Cheat on me with my best friend? I'll wreck your career and publicly humiliate both of you

20,917 points1,784 commentssubmitted by wafflesareforever to r/ProRevenge43

So, this post apparently is what triggered the /r/ProRevenge Riots of 2019 over the excessive use of acronyms to represent people (MW, FBF, FBFW) in the story. Sorry about that. I have reformatted the story with fake names in place of acronyms.

Also, at the end of the post I've added answers to a few questions that came up repeatedly in the comments.

Shithead and Sarah have been like family to my wife and I for several years, practically ever since we moved in across the street from them. The four of us were extremely tight. Our kids are the same age as theirs and are all good friends. We were one big family unit. We did dinner together a few times a week. We went on vacations together. I truly saw Shithead as a brother, and my wife and Sarah were very close too.

Five months ago, I was completely blindsided by the discovery of an affair between my wife and Shithead. My wife had left her email open on our computer, and I saw an email from her to her longtime therapist saying that Shithead would be joining her at an upcoming session "again." Uh, WTF? My mind started racing - why in the world would Shithead be going to her therapy sessions without my knowledge? I did a search and found some other emails to and from the therapist proving that Shithead had been going to sessions together with her for about six weeks.

I checked our mobile phone account and discovered that, since late summer, they had been exchanging hundreds of texts every day, peaking at nearly 500/day by the holidays. Speaking of the holidays, my wife and I hosted both of our families (parents, siblings, etc) for both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, and Shithead and Sarah joined us either for dinner or after dinner on both holidays. Text records showed that the entire time that they were at our house celebrating with our families, my wife and Shithead were texting each other across the room. They were doing that pretty much every time the four of us hung out, for months. And, you know, all day every day just in general. But what bothers me the most is that they were doing it with Sarah and I right there.

I confronted my wife with the evidence and she admitted that yes, she and Shithead had fallen in love. "It just happened! I don't know how! But I love him and I just don't feel anything for you anymore, I'm sorry!" They had gone on a school district trip together, something had happened in her hotel room, and things had moved quickly from there. She explained, as I lay face-down on the couch, unable to look at her, that they had already made plans to move out and divorce me and Sarah, and while they didn't plan to move in together immediately because of the kids, they'd probably do so eventually. The meetings with the therapist were supposedly mostly for the purpose of finding a way to break this to me and Sarah as gently as possible, because they were so very concerned for our well-being. (Sarah and I are fairly certain that they weren't planning on telling us about the affair at all, and were simply going to "discover" their feelings for one another several months down the line, after they'd come up with some other reason to divorce the two of us.)

My wife moved out two months ago. I was, and still am, utterly destroyed. I cry every day. I cried writing the first few paragraphs of this story just now. I worry non-stop about the impact on our kids. But I am also not exactly a shrinking violet when I feel that I've been wronged. And in this case I was, objectively, very very wronged.

So, a couple of years ago, Shithead ran for a Board of Education seat as a pretty extreme underdog. I helped him with his campaign materials and debate prep, and my wife, a well-known school district employee (this becomes important later), got the word out as best she could. Much to our surprise, he actually won in a squeaker, by just a few dozen votes.

Being on the Board became the center of Shithead's world. He joined every committee that he could. This turned into the foundation of his affair with my wife, as they were constantly going to school events and meetings together on evenings and weekends.

Once I discovered the affair, my thoughts turned pretty quickly to revenge, and it occurred to me that an extramarital affair between a member of the Board of Education and an employee of the school district was at least bad politics and possibly violated district policy. Making things far worse for them was that my wife was in the running for an open administrative position, and everyone knew that she was more or less guaranteed the job and the major pay raise that came with it. She had just finished her master's degree in school administration, at the urging of her principal and the superintendent, so that she could be promoted to this specific position.

I had plenty of evidence of the affair - texts from both of them admitting to it, text records showing that they were texting hundreds of times a day, emails to and from the therapist, etc. I considered simply emailing all of the evidence to the Board and the superintendent, but felt like I, as the grieving, betrayed spouse, might not be seen as a credible source. So instead, I invented a fictitious "furious friend" who was planning on showing up to the next Board meeting and publicly shaming the two of them for their affair. I told my wife that I'd tried to talk this person down but couldn't guarantee that they wouldn't show up and humiliate them publicly. As I expected, this led Shithead to conclude that the only option was for him to preemptively admit the affair to the Board. The superintendent subsequently recommended that Shithead resign, which he did. Sarah said that he was utterly humiliated and crushed, and barely got out of bed for a few days afterward.

Once word of the affair and Shithead's resignation started getting around, the superintendent (a longtime friend of both my wife and Shithead) contacted my wife and tearfully informed her that it was no longer politically appropriate for her to be promoted to an administrative position within the district. The position that had been lined up for her was later filled by an outside candidate. This sent waves of confusion and rumor throughout the district, as it was pretty well-known that my wife was getting the job. The day after she was informed that she wasn't getting the promotion, my wife and I, despite our crumbling marriage, took our son out to breakfast together on his birthday, and a parent stopped by our table to congratulate her on her new role. She said thanks, then excused herself to go cry in the bathroom for a while.

I let the dust settle for a couple of weeks, and then, right before my wife moved out, let them in on my little secret - there was never a "furious friend" threatening to expose them in the first place. Just me.

Word of all of this has gotten around our fairly small town, which Shithead grew up in and my wife has worked in for nearly 20 years. My wife refuses to talk to me about how things are at work now, but I've heard from some people I know in the district that her formerly spotless reputation has taken a major hit. Shithead, formerly a gregarious social presence in our neighborhood and at events and pubs in town, has completely gone underground and barely emerges to mow his lawn. He's moving out soon, to a shitty little townhouse which is all he can afford due to all the child support he's going to have to pay his wife.

My wife and Shithead claim that they plan on trying to make things work together, despite all the public humiliation. I wish them lots of luck with that. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun to show their faces together in town.

Edit: Here's a log of their texts/calls over the course of a few months before I discovered the affair. Obviously their phone numbers have been stripped out. https://anonymousfiles.io/UdpmGq8h/

Answers to some common questions in the comments:

Are you and Sarah a thing now? You should totally be a thing, that would be awesome. No. We're friends. We've been incredibly important to each other since this all started and have certainly gotten a lot closer, but not in the way everyone's thinking. This would all be so much harder to deal with if I didn't have her to lean on, and she says she feels the same way about me; we're going through basically the exact same situation with the same players, after all. Shithead hasn't moved out yet; once he does, we plan to go back to getting the kids together more often like they used to - it'll never be the same, of course. She already does come over with the kids from time to time, but it's just tough with Shithead's constant presence across the street.

Didn't your revenge hurt both sets of kids? Not really. Shithead has a day job; the Board of Education was his hobby and his passion but this didn't affect his income at all. And my wife has been assured that if she wants to pursue an administrative position with another district, she'll have glowing letters of recommendation from her superintendent and principal. It'll mean giving up a lot of work relationships in the process, but given the hit her reputation has taken, I'm guessing she makes that jump sooner rather than later. In the meantime, not moving to an administrative job means that she still has summers off with the kids.

Why do you call her your wife instead of your former wife? We're working out way through divorce mediation, but it isn't final yet. Will be soon.

Why didn't you notice all of the texting your wife was doing? Well, I did. It was really starting to piss me off. It was excessive. She has a big social circle and does tend to text a lot anyway, but it was really getting over the top, to the point where she was completely ignoring me and the kids. At one point in November I asked her to agree to a "no phones at the dinner table" rule, which she agreed to reluctantly but then would pout through dinner, and eventually she just started using her phone during dinner again. All that said - I was blind. Not only was the texting getting weird, but her relationship with Shithead was starting to make me uncomfortable. Sarah noticed it too and agreed. We confronted them a couple of times about it directly and they both swore up and down that it was just school stuff that they were talking about, there was nothing else going on. And for whatever reason, we believed them - probably because the mind tends to refuse to see things that it doesn't want to see.

Thanks, by the way, for all of the support in the comments. I couldn't reply to every one, but I did read them all, and I appreciate them, even the brutally honest feedback from people who feel that I did the wrong thing. Posting this and reading all of the responses introduced me to perspectives I hadn't considered about all of this, and reminded me most of all that the anguish I'm dealing with is pretty normal given the situation I'm going through. I had a pretty OK Memorial Day weekend, even though I missed my wife and thought a lot about the things we'd probably be doing as a family. I'm taking my kids camping next weekend and having something like that to look forward to and plan has me feeling pretty good today.