, our hopes, and our emotional needs. She shared how she was having problems in her marriage, and I felt safe to open up my heart to her as well. She always listened patiently, and I felt like she really understood what I was going through. Our husbands ended up becoming friends, too.

As much as having a close friend in the building helped, I still felt so alone in my marriage. By 2016, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression.

As I was sinking, I noticed he was changing too, in exactly the opposite way. He grew more confident, almost smug. After dinner, he began going on long walks. When I asked to join, he said he preferred walking alone. At the same time, I noticed him growing close to my building friend, even working out with her. He would turn his phone face down whenever I entered the room.

I asked him directly if there was someone else. He told me I was paranoid, and that I should go to therapy.

I believed him, but only because believing him was easier than believing my life was a lie.

The sudden end

One day in October 2018, things finally came to a head. Diwali was around the corner and the parties in Delhi were in full swing. We had spent the entire day catering events and I was exhausted, but he forced me to attend a party with him that night, promising we’d only stay an hour. Reluctantly, I agreed.

At the party, all he did was gamble with his friends. Hours passed and by the time I insisted on leaving, it was 3 am. When we reached home, I had barely gotten out of the car, when he turned it right around and went back to the party. I was livid. Wanting not to wake up to him the next day, I went to bed in the kids’ room. When he came home in the early hours, he went straight to sleep in ours.

Later that day, when I opened the safe in which we kept the cash for business expenses, it was empty. When I confronted him, he casually said he had taken the money the night before, to gamble at the party. When I got angry, he justified himself by telling me he had won and brought back the money—he’d kept it in his cupboard when he returned in the morning—as though that made what he’d done acceptable.

I was done. I told him that I didn’t feel safe with him anymore. That in 14 years of marriage, I couldn’t recall a single moment when I felt he truly had my back or our children’s.

He looked at me with a coldness I had never seen before. When I asked him to leave the room, it was like I gave him the excuse he’d been waiting for. He told me I would never see him again. And he walked out, just like that. I couldn’t believe it. Forget about me, what kind of person abandons his children after a fight?

After that, he moved into his parents’ building nearby, and would come home often to collect clothes or shoes. He treated my home like a storage unit, and my grief, like an inconvenience. My parents tried to intervene. His parents asked me to give him space. Everyone protected his comfort. No one asked how the two children were sleeping at night.

When I met with a serious accident three months later and was bedridden for months, he visited once or twice. Ten minutes each time, and mainly to pick up his stuff. Lying there, I realised the man I had built my life around would not show up even when I was incapacitated.

That’s when I finally let the marriage die in my mind. I packed up all his belongings and told him to stop bothering us.

The betrayal yet to come

I believe the universe has a way of revealing the truth to women. Sometimes through intuition. And sometimes, through another woman with incriminating screenshots.

By the time she contacted me last year, I had long wrapped up my catering business, moved back to Dubai and started a new life. After completing a course in holistic meditation therapy, I had set up my own practice, built a safe and loving home for my daughters, and made peace with everything that had happened.

I never stopped facilitating the children’s relationship with their father. He didn’t act like a parent—more like a fun uncle figure who’d show up or call them once every few months, buy them a T-shirt, and joke around. Still, I believe children deserve to have relationships with both parents, even when marriages fail.

Even though I had moved on, I never stopped wondering how my marriage had ended so abruptly, over a fight. Yes, we had serious issues, but separating from a spouse should not happen on impulse, without any warning, especially when you have kids. It had felt almost like a teenager storming out of the house.

Now I had my answer. It wasn’t the fight, it was the affair. He had been waiting for the right moment to exit, without explanation or accountability. In those messages, he told her the woman who sent me the DMs that he had left his wife for her.

But it wasn’t the infidelity that hurt the most, I was divorced and long past any attachment to him. It was the violation. He told her I was terrible in bed, immature during sex, and that my breasts weren’t as big as hers. He criticised a tiny mole under my arm. He mocked me for getting my period during our honeymoon. How could a man speak this way about a woman who had given him everything? And if I repulsed him so much, why was he sleeping with me at all? Reading those messages, I felt stripped of dignity.

What shattered me even more was my friend’s betrayal. The thought that while I was watching both of our children, because she’d tell me something had come up, she was sleeping with my husband. That while I was confiding in her, she was mocking me with him. It was unbearably painful.

When I confronted him, he first claimed my friend had manipulated him. Then he blamed me for making him feel small by providing for the family and asking him to be responsible. My friend? She had drifted apart from me over time and it was then that I understood why. She wasn’t under any obligation to pretend to be close to me anymore. She got what she wanted. ,

I refused to accept any of it. I would not let him destroy my confidence or plant self-doubt. The lies he told reflected nothing about me and everything about him.

Later, I found out that my friend had dumped him after moving to another city with her family. I informed her husband about the affair, and he left her. Karma has its way. Today, both of them are bitter, regretful, and alone.

Finally free

I cut off all contact with my ex-husband, asked him to contact me only if it’s regarding the children and through email going forward. But my daughters didn’t want to be in touch with him. My older daughter, who manages my social media page, had already read the screenshots. She wrote him a firm letter expressing her disappointment and blocked him everywhere. My younger daughter chose to do the same. I told them the choice was theirs. They were disgusted that their father had spoken about me the way he had.

He tried to win me over for a while, so he could be in touch with them. Then he sent threats, saying he wouldn’t spare me if I didn’t force the children to talk to him. Then he started sending birthday wishes. The erratic behaviour was no longer surprising.

What I feel now isn’t just peace but also clarity. I finally understand why he left without explanation. Why there was no attempt to fix anything. Why I was made to feel insane for sensing the truth.

The marriage didn’t fail because I wasn’t enough. It failed because I was married to someone who chose deception over courage, and escape over accountability. And I hope the kind of women who betray other women don’t ever find me again. I wish to only meet women like the one who said, “You should know.”