"You may have got him, but I got better": A letter to my cheating ex fiancé and his Mrs.

The author of this post has chosen to remain anonymous, but their identity is known to Mamamia. The image used above is a stock photo.

You dream of the moment you’ll be free. Free from the humiliation. Free from asking yourself, ‘What was so wrong with me?’ Free from believing you weren’t pretty enough. That you had some deficit in your personality. That it actually was about you…

We were together four years. My first love had just shattered my juvenile heart in a way that a first love does. I was on the rebound, and he was always nearby offering a shoulder to cry on. The friend that turned into a trustworthy lover, perhaps a little too quickly for my gentle heart.

I know I struggled to give my all to him for fear of being hurt again. Perhaps he always felt that.

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Then the shock of a wedding proposal came after two years. Him on bended knee before me with a glistening diamond ring and an audience of tourists around a waterfall. How could I say no, even though my gut was silently whispering it?

Days sailed by and I can honestly say I grew happier. What girl doesn’t get happily lost in planning a wedding?

His dream was to be a surgeon. I knew the years of study that would entail, yet I was happy to work around his dream, as a lot of supportive partners do.

His dream led him to another city so we only were only able to see each other on weekends, which wasn’t actually a bad thing because we weren’t living together anyway. I remained at the job I enjoyed in the hopes of saving enough for a deposit to buy a home in the city he was studying in. I thought that was the mutual plan.

Until he met a fellow student. A pretty student. Much prettier than me, with a cuter voice. He made me listen to her voicemail.

She started driving him to the station on Friday afternoons so he could make his way home to see me.

He would write letters to me in lectures. She would add to them.

He would message me from her phone.

I trusted him and honestly thought nothing of it. I was happy he had made a new friend other than the boys in his student share house. She seemed to embrace that he was engaged. She too was in a long term relationship, so I had no reason not to trust her.

When the end was near, I felt it. He told me that she was confiding in him about her relationship breaking down. I actually felt sorry for her.

But I started to feel sick when he would leave. My body was obviously telling me something was wrong. I was never clingy with him but I know that’s what I became.

One night he told me he was feeling unwell. He didn’t sound himself, but I knew we’d speak the next night, so I brushed the off feeling I had aside.

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My 7:30am start at work gave me the opportunity to ring him before his early lecture that morning. Something compelled me to call.

One of the other guys in the share house answered and went to check if he was in his room… he wasn’t. His mate thought that was odd. At that moment I knew.

Thanks to the messages he’d sent me from her phone, I had her number.

I didn’t even hesitate. I rang, and she answered. I said ‘Is he there?’ She hesitated. I could hear him in the background, he was that close to her. I said ‘Put him on’. She did.

I said, ‘Glad you’re feeling better’ and hung up.

I was too numb to cry. I was just petrified. We were getting married in six months. I had ordered my wedding dress. The church and the venue were booked.

The irony was that we had a wedding on that very weekend. I picked him up from the station as usual. He had a single sad and sorry orchid for me.

I knew he was a student and couldn’t afford much. I took it and he promised nothing had happened between them – he had simply gone there to console her broken heart. Yet he overlooked mine.

Shortly after that wedding that felt like a funeral, I knew I had to ask him if he still wanted to marry me. Except he’d gone mute. All he did was shake his head… So gutless.

I walked out of his family home, past his confused mother, and collapsed in the arms of his equally devastated father (who was one of my favourite people ever). They tried to assure me everything would be ok. They didn’t know about her though.

19 years later, they’re still together. We even have mutual friends – but they live in a different city so I’ve only seen the couple twice in that time.

She spotted me first at a party the other night and gave me a ‘look’. I’m not sure whether it was a look of smugness; it was almost a look as if I had done something to her. He didn’t even acknowledge my existence: a testament to the man he is.

But you know what? I didn’t care. All I could do was smile, be my radiant self and make the most of my friends’ birthday, a fun filled night of dancing away from the kids. I finally felt free.

Truth is, if I hadn’t been cheated on, I never would have met my husband, the father of my children. The man who’s loved and been loyal to me for 14 years.

So if anything, my message to my ex fiancé’s Mrs is: “You may have got him, but I got better”.

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