My Husband Has Been Writing Secret Letters to a Woman & I Had To Ask Her for the Truth

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There are a lot of struggles in a long-term partnership, and it takes work to ensure you’re both still giving each other the support and love each person needs. We know it’s not easy, and we know that sometimes great stress in life can lead to relationship stresses. This includes things like having a baby or approaching the dreaded mid-life crisis.

One woman has hit a rough patch in her relationship recently, and she’s not sure how to handle it. In hopes of getting to the best advice, the original poster shared her story with Reddit.

Posting to Reddit’s Relationship community, OP jumped right into the issue she’s been having.

“I (35f) sensed my husband (38m) pulling away emotionally. I talked to him, he told me nothing was wrong,” she explained. “He was still acting strangely. I began thinking he was being unfaithful.”

She explained that she tried to find what she could to ease her suspicions. “But I couldn’t find any proof,” she admitted. “I started to feel crazy. Nothing weird on his cell phone, nothing strange on the phone bill, he always seemed to go where he said he was going.”

But then she found something.

“One day I was putting away his laundry and I found a notebook folded into a hoodie,” she wrote. “The notebook was full of letters between him and another woman. They passed it back and forth, writing letters to each other.”

The notebook wasn’t anything special, she added. “It was just an ordinary black marble notebook. I could’ve seen it a million times before and would not have thought anything of it. But it was filled with letters back and forth.”

She explained to the Reddit community that the letters weren’t “even overtly sexual – just deep, in depth conversation.”

"I confronted him and he didn’t hide it," OP wrote. "He said, Yeah he has a pen pal, so what?"

It seemed to be no big deal to OP’s husband, but she wanted more information. “I asked who he was talking to and it’s just someone who lives around here,” she recalled. “I asked how it started and he said they were waiting in line at the deli one day and they started talking. They both went to the same high school but he graduated 10 years before her.”

At some point, the two recognized they shouldn’t talk in person, but their relationship didn’t end. “He said they talked for a while and they had to cut it off. And she said something along the lines of ‘I feel like I still have so much to say, I could write a letter,’” OP explained.

And that’s apparently how the pen pal relationship started.

“He said, 'So go ahead and write one.' So he got a notebook and wrote her a letter and gave it to her and she wrote one back and they just kept passing the notebook back and forth,” she shared. “He said this is their third notebook they filled up. He said they don’t text or secretly hang out they just write letters back and forth.”

The way the two swap the notebook is odd, OP feels. “He said he puts the notebook in her mailbox or sometimes they’ll switch it out at the deli,” OP explained. And none of that is sitting well with her.

“It all seems so bizarre to me. I told him he could write letters to me if he wanted to write letters. And he said sure. So I said, 'So there’s no need to write to her too anymore' and he was like, 'No I can write to both of you,'” she recalled to Reddit.

OP told her husband that the pen pal relationship made her uncomfortable.

She explained that she was uncomfortable with it “especially since he kept it a secret from me. He told me he didn’t keep it a secret he just didn’t explicitly tell me because he knew I’d overreact.”

And then he tried to say it’s not a big deal because his intentions aren’t in the wrong place. “He said he has no intention of cheating on me so she might as well just be a guy friend that he’s writing to. I told him would it be OK if I did this with a male if he would be OK with it,” OP wrote.

“He said if I could find a man who was completely OK with having an entirely platonic relationship over letter writing than fine, but he doubted I would be able to find someone who’d want that.”

Her husband then told her that she’s "blowing this completely out of proportion," and then minimized her feelings.

“He says she’s a pen pal and she’s not going to cheat on me so what’s the issue,” she recalled, adding that to her, it’s not the “pen pal” thing that’s the issue. “He sees her, she lives two miles away from us. He claims they don’t ‘hang out’ but how is it possible that they NEVER chat for a while,” she continued.

“This entire situation makes me feel so weird and he’s making it out like I’m completely exaggerating,” OP admitted.

Reddit then chimed in and overwhelmingly people thought there was more to the story than her husband was saying.

After reading the advice, OP returned later with an update.

“I spoke to the woman he was writing the letters to,” she admitted. “A common thing I noticed was that he never talked about our relationship in the letters, but he did mention our children quite a bit.”

That didn’t sit well with her either and for good reason. “Apparently, he gave her the impression that him and I were separated but still living together to coparent our children. She said that they did meet up, quite a few times, to exchange the notebook that turned into sometimes hours long conversations,” OP shared.

“She said they never did anything directly ‘cheating’ but he did flirtatious things like running his fingers through her hair and putting his arms around her while they were sitting next to each other,” OP wrote. "She said she absolutely would not have allowed him to do those things if she had known we were still very much together."

Ouch.