“The secret I had kept for 28 years is no longer a secret,” says the woman as she asks for help, admitting she was a “POS then for what I did.”
A woman is fearing the worst after a decades-old secret has been unearthed, threatening to “destroy” her entire family.
The OP (“Original Poster”) took to Reddit’s Relationship Advice forum this weekend to detail a betrayal that has come back to haunt her, after her son made a discovery that exposed her past indiscretions.
While she was hoping for helpful advice, most of the commenters told her to prepare herself for divorce, as nearly 30 years of lies could be hard for her husband to accept.
Read on to see what happened.
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Secrets are never forever. Me 56f, Husband 55M How do I deal with this ?
The woman began her post by saying she and her husband, to whom she’s been married for 32 years, share two children — a 27-year-old son and a 30-year-old daughter — as well as 4 grandchildren.
“I want to keep this as short as possible but I am so scared of what is going to happen to our lives now this secret has come out,” she wrote, saying that her son recently came by and she instantly knew “something was wrong.”
“I was getting very concerned at this stage never thinking that what he would tell me could destroy our lives,” she wrote, before revealing her big secret.
“My son told me that he took a ancestry DNA test because like his Dad he was interested in Geneology and he wanted his kids to know where they came from and the history,” wrote OP, saying her son learned he and the man he thought was his biological father shared “no common DNA.”
“The secret I had kept for 28 years is no longer a secret. I knew that my son could of been the product of a mistake I had made early on in my marriage but when he was born he looked so much like my husband and I that I dismissed it and convinced myself he was his,” wrote the woman, who said her one night stand with one of her husband’s friends happened when the pair were “going through a tough” time in their marriage.
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“One of my husbands friends was in our lives as he was going through a break up and we were trying to be supportive. My husband was at work and his friend and I was drinking and just talking about life, we got drunk and yes we had sex,” she wrote. “I can’t even remember it and the next morning his friend and I was mortified and vowed never to bring it up again.”
While she said she “dismissed it as a one time mistake” and never felt “tempted to cheat again,” she added that around the same time she and her husband were trying for a second child and she became pregnant. “It was such a long time ago I can not even really remember it,” she said of the affair, adding that her son wants his mother to tell his father the truth, “as he will find out soon enough through Ancestry.”
She then asked readers for advice, adding that, “I am disgusted that this is going destroy my husband, my entire family,” while admitting, “I know I was a POS back then for what I did.”
“I can not erase that, but the hurt we are all going to go through I can not fathom,” she concluded. “My husband has not found out yet but I have to tell him before he finds out.”
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Prepare for Divorce
There was plenty of advice for OP, though many also felt the same way she did — that her long-held secret will have dire consequences for her marriage and family.
“So when your husband finds out, it’s important to remember that for him it didn’t happen 30 years ago. For him it happened when he found out, and anything you say to the contrary is basically invalidating that,” read the top comment, which has 8.3K upvotes at the time this article was published.
“Any kind of credit you think you’ve built up since then isn’t real, it’s in your head only,” they added. “From your husband’s perspective, this is something that just happened. Be respectful of that.”
“That he will find out his son is not biologically his is a second atomic bomb in his universe,” read a reply to that comment, which also suggested OP read a book titled, “how to help your spouse heal from your affair.”
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Many of the commenters, however, weren’t as helpful — instead clinging to her hiding this horrible truth for nearly 30 years.
“She has kept this secret for about 28 years and would only be telling him because she’s finally been caught. There’s not just the betrayal of cheating. There’s also the betrayal of living a lie for so long,” wrote one.
Added another: “28 minutes is ‘I made a drunken mistake,’ 28 years is ‘I’ve been lying to you for 28 years.”
“28 years of seeing that same friend in his house and still cynically being a part of his life while he was unaware. Man, OP really f—ed it up,” commented someone else.
Others told her she should “mentally prepare for a divorce,” as many said any reaction he has — aside from violence — is justified.
Despite her post garnering nearly 2,000 comments, she only responded to three of them. In one, she reiterated her son used an ancestry DNA test … while, in another, she insisted her story was not fake and her son — or someone pretending to be him — hasn’t posted his side of the story elsewhere on Reddit.
The most relevant reply, however, came to someone who empathized with the woman’s “poor son” for “having to carry this secret.” Her response: “My son has told me that the DNA result is irrelevant. He is his Dad and that’s it as far as he is concerned.”
What do you think?
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