She stood in our living room holding the divorce papers and for a second, she couldn’t find any words. Her mouth hung open, and she looked small, standing there. For nine years, I had loved her so intensely that it sometimes clouded my judgment. But in that moment, all I felt was cold certainty.
Adriana had cheated on me, and then she had the audacity to ask me for an open marriage so she could pretend she never did anything wrong. It all started a week after our ninth anniversary. We had celebrated another year together, and I genuinely believed we had a fantastic marriage. We chose not to have kids, we did okay for ourselves, and we communicated well.
There wasn’t an aspect of our lives that I could really complain about. Then she walked into the living room while I was working on my laptop and said she wanted to talk about something important. She told me she wanted to talk about our sex life. She said it wasn’t bad, but she thought we could energize things by opening our marriage.
My mouth literally dropped open. We had both trash-talked open relationships in the past, so this felt like a complete 180 from the woman I thought I knew. I asked her why she felt we needed to do this, and she admitted things were actually very good, but she didn’t think we should just settle for being satisfied. She talked about trust.
She said open marriages were a great way to build trust and keep each other from getting bored. When I asked if she was bored with me, she said no. I asked if someone had put the idea in her head. She said no, that she had naturally thought about it and researched couples who opened their marriages.
She believed they were all happier for it. I struggled to believe that. Even if I had been tempted to agree, I knew the practical reality: as an average-looking man, it’s hard to find someone willing to sleep with you. An average woman can have a line out the door if she wants.
That alone would have stopped me. I told her I would think about it, and she seemed satisfied with that answer. But honestly, there was very little for me to think about. I just kept asking myself why this came up so suddenly.
If you love someone and the sex is good, why would you want to sleep with random men? I’ve read all the advice about walking away the moment someone asks for an open relationship, but I love her so much that it felt like a hard choice to make. I wanted to just tell her no and move on, but every story I read suggested that was a stupid move. So I delayed, trying to figure out the right thing to do.
Then things took a turn I never saw coming. Adriana asked me once whether I had finished thinking, and I told her I still needed time. The next day, one of her friends reached out to me on Instagram. She said her name would be Sam, and she told me she really needed to talk to me in person.
I met her the next day without Adriana knowing. Sam apologized for being cryptic, but she wanted to tell me something without leaving any records of her being the snitch. She made me promise not to let Adriana know what she was about to say, and I agreed. She asked me to confirm whether my wife had talked about an open marriage recently, and I told her it was true.
Then Sam told me that Adriana had already cheated on me. The reason she wanted the open marriage so badly was so she could feel like she never actually cheated. She was going to retroactively attribute her one-night stand to our open marriage. Sam explained that Adriana had told their friend group, which consisted of Adriana and three other women.
Adriana got drunk at a bar, started getting friendly with some guys, and ended up sleeping with one whose name she never learned. She told the girls she didn’t even remember most of it, so it wasn’t worth cheating for. Her friends told her off and warned her that they had tried to slow her down that day. Adriana asked for their advice, and they told her she had to come clean.
She said she was scared I would divorce her. One of them suggested she vow to quit alcohol and bars for life, but Adriana wasn’t excited about that. A week later, she came to me with her brilliant idea to open the marriage. Sam said Adriana had messaged the group, saying she thought I was a lover boy and that I would probably go along with it if she laid out the pros.
That offended me deeply. She thought my love for her made me a fool. Sam said she had a guilty conscience and knew I was a good guy who didn’t deserve that betrayal. The open marriage wasn’t going to erase the infidelity.
It would just open me up to more pain while my wife slept with all sorts of people. I thanked her and promised I wouldn’t expose her. I deleted our messages and went home. I wanted to confront Adriana so badly, but I held back because it wasn’t time yet.
I couldn’t throw Sam under the bus, and I had no other evidence. So I told Adriana I would go along with the open marriage. She hugged and kissed me, saying it was going to be fun, and that I could always tell her if I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. That night, after she fell asleep, I grabbed her phone and screenshotted a lot of her messages with her friends.
She had already texted them to celebrate that her plan worked. No one replied, which I liked. I remember wondering how I ended up with the worst one in that group of friends. Now I had evidence.
She admitted to her one-night stand in those messages. I decided I would get a divorce lawyer and, after everything was ready, finally confront her. I found a lawyer and told him absolutely everything, including submitting the evidence I had gathered. Once the divorce papers were ready, I hired a process server to deliver them to her while we were at home.
I didn’t want to give her a second to process anything before I confronted her. She came back from the front door looking dumbfounded and asked if it was a joke. I told her it wasn’t. She asked if it was because she asked for an open marriage, and I told her it couldn’t be that, since I had accepted.
She begged me to just explain what was going on. I told her it was only partly about the open marriage. The rest was about what she had done before that. I watched her face go pale.
I told her I knew she had cheated on me, and that was why I was getting rid of her. She stood there holding the papers, her mouth open, looking completely stupid. She couldn’t figure out what to say. Her first instinct was to deny it, but she couldn’t do that.
She was smarter than that. I told her she messed up so badly and I was going to make sure she paid for it. Then she stopped lying and started begging, claiming it was a mistake and that she had been under the influence. I told her that wasn’t an excuse.
I picked up my phone and set a timer for an hour and a half. I told her that was all the time she had to pack her things and get out of the house. She kept begging, but after that point, I didn’t say a single word to her. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say, but I realized I could never truly convey how I felt.
It would just be a waste of breath. So I let her cry and beg until she was tired, and then she went to pack. She took longer than the time I gave her, but by then I just wanted her gone. She packed her things, loaded her car by herself, and left.
She wanted to talk before she left, but I had nothing to say. So she left. She came by a few times to get more of her stuff, but we barely interacted, especially since I refused to say anything to her. She told me I was killing her, but that only made me feel better about myself.
The divorce went relatively smoothly for me. We had to go in front of a judge, because once the proceedings started, Adriana got petty like most cheating spouses do. She wanted a lot more than she knew she deserved, especially since I wasn’t afraid to show all the evidence I had of her plot to feel better about cheating. The judge awarded her the apartment and her car, which was fine with me since I was open to moving.
It was annoying, since I had retained the house and kicked her out, and now I was the one who had to move out. But I kept my car, which was by far the more expensive model, and I didn’t have to pay her alimony, even though she earned quite a bit less than I did. Her lawyer kept raising the issue, but the judge didn’t want to hear it. He asked the lawyer whether he felt his client deserved a pat on the back for cheating, and the lawyer didn’t say much after that.
I moved my stuff into storage with a police escort. Adriana watched me move out of the apartment, not even the house we had bought, and I could tell she felt powerful. I made sure not to do anything that would get me in trouble. I stayed with a friend for a few weeks while I looked for a new place.
But I knew I wanted to hurt Adriana, and I planned out the perfect way to do it. The first thing I did was expose her online. I wanted everyone to know her character, and I wanted anyone who searched her in the future to know what she was capable of. I made it clear she wasn’t the kind of person to be trusted, if she couldn’t even be trusted in her marriage.
Then I called her parents to tell them what their daughter had done. They both sounded disappointed in her and claimed they would talk to her, but I doubt they did. That didn’t matter to me. I just needed to make sure they heard it from me personally since they wouldn’t see it online.
Adriana saw my post online and called me. I started recording the call the moment I picked up. She threatened to sue me for harassment and making false claims. I told her I hadn’t harassed her, since I hadn’t contacted her since I left the apartment.
I also made it clear that none of my claims were false, and I had the evidence to back them up. As we were talking, I posted the screenshots of her messages, blurring out her friends’ names because they did the right thing and didn’t deserve to be dragged into this mess. When I told her to refresh the page and see that my claims were now backed up, she lost her mind. She said she would make me feel pain and regret it if I didn’t delete my post.
I stood my ground and hung up. I reported to the police immediately that I felt threatened by her words. They said there wasn’t a clear enough threat to my life, but I could call them if she showed up at my house or work. She didn’t know my new address, but she was in the parking lot of my workplace when I pulled in.
As soon as I saw her, I texted a co-worker and told him to call the police, explaining the situation. When she saw my car, she came up and started banging on the window, yelling at me to get out. I told her I wasn’t going to do that because I felt threatened by her behavior. I told her she was acting emotionally and irrationally, and that I didn’t know what she could do in her frenzy.
I used those words specifically to trigger her, and they worked. She got angrier. Once she was angry enough, and I spotted my co-worker standing by the door recording, I got out of the car and started walking to my workplace. She kept trying to block me, and at one point she pushed me hard in the chest.
“Get out of my way, crazy witch,” I said. That set her off. She asked what I called her, over and over. When I told her she had heard me loud and clear, she spat in my face.
Then she picked up a piece of gravel and started scratching my car. I started recording too. I had less than a minute of footage before the police arrived. “You’re going to jail, crazy witch,” I said.
She saw the police cars, but she clearly wasn’t thinking, because she chucked the piece of gravel at me. It hit me on the chin and cut me. The police officer grabbed her from behind and pushed her against my car. I riled her up enough for her to do something that stupid right in front of a cop.
She ended up facing charges of vandalism, assault, assault causing bodily harm, and resisting arrest without violence. She posted bail, but I’m sure she won’t get off on all of them. And she deserves every single one. I didn’t tell her to crash out on me.
I only posted the truth online. If she didn’t want to be portrayed that way, she should have been a better wife. It’s not that hard to not cheat. The only time she spoke to me after that was when she called, drunk, and asked if I was happy that I had destroyed her life.
“You ruined your own life,” I told her. “But I don’t mind watching it. ”
I told her not to call me again, or I’d get her charged for harassment too. She hasn’t contacted me since.
Revenge isn’t ever going to be the morally right thing to do, but it feels good. I’m finally a single man again after nine years of marriage. It’s not the kind of thing you want to have to say, but if you’ve been married to a woman who cheated and then thought the solution was to ask for an open marriage, you should be happy to say it. She tried to gaslight me into believing an open marriage would energize things, when really she just wanted to erase what she had already done.
That’s not some wild experiment. That’s straight-up manipulation. She showed me exactly who she was, and I’m glad I didn’t give her the satisfaction of playing the victim. She ruined her own life, and all I did was shine a light on it.
I just hope she’s embarrassed every time she thinks about how she handled this, because she should be.
