NEXT month, my husband, Erik, 54, and I will celebrate our twenty-first wedding anniversary, a milestone I once thought we’d never see.
Because 14 years ago, I had an affair with another woman, and, though my marriage survived — thanks to a very understanding husband — I came perilously close to losing everything.
As a 40-year-old mother of three, I’d never even had a teenage crush on a female friend before, never mind a physical relationship.
I wasn’t attracted to women, and I still loved my husband.
Yet I found myself caught up in a passionate affair that could have ended my marriage.
Erik and I met in 2001 at a friend’s wedding in Florida. Bruised by bitter divorce, romance was the last thing on my mind.
But I got talking to a tall, handsome American philosophy PhD student, and fell for him straight away.
I was a writer and journalist based in London, so we flew back and forth across the Atlantic for nearly a year.
Then, in 2002, I fell pregnant with our daughter Lily, now 22, and I moved to Florida permanently, along with my two sons, Henry, 30, and Matt, 27, from my first marriage.
Erik wanted us to wed, but I was burned by my divorce and kept saying no.
Finally, I realised I was just being stubborn. We got married, not once but twice — Erik and I eloped to Hawaii in April 2024 for a private beach wedding, with only the priestess who married us and a photographer for company, and then held a church ceremony in England for all our friends in December 2005.
Three years later, we moved to Vermont, a small, rural state right on the border with Canada, for Erik’s work.
[bc_video account_id=”5067014667001″ application_id=”” aspect_ratio=”16:9″ autoplay=”” caption=”Cheating Heartbroken barista discovers husband’s affair – with her own aunt” embed=”in-page” experience_id=”” height=”100%” language_detection=”” max_height=”360px” max_width=”640px” min_width=”0px” mute=”” padding_top=”56%” picture_in_picture=”” player_id=”default” playlist_id=”” playsinline=”” sizing=”responsive” video_id=”6364087841112″ video_ids=”” width=”640px”]The children settled well into their schools, but once more, I had to start afresh finding new friends and I was often lonely.
I worked from home, which made it hard to meet new people. I hated the freezing weather, and I was used to living in a city, and felt suffocated by the small town where everyone knew each other.
Much as I loved my husband, I craved the kind of intense feminine friendship most women take for granted.
Then, out of the blue, I got an email from a former colleague who’d moved to Montreal. I didn’t know Freya* well, but she was also British and far from home — so when she suggested meeting, I agreed.
[authenticated-scripts src=”%3Cscript%20class%3D%22palin-poll%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thesun.co.uk%2Fpollingwidgets%2Fv3%2Fwidget.js%3Fquestion_id%3D109997%26game%3Dpolling%22%3E%3C%2Fscript%3E” type=”embedded” width=”100″ /]We clicked straight away. It was so nice to have a girlfriend to talk to. Erik has always been my best friend, but there are some things only a woman can understand.
Freya and I met every few weeks, and then she invited me to a party in Montreal. It was wilder than I was used to, and we drank too much. At some point, Freya kissed me and we ended up in bed.
Sex with a woman was so different from anything I’d ever experienced with a man. Freya took the lead, and I certainly enjoyed it, but if I’m honest, I wasn’t sexually attracted to her.
Because it was a woman I slept with, not a man, I didn’t consider I’d been unfaithful, but I didn’t tell Erik.
Freya and I grew closer over the next few months, talking nearly every day on the phone and texting.
We were both entering our forties, dealing with teenagers, coping as freelancers in a depressed economy. With her, I didn’t have to explain how I felt.
I confided in another close female friend what I was doing, and to my astonishment, she confessed she’d had a fling with another woman herself a few years before.
In a way, it’s not surprising women our age find ourselves turning to other women.
[quote credit=”Tess Stimson”]She started to want me to be more proactive in bed, and I just wasn’t that into it[/quote]We don’t need men biologically any more as fathers, we’ve often raised our children and we find we have more in common with other women than with men.
Sometimes, this spills over into a physical relationship and women who have never considered themselves lesbian find they ‘fall in love’ with their female friend.
But although Freya and I carried on seeing each other, we only slept together twice more.
She started to want me to be more proactive in bed, and I just wasn’t that into it.
It was the friendship I wanted, not the sex.
And the fact I hadn’t told Erik what we were getting up to began to weigh more heavily on my mind.
Slipping back into the house one evening, after another phone call to Freya, I glimpsed Erik, framed by the living room door, between my two boys on the sofa. It was like seeing a snapshot of what I had to lose.
I might be able to convince myself a fling with a woman didn’t count, but I couldn’t deny I was betraying his trust.
So I sat Erik down and told him what I’d been doing.
He was remarkably forgiving, revealing that he’d guessed what was going on ages ago, but had been waiting for it to run its course.
I’d thought he wouldn’t understand what it felt like to be a woman entering middle-age, prey to hormones and the ravages of time. But, as Erik put it, he lived with me so he knew me better than anyone — male or female.
My assumption that as a man he wouldn’t ‘understand’ me was completely wrong.
My friendship with Freya fizzled out soon after — she wanted a full-on relationship, and things got tense between us.
[quote credit=”Tess Stimson”]I don’t regret the affair, because it reminded me Erik was and always will be my best friend, but I’d never do it again[/quote]We had a huge row one day, and decided it was better to end the friendship.
Ironically, my affair brought Erik and me closer. The fact he understood me emotionally made me realise how much I loved him, and that translated into more intimacy in the bedroom.
I don’t regret the affair, because it reminded me Erik was and always will be my best friend, but I’d never do it again.
There’s nothing wrong with intense female friendships, but it was a mistake to confuse that with sexual love.
And, in the end, an affair with another woman is still an affair.
I was lucky, but I risked everything just for a bit of novelty and excitement, and I could’ve lost it all.
‘The New House’ buy Tess Stimson, published by Avon.
*Names have been changed
