“Two years ago I discovered my wife was having an affair with a significantly younger woman…”

Dear Rosie,

I wondered if this perspective on the experience of affairs and divorce might be an interesting one that others might relate to. I live locally to you and follow your Instagram. I find it reassuring to read of your own and others experiences so thought you might find this content interesting.

Two years ago, I discovered my wife was having an affair with a significantly younger woman, a discovery that prompted a prolonged period of deep visceral heartbreak and loss of self worth. But as I navigated this complex aftermath, I noticed a silence where there should have been outrage.

In the heterosexual world, the social reactions to the stereotype of older married man and younger woman are written clearly: we recognise the ‘midlife crisis,’ the ‘dirty old man,’ the ‘cradle snatcher.’ There is typically a communal rallying, a vilification and a shielding of the cheated on wife. But in the context of a lesbian marriage, the script is somehow rewritten as a tragic love story. Society strips away the possibility of a woman being self-serving or shallow; instead, they reach for an emotional excuse. They believe that women only stray for love, or out of neglect.

By a large part of my local community, I was met not with outrage, but with the cutting phrase of: ‘we don’t know what went on behind closed doors.’ Or ‘sometimes people just fall out of love’. Phrases that can put the victim on trial, suggesting that my wife’s choices must have been a moral reaction to some hidden failure of mine. Two years later, I can see the shoots of a new life that I am proud of but I wonder: is it time we stop justifying female infidelity and start seeing it for the raw, human betrayal it actually is?