Syda Productions/Shutterstock, @aliyajmari/Twitter
September 26, 2021, 7:02 am
There are some marriage issues that cannot be solved by talking to the internet about them and this is a story about one of those problems. The anonymous woman who shared it posted her conflict with her husband and it was soon screenshot and shared all over Twitter, probably because it’s so awful it’s almost funny. Almost.
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The screenshot has gone viral several times over, but the earliest version on Twitter seems to have come from user @aliyajmari.
The anonymous OP writes, “Three months ago, the woman who was having an affair with my husband died suddenly from an accident. I found out about the affair only two days after her funeral. I thought she was simply a co worker and I was wondering why my husband was so disturbed and emotional. He quit his job saying it was too traumatic to go back to work. She was in the early weeks of pregnancy when she died and my husband doesn’t know whether he or the husband was the father. So on top of everything he’s also grieving for a baby that may or may not be his.”
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I know you want the next thing she says to be “and I’m leaving him,” but unfortunately it didn’t go that way.
“I find it extremely difficult to be emotionally supportive when he wakes up at 3 am crying and trembling yet I don’t have the heart to yell at him like I want to,” she continued. “He says she’s dead so there’s no reason for me to feel jealous or threatened and asks for my understanding as he grieves. We’ve barely talked these last few weeks because I don’t know how to respond to my husband when he cries and says he misses her and wishes she were here., then also how much he loves and that he never intended to leave me.”
“I asked him to visit a marriage therapist together and he said he’s ‘not ready’ to work on our marriage, and thinks he needs to see a grief therapist instead. Do I need to give him time to mourn the loss of his mistress? Or should I demand he focus on our marriage?”
Honey, what marriage are you even talking about! This is a divorce-worthy offense—at least according to most of the women responding to this story.
This came across my timeline along with this tweet. If y’all don’t free y’all selves from these unnecessary relationships and find true happiness. pic.twitter.com/cocbKXopR3
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(@breamstream) September 19, 2021
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There were also a bunch of men in the comments defending the guy and saying that if she leaves him now, she’s not really a good wife. This is kind of true because she should not be this man’s wife at all, good or bad. Free yourself, ma’am!
It was finally posted in the comments that this email was sent into Dear Prudie, the advice column, in 2013. She did try to offer some advice, so this is what the professional said:
You cannot impose a schedule on someone else’s grief. So I think you should let your husband fully experience his—alone. If you are being asked to be an understanding source of solace while he mourns the loss of his mistress, a woman who was possibly the mother of his child, then that is an emotional burden that’s simply outside the bounds of what one spouse can ask of another. He’s told you flat out he can’t work on his marriage because he’s too torn up about the death of the woman he loved.
So I think you should tell him to move out while you each figure out what you want out of your marriage and life. In addition, I hope he is independently wealthy, or has fantastically in-demand professional skills, because quitting his job over her death indicates he’s gone off the deep end.
I can’t imagine how he’s going to explain that departure to potential employers. Of course you’re reeling over these events, so if he won’t see a counselor with you, consider going alone. And you’ve left us all wondering: Does the grieving widower have any idea what his wife was up to?
What’s crazy is that it’s almost ten years later, and we have no idea what happened to this couple. Are they still together? Did he ever work again? And yeah, what happened to the widower??
*First Published: September 26, 2021, 7:02 am
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