Did my wife visit her ex-boyfriend?

Please read the following true story and kindly give your opinion at the end.

I’m a British man working and living in the Middle East with my family. Recently I was on the internet and my Filipina wife had forgotten to log off her email account when she left the computer.

The page was at the ‘Sent’ mail folder and I noticed that my wife’s ‘Sent’ emails had gone to just one recipient and it was a Filipino man.

Curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of her emails to this guy. I was shocked to realise that my wife and the Filipino had known each other intimately before.

I opened the rest of her ‘Sent’ emails and confirmed it. My wife had written to him how much she really missed him, loved him and she said she would send him pictures of herself that would give him a hard-on etc. and she’d always signed out ‘love you’, ‘miss you’ or ‘xxx’.

They had also sent SMS messages and chatted on Yahoo! Messenger and made international telephone calls. My wife bought a new webcam but the Filipino guy’s connection was too slow and they only connected once via webcam.

I read an email where my wife even called him on our wedding anniversary and cried and told him how much she really missed and loved him. On our very own wedding anniversary….

The guy wrote and asked her to visit him where he works in Pasir Gudang, near Johor Bahru, in Malaysia if she ever got the chance to take a trip abroad. (It is a 2 hour flight from Manila to Singapore, then a one hour journey by road over the Singapore - Malaysia causeway to Johor Bahru.)

I told my wife that she hadn’t signed out her account and I’d got curious about who she was writing to so read all her emails.

I asked her about the emails and wanted to know who the man was. She was very defensive and said that it was a stranger, a nice guy who she had met at Bangkok airport who assisted her by taking on some of her excess baggage, on a flight to Manila.

I did not believe her though, as I know my wife would not send sexy photos of herself to a stranger who she’d just met at an airport.

After changing her story many times, I knew that she was lying. I read the emails again and realised that the guy worked for a company I knew in Pasir Gudang, Malaysia.

I called the company and got to talk to the man and confronted him as to why he was sending secret emails to my wife, a married woman.

He confessed that he knew my wife long before she had got married, when they had both worked in Johor Bahru. (They were actually boyfriend and girlfriend in Malaysia, back in 1987. As it happens, the guy had actually taken the virginity of my wife.) By coincidence, he was now back working in the same region where he and my wife were dating 21 years ago.

He swore that he had not seen her for 21 years, when he had to leave Malaysia to take a new job in Indonesia. He understood that I was rightly angry that my wife was writing to him behind my back and promised to stop all correspondence with her. He gave me his word of honour.

I told my wife that I had spoken to the guy who she’d been emailing on the phone and discovered that he was her Filipino ex-boyfriend and he had aplogised, promising never to contact her again. (I knew that my wife had a Filipino lover 21 years before.) She admitted all what he had told me was true and begged forgiveness. I asked her how they had got in touch after such a long period of time, and she said that she had recently met an acquaintance from the old days in Malaysia at a party in Philippines and got her ex-boyfriend’s telephone number, called him and they’d exchanged email addresses.

She apologised and promised to stop all correspondence immediately and to never contact her ex-boyfriend again. I was raging mad and it almost ended our marriage but I loved her so I forgave her.

Several months later, I had to stay in the Middle East when my wife was going home to Philippines with the kids for Xmas holidays. She told me that a Filipina lady friend, Tess, who was married to my Scottish friend, but separated, had been repeatedly asking her to go on a trip to Singapore.

She said Tess had asked her to ask me for permission. I sent Tess a text message saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, my wife doesn’t need to ask for my permission to go to Singapore with you. Of course she can go.’ Tess didn’t reply to my message.

After my wife and kids had flown to Philippines, I called home a few days later. Our daughter told me that her mother had gone to Singapore. I tried to call my wife to see if she was okay, had enough money etc. but I could not get through. I had Tess’s number and sent her a text message asking her to tell my wife I was trying to call her.

I joked to Tess that maybe she could find a new boyfriend in Singapore. Tess sent a reply saying that she was not in Singapore.

She had to stay in Manila as her sister was in hospital. She also told me that she was not interested in finding a new boyfriend and that it was never her intention to go to Singapore at all, it was my wife’s plan. She told me that my wife had even offered to pay for her air fare.

So I’d found out that Tess had never wanted to go to Singapore in the first place although my wife had said Tess had always been asking her to accompany her there.

So obviously my wife had used Tess as her excuse to go there and possibly as an alibi, if I wondered what my wife could be getting up to. I started to wonder, why was my wife lying? I suspected that my wife could be planning to visit her ex-boyfriend, who’d asked her to visit him if ever she got the chance. Her ex-boyfriend was situated just one hour’s drive from Singapore.

Still unable to contact my wife, I called home and my daughter told me that her mum had since left Singapore and gone to her ex-employer’s house in Malaysia.

It was about 20 minutes drive from where her ex-boyfriend worked. I called my wife many times and eventually managed to talk to her for about a minute but it was a bad connection. I knew that she was at her former employer’s house, whom I’d met 3 years earlier, because I spoke to him.

I wanted to ask my wife what was going on, why had she planned this trip all along and pretended that it was her friend Tess who’d asked her to go to Singapore, even offering to pay Tess’s air fare? But I didn’t get a chance to ask her what Tess had told me.

For the next three days, I was calling my wife 75 times a day but her phone was always frustratingly disconnected. In desperation, I sent her an email saying that she had connived to deceive him about the whole trip and accused her of following up on her ex-boyfriend’s request to visit him there in Malaysia. I slandered her and her ex-boyfriend terribly, calling them a scheming pair of Filipinos etc. etc. etc. and much worse.

I wrote that I’d send copies of their secret emails to all of her family and friends and I’d divorce her. I also cc’d the ex-boyfriend in the email. I had his mobile number from their emails before and tried to call him numerous times but although his phone was ringing, he would not answer it.

I sent him very strong accusatory text messages, implying that he and my wife were meeting in secret. He replied asking who was sending the messages and I told him he knew fine well it was his ex-girlfriend’s husband.

He denied all wrongdoing and said he’d not seen or heard from my wife and had kept his promise never to contact her.

The following day, my wife finally called me in a panic. She’d read my email accusing them of meeting in secret and denied it, pleading innocence.

She told me never to dare accuse her of meeting her ex-boyfriend as she was staying with her former employer and her conscience was clear. She saw that I’d included her ex-boyfriend in the email and asked me to send him a text message apologising for wrongly accusing him of being with her.

I had no hard evidence, only circumstantial evidence, but I strongly suspected that my wife had gone to meet him behind my back for various reasons.

1. She concocted a bunch of lies about her friend asking her to go to Singapore when it was her who planned the trip all along and she’d tried to frame her friend as the organiser of the trip.

2. She was so desperate for her friend to go to Singapore (as her own reason for going), she even offered to pay her friend’s air fare.

3. She could use her ex-boss as an alibi. (Of course, I was not going to call her ex-boss and ask him for a breakdown of her every movement.)

4. I could not contact her for three days. (She’d said her mobile battery was low therefore she could not reply to messages or answer calls and she didn’t have a charger. I told her that I didn’t believe her.)

In the absence of solid proof, I sent her ex-boyfriend a text message apologising for accusing him. I explained all the reasons for doubting my wife and he replied that he fully understood why I suspected her and he accepted my apology.

Which only made me suspect them all the more. Why would a person who has been wrongly accused of committing adultery with another man’s wife and very strongly verbally abused accept an apology, especially if he had done nothing wrong? He would normally have been affronted….