Dear Ellie: My partner and I separated but remained good friends, seeing each other regularly. We’re late-50s. I wanted to be free because he wanted me to focus only on him — no friends, no outside interest. I finally left.
He has since told me that his nephew (his sister’s son) is having marital problems and he’s helping the wife because she has a young child.
He’s advised her to leave her husband and he will help her.
Days later I had to pick up something from his place and I used his washroom. On the sink counter was a box of medication for erectile dysfunction, which, toward the end of our relationship, he denied needing and wouldn’t discuss with me.
While I was there, his niece-in-law was constantly texting him and I asked him what’s going on. She’s his nephew’s wife and the mother of his sister’s only grandchild. She’s only 28!
He brushed my question aside, and instead said he had coffee “dates” for him to advise her.
This young woman lacks experience to recognize what he’s really like. I have no doubt that he’s having an affair with her, just months after he was still with me. Do I disclose it?
Disgusted and Bitter
If you want to help this young woman avoid a disastrous union, drop the “bitter” part of your thinking. You left him for solid reasons. Staying friends is now impossible as he lacks decency.
Tell him you will disclose his affair (and his manipulation) of his niece to his sister if he doesn’t end it, fast.
If he persists, disclose and urge his sister to help the young woman get counselling.
Also, tell her to recommend marital counselling for the couple to try and resolve the issues that made a young wife so vulnerable to this man.
Reader feedback
Regarding the innocent “girlfriend” whose call to her love of three months was answered by “the wife”:
Reader: For a second, I relived what the woman felt when she heard it was her love of three months wife who answered — the hurt and humiliation you feel from learning that you have a cheating partner!
Even after 40 years since it happened to me, my heart still sank.
I still ask: How can someone, man or woman, be so cruel to their partner or spouse? How do cheaters feel about themselves?
Was the gratification from the affair worth the hurt it caused the other partner?
I hope the letter-writer gets lots of psychological help to restore her self-confidence.
Send relationship questions to ellie@thestar.ca.
