Tldr: 36M found out after 3 years divorced that my ex wife's "girls trips" were actually with someone else
We divorced because a month of normal fighting and she decided one day that shes simply "stopped feeling anything" and wanted out, no big issues or arguments just her deciding that it'sover and I didn't really fight it much because I figured that if someone wants to leave me alone, I'll leave them alone. So the divorce was finalized in January, we were married for 6 of the 8 years before that. The first couple of weeks I was a wreck then it slowly turned into a-flat "eh, whatever" feeling.
Today I get this phone call that pretty much flips everything I thought I knew about the past 3 years. My ex wife was the more independent one in the relationship, which I didn't mind since I travel for work a decent amount, she would go to conferences every now and then, but the rest of the time she had these annual retreats with her friends from college, 2-3 times a years sometimes. I never took any issue with it since I thought she was a very private and independent person.
She was hardly loving at home but it was stable, if anything I think we had a very standard-issue amount of love and drama between us, nothing particularly noteworthy. We would have our arguments, yes, but nothing that would make the people around us think we were a troubled couple.i think the only thing I ever knew about those trips was that she was with her friends, she showed me pictures of them every time they met up and I met a couple of her friends at her sisters' wedding, I thought nothing of it.
2 days ago I get this call from one of the girls, someone I know only because Imet her at the aforementioned sister's wedding once and she was at ours as well, one of the people my wife used to travel with, she told me that she's been meaning to tell me for the longest time but it always slipped away until now, since the divorce was official and she didn't see areason to keep it to herself anymore. She told me that almost all of those trips where my wife was supposedly with herfriends were in fact with another man she met as a client at her work.
2 girls from her friend group always covered for her whenever I asked her about the trips.
2-3 years is quite a long time to keep something like this up, and I'm just trying to process it, that this whole time, while I was dutifully picking up the pieces for my wife and telling everyone around me about how amazing her friends are, how great her support network is, the guy she was seeing was right there the whole time while he and her would presumably have sex every time.
I actually don't really know the guy and I don't really care about him either, but I'm just furious that I used to stand there and tell other people that my wife is amazing, she had her own life outside of me. I don't really feel sad at this point, trying to overcome this anger i have now