It was when we were watching Sam Fender perform live on stage that I realised that my husband Tim no longer loved me.
I had bought the tickets as an olive branch – we’d been married for 18 years, and it felt like we rarely connected anymore. Tim worked in marketing and had a stressful job (and I work for a charity) . He rarely saw our kids, a 12-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter. So I’d bought the tickets as a nice surprise.
But the whole time we were there, he just complained. “It’s so busy and everyone’s on their phones,” he said, “It drives me mad, why not just watch the damn concert?” I shrugged, but was triggered as Tim had pretty much been looking at his phone the whole time too. He said he was waiting for confirmation on a client they’d pitched for, but I thought it was odd that he couldn’t switch off for even a couple of hours.
At one point during the concert, he disappeared for a long time. When we got home later that night I quickly picked his phone up when he left it unlocked, whilst he was in the loo – he often took the phone in there too but this was a rare occasion he didn’t. The minute I saw the WhatsApp messages and the name – Claire- I knew something was up.
Claire was someone he’d mentioned before, a younger colleague who was 31 (Tim was 52), someone he’d talked a lot about, saying she was an “entitled young millennial” and how he’d once complimented her shirt, and she’d “talked to HR”. If I’m honest I hadn’t really listened as Tim talked a lot about his work and it used to bore me to death.
