About a year and a half ago, my wife — whom I’ve been married to for twenty years — had an affair. It took me about six months to actually figure out what was going on.

I’m in my forties. She is two years younger than me. And I will say this plainly: this was the last thing I saw coming

Our sex life was not bad at all, and I was working with a multinational company right from the moment I graduated from the University of Lagos. The company took us from Nigeria right after we got married, first to Dubai, then to Malaysia, before I was transferred to the American branch

I don’t know where she met the guy or how till tomorrow. We have three children, and I was working and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum. We were going on two vacations a year. A mini vacation for our annual wedding anniversary, which lasts for between five days and one week, and a family vacation every summer, which lasts for up to a month for the entire family

It was when we moved to the USA, and the children were already teenagers, that my wife, who was thirty-eight years old at the time, decided to take up a skill so that she could keep herself busy whenever I was at work and the children were in school. She took up nursing, and even though we didn’t need the money, I understand why she needed to occupy herself with something as meaningful as that

We attend a good church, and we have built a family that is deeply defined by our faith. The children are incredibly well-behaved. Our first daughter started playing a motherly role to the younger ones as soon as she turned thirteen. She helped in preparing her younger ones for school, church, watches over them at the park, even while we were present, and generally acts like the boss lady from that age.

We all call her boss lady till today as a result of that.

Sexually, I was available. My job was a strict nine-to-five affair. I neither clubbed nor partied. I was always the go all the way guy in bed, and love making for us was always dynamic. We can do a quickie and then do the hour-long slow and delectable slow burner. I believed we were soul mates, and I invested in the world of joy I was building with her with all my being.

Until I discovered a recording. An audio recording of a conversation between my wife and her lover on the answering machine one evening, right after I arrived home from work.

My first son was fourteen at this time, and he was crushing on a classmate. I didn’t allow him to have a mobile phone at that age because I wanted to monitor his use of devices. If he needed to make a call or receive a call, he was permitted to use the landline in the house. The landline has an answering machine attached to it, and it has the option of recording conversations in case you want to listen to them later.

My son set it to autorecord so that he could listen to the voice of his crush long after they had gotten off the call with each other. Sometimes he would play it, and all of us would listen and poke fun at him.

My wife and I have had access to each other’s phones right from when we got married. She was twenty-five, and I was twenty-seven at the time, and since then, we have built a life that is knitted together in every way.

So she used the landline to receive her lover’s call earlier that day, not knowing that the recorder was automatically recording. She was off to church for choir rehearsals that evening when I got home from work. I saw the recorder’s light blinking, and I pressed play. I was expecting to hear my son and his crush’s teen conversation, but discovered that it was my wife’s voice and that of a strange man whom she had been sleeping with for over a year.

The conversation was so intense that it led to my wife having phone sex with him, and both of them orgasmed on the call.

The guy started with “Do you remember when we were in the room in the South Bronx, your friend’s house. The moment I touched you, you just looked at me and melted in my arms. Do you remember that day at the back of my BMW, you rode me so eagerly, I almost died of pleasure. Do you remember that day behind the horse’s stable at the country club…

My wife replied to each sentence with her own, “Do you remember the story…” and from there they began to say things like “You are making me wet and I am so hard and BAM they were both grunting and moaning…”

I took out the tape and replaced it with another. I was shocked at my own calmness, but I was calm.

I waited until the weekend before bringing up the topic. I didn’t want to rush into a conversation that i knew would likely destroy our family. I knew it had to happen. i also knew it would be intense because my wife is my wife and i know how defensive and manipulative she could be when she wanted me to do something or when she wants to have her way on any issue.

I felt it was better to take her out to dinner and have the discussion in public where tempers would be restrained by the presence of other people.

I told her I knew she was having an affair.

She at first looked as if i was being silly, then she tried to laugh it off and then she got angry that I found out. “What you were looking for, you have found” that sort of thing. She was very sure she covered her tracks and unless i hired a private detective to investigate her, there was no way I could have known. She said she just wanted to have a things that belongs only to her to do for herself and had no intention of hurting me.

She said she wished i didn’t find out. It was just fun by the side. She said she was careful, there was no risk to me at all because the guy was selected by her, he has a good job, does not do drugs, is in his thirties, not married and sleeps only with her. So there is no fear of Sexually Transmitted Disease or infection. She said he was just something different, like a pet project that she was doing to destress and catch some fun while she still could.

Everything she said made sense to her. She even asked me why I didn’t just ignore it when i found out instead of ruining things by bringing it up.

It was all my fault in her eyes.

The biggest problem with affairs is that they rob a couple of a future.

The minute erotic energy gets directed elsewhere, something fundamental breaks. The attachment that holds two people together fractures. And in my case, it didn’t help that my wife was completely unable to honestly disclose who it was or how it happened or how many times it happened or if it would stop happening.

She oscillated between gaslighting me — telling me I was overreacting — and minimizing the affair whenever that didn’t work. What it felt like, in practice, was that she was trying to negotiate a new deal: keep the marriage, but redefine its terms.

She wanted to continue our trips, our shared meals, our intellectual companionship , our family, our amazing sex life and dreams— but she also wanted to keep her pet project for as long as she could before the guy moves on or maybe until she meets another interesting guy who has a job, a clean bill of health and is into married women and this, she emphasized, would be none of my business.

Finding out your spouse is cheating on you feels a lot like discovering a business partner is being unethical. There’s disbelief, then anger, then a kind of cold clarity.

My terms were simple: end the affair, go to counseling, and try to rebuild intimacy. Which, in practical terms, meant re-dating each other from scratch.

The answer was no.

She had feelings for the other man. She didn’t want a therapist involved. And she suggested that we would “figure it out like adults,” potentially in the form of an open relationship.

One thing I’ve come to understand is that not all affairs are equal. Lumping everything into the category of “cheating” isn’t very useful.

Watching porn is not the same as having an affair — ditto for going to a strip club.

A one-night lapse at a high school reunion is not the same as a sustained emotional and physical relationship involving hotels, secrecy, and ongoing investment.

Broadly speaking, affairs, which have a repeat quality to them, fall into two categories.

The first is what I would call a replacement affair. This is when someone is looking to exit the marriage and find a new partner. There’s a strategy to it. It may not be moral, but it’s understandable. In some cases — especially in abusive situations — it’s even a path to survival. It is most often used by women in abusive relationships.

Replacement affairs typically begin when one spouse is deeply unhappy in the marriage. Their appeal lies in the hope that falling in love again might offer an escape — or even a substitute — for that unhappiness.

The second is what I would call an experiential affair. This is about stimulation. Novelty. Dopamine. The person has no intention of leaving their marriage — they just want something more, something different, on the side.

Experiential affairs are often born out of boredom. The thrill of falling in love again lets the cheating partner rediscover a version of themselves they thought time had taken away. More often than not, they are a rebellion against the monotony of marriage and the routine of daily life. Older women can be particularly vulnerable to this dynamic, as can younger men weighed down by too much family responsibility.

The first is a strategy. The second is a fantasy.

My wife’s situation falls squarely into the second category. There is no future there. It’s a closed loop designed for emotional and sexual stimulation.

And that creates an unsolvable problem: she wants a relationship without commitment from her other lover, and commitment, family, and intimacy without a relationship from me.

When the Game Changes

Within a month of discovering my wife’s affair, something unexpected happened. As I was trying to cope with the shock and the pain, someone very special from my teenage years reappeared in my life. What began as a simple exchange — messages, memories, a kind of mutual consolation — gradually deepened.

That correspondence led to a meeting. And from there, it quickly turned into a love affair of my own.

She made me extremely happy. The relationship was passionate, intimate, and alive in a way I hadn’t experienced in decades. For the first time in a very long while, I found myself pulled back into the kind of romance I thought belonged only to youth — the intensity, the anticipation, the feeling of being completely present with someone again.

But there was a fundamental difference. My affair fell into the first category. I wasn’t looking for stimulation — I was looking for safety. A replacement. A way out of what increasingly felt like an abusive dynamic.

It’s a hard thing to accept, but being married to someone caught in an experiential affair can feel a lot like being married to a drug addict or an alcoholic. You may still love them on some level, but what they’re doing is so self-destructive — and so corrosive to the marriage — that staying begins to hurt more than leaving.

At some point, out of self-preservation, you’re forced to make a choice: to let them go, even knowing it may lead them further down that path. And yes, it does hurt to let someone you love go, even when their behavior is abusive and has been for decades.

Interestingly, my wife went berserk when she discovered my affair.

We came to Nigeria to attend the wedding of one of her younger sisters. We were lodged in the family suite of a hotel, and my girlfriend was at the same time in the USA, moving from one state to another.

She was moving closer to me from Texas, and I was on the call, encouraging her and reminding her of the things that we already have in the house we bought together, not too far from my current house

The marriage was over for me. I was going to move out as soon as we returned to the USA. Our children are teenagers, and I wanted to give them the option of being close to both of us. I was willing to leave the present house to my wife and the children and move in with my lover and joy.

My wife overheard bits of the conversation and completely lost her mind. She started screaming on top of her lungs, “Ladi has killed me, Ladi has killed me.”

She combined this with rolling on the floor, shivering and convulsing until friends and relatives who were also booked into the same hotel rushed in to see what was going on.

She wanted to eat her cake and have it. I wanted to have something else. it was that simple.

The Reality of “Open” at This Stage of Life

There’s a lot of talk about open relationships these days. And for some people, they may work — particularly when both parties genuinely want that structure. There’s even an entire polyamory subculture being promoted as a solution to the frustrations of monogamous life — though to me, it feels more like a kind of living hell than a remedy.

But that’s not what this was.

What my wife wanted was to keep the marriage for companionship and stability, while outsourcing sex and romance to third parties.

Deep down, my wife still operated from a fundamentally monogamous mindset — but one where sexual exclusivity had been shifted to the affair partner rather than the spouse. In that framework, if I were to have a purely casual relationship outside the marriage, it would dilute any remaining claim I had to intimacy within it. In a sense, it would “balance things out” on her terms.

But the relationship I am having is not casual. I fell in love with someone who wanted to be with me on mutually agreed terms and not someone who wanted to be with me on her own terms, while my terms didn’t matter

The next thing I know, my wife was calling all my relatives and hers.

I had become the devil.

I was leaving the marriage, breaking our home, abandoning my children, breaking my marital vows, and dishonouring God.

She had called pastors, including the Reverend who joined us in marriage, and had insisted i must break up my “affair” in Nigeria before we return to the USA where she would have no one to support her in pressuring me to do so.

A family meeting was called. I had been married for almost twenty years and kept my affairs to myself. I was a model husband and father. I supported both our families in every season, and I had a single eye that was on the ball throughout.

The family meeting was held, and everybody blamed the devil. (I didn’t tell them my wife was having an affair, and i didn’t admit i was having one) I left all the talking to her, and she only told everybody who cared to listen that she overheard my conversation with a lady and knew I was having an affair. She also said she heard me telling the lady I love her and talking about our house and our bedroom.

She didn’t say a word about her affair, and the devil’s alternative she gave me as relating to her pet project.

Everybody said that if there was such a woman, she would be out to destroy my life. She is the daughter of JEZEBEL and will not be recognised by any member of the family. I should discontinue any form of conversation with her and break up that relationship or friendship immediately.

My mother, God bless her soul, even cried and said, “Your wife has been a faithful pillar of support to you all your life, don’t betray her like this.”

That was funny. Especially as she was holding my wife while saying so, and my wife was nodding and crying like a baby who ate her biscuit and is trying to convince grandma that it was stolen

A married woman can relatively easily find a married man for an affair. Most men will not turn down the advances of a woman if they are unhappy at home.

Affairs between married people are inherently volatile because once exposed, they tend to blow up. There’s a kind of “mutually assured destruction” built into them — but at the same time, betrayed spouses can react in unpredictable ways.

However, a married man will quickly discover that most single women in their late thirties and forties are not interested in being a side experience. They are looking for commitment.

I cannot look beyond that age pool for a relationship, as I cannot imagine myself sleeping with a girl who is just a few years older than my children just for the sake of having a casual affair or casual sex

A man’s appeal, at that stage, is his ability to commit — not his availability for casual involvement. So the bias plays out differently between the sexes.

Which means that, practically speaking, the only viable path for a man in my position is the first kind of affair — the one that leads somewhere — out of his relationship and into a new one.

An Equation That Doesn’t Balance

What I’ve come to believe is this:

The second type of affair — the “have your cake and eat it too” model — creates a fundamentally unworkable equation. By unworkable, I mean that it does not work for the married couple.

It asks for commitment without intimacy, and intimacy without commitment.

It tries to preserve the structure of a marriage while hollowing out its core.

And in the long run, that simply doesn’t hold.

At some point, the question becomes unavoidable: are you still building a life together, or just maintaining the shell of one? Faced with this dilemma, the betrayed spouse is often left with little choice but to leave the marriage if they want to escape the ongoing harm. And the possibility of finding a suitable companion can be the catalyst that finally makes that decision possible.

In my case, I got back to the USA with my family and stayed at home for a full week.

I used that week to explain to the children everything that happened with all the evidence I have (I also recorded our conversation at the restaurant where she said she wanted to keep her lover intentionally)

My first daughter, the boss lady, now in her twenties, understood and even explained to the boys, who also understood to a degree what was going on. I told them I am not abandoning them, but I am leaving the marriage because the terms of engagement had changed.

I took them to my new apartment and introduced them to my lover.

Then I moved out of the house and the marriage without any drama or fuss.

My wife, on the other hand, suddenly lost her taste for the affair once the marriage was dead.

She has now left our church to join a Nigerian church where they are waging war against spiritual forces in heavenly places and shooting imaginary spiritual arrows at my lover, whom they see as the daughter of Jezebel, who snatched the husband of this woman out of nowhere after she had faithfully and dutifully loved him for over twenty years.

I am writing this from Florence, Italy! I came here to spend some time with my lover (i like saying that) and to catch up on some childhood dreams of making love to someone I love in this eternal city

Thank you, Brother Gbenga, for being a good teacher of the gospel and helping me know the truth of who I am in Christ. It really helped a lot to know that God does not hate me or would not cast me away for doing right by myself and standing up for my sanity when that storm raged. It preserved me from thinking God was punishing me for something I did wrong or that the devil was attacking my home. I could see with clarity, and this helped me from plunging into depression or losing my mind or doing something silly in the name of passion.

God bless you, sir

Oladipupo J.

PS: We will be in Lagos on Saturday by 12 noon for the Flight. Make sure you come early. The Spirit of God will set all our paths straight and our joy will be full.

-GSW-