TL;DR – found out my long distance ex of 2 years was married the whole time and disappeared offline after getting pregnant with another kid to her husband. Should I tell the husband she’s been cheating on him for years? Her having kids is the only thing stopping me currently as I don’t want them to have a broken home.
EDIT: I realise that I might not have been clear in what the relationship was like. We called and video called often, it was very flirty and sexual. We exchanged photos and videos and she would often say how she loves me and wants to be together but that it was difficult with Covid and me being in university at the time so we would have to wait until an “appropriate time”. It was as much of a relationship as it could be in an online setting. Also, this isn’t for some personal revenge or to hurt her back, if it was I would’ve told everyone she knew instantly when I found out. While I was very hurt and betrayed over the time she took from me and leading me on, this is about the husband and the children and whether it would be better for them to know or not. I also understand that this is not the same as a full blown irl relationship but a married woman telling someone else that she loves them for 2+ years, sending sexual photos and videos while also having sexual video calls with them is definitely cheating on her husband.
During Covid and lockdown I (M23) met my ex (F33) (gonna give her the random name Sarah for this) in an online situation which I know that some people will disregard as not being a genuine thing and that’s fine whatever. But it was during lockdown so I was stuck inside most days and I’d just gone through two very shitty relationships of people that were local, I wasn’t planning on anything online at all but we just clicked and stayed talking for a while.
Anyway, Sarah and I ended up being a ‘thing’ for about two years and we both seemed pretty committed to the idea of meeting up and being a genuine part of each other’s lives, we would talk for hours all day, nearly every day and she had kids that she would tell me about all the time and I even played Xbox with them sometimes so they knew I existed too which is what makes it all a bit more confusing with what did eventually happen.
Now, there have always been some unusual parts about the whole situation which at the time I did brush off as I was in a pretty bad place mentally and it was lockdown so I think I subconsciously wanted to tell myself things were ok just so I didn’t have the possibility of being lonely. For starters, I was 19 when I met Sarah and she was a 30 year old, parent of two that she didn’t initially tell me about having kids until a couple of months after we started talking but her having kids didn’t bother me it was more the secrecy of it all at first. She would also be very quiet on weekends and less active compared to weekdays where she was never offline and always talking to her friends and I. She also tried to keep her friends on there separate from me as she felt there would be drama as some of them didn’t like me for some unspecified reason despite me never speaking to them.
After about two and a half years of being a thing and making all these plans, things got a bit bumpy and we would talk less and this went on for a few weeks but we just put it down to being busy and her getting a new job that required her to be in an office. We still talked when we could though and that was still everyday just not as much and we never steered from being a ‘thing’
Then one day she just vanished without a word, never replied to any of my messages, never came back online again. Just nothing at all. So I start panicking and thinking “oh my god has something happened to her? Is she dead?” which I feel is understandable considering she had disappeared without a word. A few weeks go by and I still hear nothing, I’ve checked obituaries and things where I had her as a friend elsewhere to see if she’d been on and nothing. It was kind of driving me crazy not knowing what happened to her at all then one day I remembered she had a Facebook account which I had never had an account myself, so I decided to make one and search her name.
I found her Facebook account and that also led to me finding out just what had happened. It turned out that Sarah had still been married the entire time and her husband worked at some oil place that kept him away from the home in the week. Not only did I find out that she was still married it turned out that the reason she did just disappear one day was because she had become pregnant with another child of his.
I was so angry and hurt that she had happily wasted two+ years of my life for her own entertainment and I tried contacting her to tell her I knew what she had done and that she’d been a liar the whole time to no response. Then a few months later, she’s back online and doesn’t respond to a single thing I’ve said and she starts going about her life like she owed me nothing, no apology, no real explanation. I had to confront her about it when she was online after a year of being gone and all I got was more lies and self pitying answers.
I’m torn on whether or not I should tell her husband that she had been cheating online for years and leading me on into being a part of it unknowingly and honestly I think I probably wasn’t the only person she did it with considering how she kept me separate from people and how easy it seemed to be for her to keep up a lie. The only thing that’s stopped me telling him is her kids as I don’t know if it’s fair for their home to be potentially broken up over something that they didn’t do.
So, should I tell her husband?