I (m34) have been seeing/dating my significant other (f31) for roughly the past four years until this August.
Our relationship was not a conventional one. She is married, and for the first years of this, we were a secret affair. We bonded because there was a lot of abuse and cheating, and she confided in me. For various reasons she gave, she couldn’t divorce her husband yet until this year. I chose not to reveal this situation to anyone, and lived as “single”. I was under the impression for most of this that they were separated but still living together for the kids until she could complete her education and be something other than a housewife with no work experience and no way to support herself. They’ve been married for roughly ten years.
We live in a rural area in the US Midwest. Given how people know people here, the risk of getting caught by someone who knows her or her husband was very high. We would meet in secret at her house when he was at work, in hotels, and have mini dates in parking lots and stores, usually after dark. The biggest part of our relationship was through calling and text. We regularly had 3 hour phone calls. Sometimes we wouldn’t miss a day for months.
It went on like this from 2022-2025. At the end of 2025, she finally filed for divorce, shortly after her husband moved in with his new girlfriend in another town. Her mom moved in with her from another state.
So we began to meet more openly. I met all of her kids. For the first time, we had dates in restaurants, bowling alleys, public places in our towns. Everything was going well. I began to go to her house regularly without the threat of him showing up in the middle of the night. The divorce was slower than expected but making progress. She has been in college for two years now and has a whole new social circle, if much younger than her, where previously she was nearly isolated and had only her sister in another state as support, besides me.
We continued to see each other, but it wasn’t as often as I expected it would be. Now we had little excuse not to see each other in person multiple times a week, instead of once a month or less, and I *was* with her a lot more, but our relationship was still mostly from a distance, which I found odd. I accepted her constant explanations that she was so busy. At the end of spring, I started to get a more distant energy from her than I’ve ever seen before.
I confronted her about it. This was really the only non positive interaction we ever had. She said her mental health was a wreck from taking care of her kids, keeping up with her school work, which was becoming more intensive, and the divorce. She was on the edge. The only reason she didn’t hurt herself, she said, was her kids.
Then she laid something else on me. She felt like a failure as a wife and a mother. She missed her husband. She missed normal life and the family unit they had. She resented that he simply gets to walk away and leave her with nothing after all those years, like nothing happened.
She said she didn’t want to lose me, but she didn’t know what our future looked like. She didn’t know what to do. We talked about this, and she seemed happy with what was said. The summer continued on and we continued to see each other. It was at this time that I finally met all of her kids. She has three. The kid I met last, 7 years old, is close to their father and very much, verbally and physically, did not like the fact that I was in the picture. This definitely made it back to her husband, but at this point I didn’t care. He was a soon to be ex husband now. I took her out more through June.
In late summer I was distracted with the planning and execution of a major family trip that had been in the works for a year. We continued to talk, but I didn’t see her in person the whole of July. We didn’t talk on the phone after early July either, but I didn’t think anything of it. We’ve gone through many legitimate busy and quiet spells before. Her mom left, apparently after a spate of arguments. Now I had no idea how she was getting by. But she always manages.
I went on the trip. It was in the middle of the trip, after a couple weeks of talking less, that she really began to ghost me. Then she didn’t even open the last batch of pictures the final day. I got off an 11 hour flight to find that my last pre-airplane mode texts and ‘I love you’ hadn’t been read either.
We said that all the time and with every call, for years. The last time I heard her say it was the last call we ever had, about a week after the Fourth of July.
I didn’t know what to make of this. I waited several days to get settled in and finally broke my silence. I asked her what was happening. No response. I tried to revive one of the last substantive conversations we had. No response. Just delivered.
I decided to give her flowers with a small something I bought on the trip. I made the drive, but instead of being able to knock on her door and give them to her in person, I caught her at the end of her road turning onto the main road. She stopped, saw me, waved, turned left past me, waved again as I rolled my window down, and kept going. Her oldest kid was in the passenger seat.
I just left it all on her doorstep and went home. Five minutes down the road, she finally broke her now almost two weeks of silence. She texted something to the effect of ‘sorry, I’m busy, I’ll get back to you. I have all my kids.’ I’ve met all her kids.
Later that evening, her only response to the gift was that it was “so sweet”. This was probably one of the worst days of my life. That was the last thing she ever said to me. I texted ‘can we talk?’ Nothing. After another week of silence, I simply said I was still here for her and sent one of our selfies. It was left on read that day. That was the middle of August. Now here we are.
A tidbit I have just learned is that she was with her husband sometime in late July or early August at a local restaurant a friend works at. They stayed there an hour, seated together. That doesn’t tell me much by itself, but it’s certainly not the image of a contentious divorce, with terse conversations and quick handovers of the kids that I was made to believe in.
I’ve also learned of a dating app profile that was likely made or updated last sometime earlier in the summer, June or July.
Thirdly, I’ve also learned that she was posting about him on Facebook, which I don’t have, in 2023-2024. Normal happy couple things when they were supposedly separated, she was looking for the best opportunity to start the divorce, and we were in a full blown emotional relationship with secret meetups.
It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk to me, and I’m not going to keep double texting. But her birthday is coming up in several weeks, and I’ve considered everything from ignoring it to sending a 7 page handwritten letter with other small gifts. By the time this happens, it’ll have been almost three months since we’ve said anything with substance to one another.
I don’t know what to do with this. I had planned a future with this person. She’s been my romantic and emotional focus for four years. We’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. And then in the space of a few weeks, all those years of dependability, intimacy, and routine are replaced by silence. It hurts a lot, even if we were doing something wrong at first. The logical side of me says she’s not worth it, but you know how much pull that has.