Wife Cheated and Said It Was “Just a Friend” I Divorced Her; She Came Back Begging Me to…

My wife thought cheating was fun. She came back to me begging for help. I, a 30-year-old male, and my wife, a 27-year-old female, have been married for four years. We got married young, or at least she was pretty young, but it felt right at the time. We dated for about a year and some months, and that was enough for us to know we were meant to be (or so I thought). Though with recent developments, I’m not sure if we truly were.

I have a solid job. My brothers and I operate a jewelry business together. We built it from nothing and made it very profitable, which is always something to be proud of. I know business with family can be hard, but for us, it’s been a dream. We’ve never been the kind of siblings to butt heads constantly, so that has helped.

On the other hand, my wife opened a cute café where people could come to get pastries, drink coffee, and read books. She’s always been big on books and proudly makes reading her personality. Those sorts of people annoyed the crap out of me before I met her, but yeah, I’m a hypocrite. Bite me. To be honest, I was pretty enthralled with the idea because I wanted to support her. I helped her pay the rent for the café, which is in a swanky part of town. It’s expensive, but the business is profitable without the rent to worry about, and that was enough to put a smile on my face.

Now, I think that’s the background you need. Here’s where the actual story starts.

The Man Who Became The Paramour

I can’t remember exactly when, but I think it was around March that she came to tell me about a new man who showed up at the café. According to her, he was very handsome. I was secure and found that we could objectively talk about someone’s attractiveness without it becoming an issue. However, there was something different about the way she talked about this guy. Supposedly, he seemed like the kind of masculine hero that she reads about in the smutty romance novels that women like to read. Yes, she’s into those kinds of books too, as all book talk type women seem to be. I’ll never get it because it seems to be the cheesiest form of romance that gets them going.

Anyway, she went on about this guy before it ended, but I’ll admit that the words she chose were almost like how she would talk about the cold Russian hitman who fell for some woman in the laundry room of their apartment building. No, I didn’t make that up; it’s from an actual book she finds interesting.

That was it for the day, but she let me know he came in the next day and they spoke at length. According to her, he was from Ukraine and used to work as a car dealer but decided to come to the United States for a better life. It was taking him some time to get back on his feet and find work at nearby dealerships because that’s what he knew best. I learned in about ten minutes that he was tall, blonde, handsome, dressed well, and spoke with an accent. Apparently, he loved to read books set in the Wild West and was a big fan of fantasy like “The Lord of the Rings.”

She always tells me a lot about her café’s patrons, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary, but once again, her flowery verbiage made it seem like she was almost fetishizing him. At some point, he wasn’t novel to her anymore, so she stopped talking about him at length. It felt better knowing he didn’t seem worthy of long spiels every evening.

I even popped into her café one afternoon to bring her lunch and saw a guy sitting in the corner who fit the exact description. I was 100% sure it was him. Admittedly, he was a handsome guy. His name was Aleksander, according to her.

Now, here’s where things start to get wild.

Another Man Bought My Wife Flowers!

One night, she arrived home with a goofy smile on her face. I asked her what was up. She said Aleksander had walked her home, and they talked a lot about books along the way. She admitted he asked her out on a date, but she informed him she was married and couldn’t. She said he was really apologetic, held her hand tenderly, said goodnight, and left.

I remember asking her why that made her smile so and her response was, “It’s like something out of a book.” That part pissed me off because it was like she was romanticizing every interaction with Aleksander. I knew, since he was a patron of her café, they would keep interacting almost daily. I didn’t want to seem insecure, and she could have decided to tell him she didn’t have a man, so I felt no need to talk about it despite feeling a certain way. I thought I just had to get over my feelings.

It eventually became evident this wasn’t the case when my wife came home about a week later with a bouquet of flowers she promptly put into a vase. According to her, it was a gift from Aleksander. He bought a bunch for a coworker’s birthday and thought it’d be nice to get her some because he always saw how hard she worked. I felt my head get hot as she said that because she tried to paint the situation like she was a schoolgirl who didn’t understand when someone liked her.

I asked her straight up if she could tell Aleksander really liked her. She said it was obvious, especially after he asked her out, but she believed the flowers were just a friendly thing. That baffled me because if you’re a guy, you don’t get flowers for a girl that rebuffed you, as a friendly thing, especially if she was married. He was still trying to get in her pants. He wasn’t shy with his advances, so I knew he wasn’t stopping anytime soon.

My Wife Went on a Date With Another Man!

I was right because two days later, my wife came home relatively later than usual, almost two hours later, without telling me she’d be late. This wasn’t the first time she had come home late, so I called her twice, which weren’t answered, before deciding to give it time. But before I could call a third time, she showed up at home in a distinctly bubbly mood.

“You won’t believe the evening I had,” was the first thing out of her mouth before she went into a spiel about how she showed Aleksander the museum and then got a slice of American pizza because he had never had it before and always saw it in the movies. Then they walked and talked and ate pizza and other crap I didn’t care about, but I let her finish. When she was done, I asked, “Are you attracted to him?”

She acted shocked and offended, saying she wasn’t, and the only person she was attracted to, in that way, was me. She said she was just trying to welcome someone who was in an unfamiliar country with no friends or close people to show him around. I wasn’t convinced, so I told her straight up to stop seeing Aleksander. That caused a big fight, unsurprisingly. She talked about how I was being insecure, how there was nothing there, how I should stop feeling threatened, and more nonsense. I was pissed but kept my wits and temper in check. I stood my ground, telling her it was fair if Aleksander came by the café as a customer, but nothing beyond that.

I told her to imagine what she would do in my shoes if some Ukrainian girl came to buy a bracelet and I started taking her around town. According to her, she’d understand, but we all know that’s a lie. Long story short, I slept on the couch, no surprise there, but the good thing is I stopped hearing about Aleksander and all his drama, which was good for my mental health.

I Saw The Man & My Wife Walking Arm-in-Arm

I became suspicious when I walked into my wife’s café one afternoon and she wasn’t there. Neither was Aleksander, though I couldn’t be sure he’d be there at that time anyway. It meant a lot that she wasn’t there because that was unusual. I thought of sticking around until she came back or asking an employee where she had gone, but I decided not to make a big deal of it. When I was getting back into my car from across the street, I saw her and Aleksander coming up the street, arms interlocked. It took every ounce of strength not to run across the street, beat the crap out of the guy, and cuss her out, but somehow I stayed in the car, watched them walk into the café, and drove off.

That happened yesterday, and I’ve struggled to process it. I wanted to confront her as soon as she got home, but there’s a lot of power in knowing something the other person doesn’t. It makes it easier to see through other lies. I was now my own private investigator… Case in point, when she got back home, I asked about her day, and she described a plain day without mentioning going somewhere with Aleksander.

So this is why I’m here. Should I confront her straight up or try to find out more of the truth before that point? I’m tending towards the latter because I think something is going on under behind my back, and confronting her might result in all chances of finding the truth dissolving.

Reddit’er reaction:

Your wife’s coffee shop sounds adorable, a haven for book lovers and caffeine addicts alike. Then enter Aleksander, the Ukrainian heartthrob, straight out of a romance novel—tall, handsome, and with an accent. But hold up, interlocking arms and sneaky pizza dates? This sounds more like a plot twist than a mere friendship. It’s time to channel your inner detective. Gather all the clues, and when you’re ready, lay them out on the table like a seasoned pro. Because, my friend, the truth will set you free—or at least, give you a clearer picture of what’s really going on in this real-life romance drama.

Well, I’m back with a pretty big update. Let’s talk about it because I found out a lot. It took me a bit to gain the courage, but I decided at a point that I had to find out the truth, no matter what it would cost. I have never been the kind of person to believe in checking your partner’s phone, but in this case, I knew I had to put aside whatever moral conundrums I had and just do it. So, I did it at the first chance that I got, which was while she was asleep.

Retrieving Text Messages and WhatsApp Messaging

Unsurprisingly, she had Aleksander in her messaging app, and they had been talking a lot. It was WhatsApp, so it was easy for me to export the entire conversation to a text file, which I sent to my phone from her phone. I made sure to delete the evidence, of course. I looked through her gallery and found a few pictures of them smiling together in public places but nothing extra incriminating. I sent those to my phone too and deleted the evidence again. That took me about five minutes to do all of that, and I put her phone back where it belonged.

After that, I did all the reading on my phone, where it was a lot less suspicious in case she woke up suddenly. Boy, did I see things that made my head spin. Here’s a transcript of one part of the conversation that you might find as appalling as I did. It came after a point where they were discussing some book that my wife had recommended to him. Let’s call my wife Missy instead of her actual name.

It drove me insane! It was 2 a.m., and I left the house to go on a walk because I couldn’t stay beside her at that point. I would have done something crazy; I was almost sure of it. I felt like I walked around the town aimlessly for five hours, but by the time I got back, it was only 3:10 a.m. She was still sleeping.

Do you know what it is like to find out you’re being cheated on and then find out your wife is ridiculing you by actually enjoying doing everything behind your back? She was basically reveling in my ignorance of the situation, and that was the part that drove me over the edge—not that the cheating was going to be forgiven anyway.

When I got back, she was still sleeping, so I grabbed her phone, jumped to that part of her conversation with Aleksander, and took a video of it on her phone. I needed to make it very clear that there was no doctoring going on here. It was clear that Missy felt like she was living out one of her stupid books, but it was absolutely despicable that I had to be a victim in all of it. She has no idea that I know this, but the divorce is cooking up. There’s really no other way for this to go. I also need to see her go down. I need to see Aleksander go down too. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I need both of them to hurt, and I need them to hurt badly.

It’s been done, and it was glorious. This is the final saga of the Ukrainian man, Aleksander, and the book-loving treacherous cheating wife Missy. They had no idea they should have been a lot more worried about me than they were.

I Served My Wife Divorce Papers

Let me rush through the boring parts of the story. Missy went to work one day, and I parked across the street in an Uber. I watched as the process server walked into the cafe and handed her the divorce papers in a very public manner. That was very pleasing, and after that, we drove off. I went to work, had a great day, and there wasn’t a single message or missed call from Missy by the end, which was very pleasing to me. She knew she had been found out, and there wasn’t anything begging was going to do—at least that’s how I saw it.

Well, that night, she came back crying rivers, snot pouring out of her nose. She looked like an absolute wreck. Honestly, I felt a twinge of sadness seeing her like that—blame it on the fragments of love that were left—but it didn’t last long. She kept asking what she did wrong. “Was it Aleksander? Was it Aleksander?” I realized she didn’t know how much I knew, and she must have tried to figure out if she had leaks in her operation before. She couldn’t figure out what I knew.

I couldn’t tell whether it was better to tell her I knew about Aleksander or not, but in the end, I made a promise. I told her I saw her and Aleksander walking arm-in-arm that day, and I had been holding it in. But I didn’t let her in on anything else. At that point, she suddenly got emboldened and started half-begging, half-calling me stupid. According to her, there was no reason to divorce her over that. Yes, she was wrong for still seeing him, but no, there was nothing happening between them, and I was being insecure. I was being jealous. She couldn’t tell whether to grovel or insult me, apparently.

In the end, I told her to get out of my house, which she did. Fast forward to the actual divorce phase—that part was loads of fun for me. I have a lot more money than her, which in a divorce means there’s a lot more to lose, but it also means there’s a lot more to spend on good lawyers, which I made sure to do. When you get a divorce, get a good lawyer. I promise you all that it is worth it because not only did I have a lot of pictures of the two of them after a point where I had mentioned my concerns about it, but I had the text messages to clearly demonstrate the infidelity. On top of that, my rock star of a lawyer was able to point out transactions in our joint account that seemed to have been spent on Aleksander. He aligned the dates on some transactions with dates in the entire text message transcript where he thanked her for certain things, and it became very clear that she was spending our money on her Ukrainian lover boy. The lawyer did good work of painting her like a gold digger too, which was fun to watch for me.

She fought her best fight, but honestly, there was nothing bad to point out about me. I am not a perfect guy, but I definitely don’t have any divorce-worthy flaws. By the time the divorce was over, I really had everything that I needed. I kept my house, I kept my car, and because of that pretty notable infidelity and the fact that I had set her up with a money-making venture, there was no alimony to be had. She did get to keep the car that I bought for her. I didn’t feel I needed to stress myself about that, and it made it easier to take what I took when she didn’t leave the divorce entirely empty-handed.

Punching My Wife’s Lover

Now, this is my favorite part. It was hard for me to get back at Aleksander. It was very hard. But one day, he was walking out of the cafe, and I followed him down the road and around the corner. I called his attention, introduced myself, and slugged him square in the jaw. It hurt like crazy, but I busted his lip and knocked him to the ground with it, and he looked very shocked. I wasn’t looking for a street fight, but I would have taken one if it came. I think he realized he had no moral high ground on this one because he stood up and left after that. It felt good. I wish I could have done more because he knew he was messing with a married woman, but that was enough for me and probably all I could have realistically gotten without an assault charge.

And then Missy—you know that rent that I was paying for her? It was due again, and because she had her cafe in such a nice part of town, it was expensive. It was usually due on May 1st, but it was only towards the end of May that she came to me crying on the phone, saying that she needed to pay the rent for the cafe badly and she didn’t have the money for it. She begged and begged and begged, but I told her to sell the car to get the funds for it before I hung up the phone. She called several times throughout that week, but I didn’t pick up the phone. Spoiler: I found out she sold the car when she called me to start cursing me out. She said it was evil that I couldn’t help her at her very lowest. I told her it was evil to think that it was fun and exciting to cheat on me. She couldn’t say anything to that.

I’m waiting for May next year to see how she struggles with rent. If the gods have their way, she’ll lose the cafe too, especially without access to my bookkeeper any longer. It’s been sweet, honestly. I’m newly single with a lot of money and a lot of satisfaction. I won’t say that the divorce, betrayal, and infidelity didn’t hurt like hell because they did, but you can only move forward, right? That’s what I’m going to do.

Thanks to you all for sticking around and for your words of encouragement and advice. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, I’ll never have to write a post again. ~ Reddit User