A woman who was heartbroken to find out her husband was cheating on her after she received an email from his mistress while at work has written an incredibly powerful open letter to the other woman.
Writer and life-coach Carlie Maree wrote a bravely honest letter in which detailed the heartbreak she had experienced and the devastating effects the affair had on the family. The letter was posted to Mamamia, and was penned exactly one year after the affair was discovered. According to an interview with Daily Mail Australia, Carlie had begun dating her husband in 2015, and they married in 2021. Carlie gave birth to their daughter in 2022, and the affair was outed on the 22nd May 2022, when their daughter was about to turn two years old.
Reaching out to the woman who helped end her marriage, Carlie wrote: ‘A year ago today you hit send on an email that had a monumental effect on several people’s lives.
‘Mine, my husband’s, my daughter’s, both our parents and families, our friends. I often wonder what was going through your mind at that moment, how much of it was revenge against a man who broke your heart and how much of it was you trying to do the right thing for his wife.
‘The level of detail that you went into, felt like it had been curated to inflict pain. You knew what a wife would need to hear to get her to the point of no return in her marriage and you delivered it, blow by blow.’
Considering Carlie has a blog, a lot of her information is available online and therefore she wondered how much the other woman knew about her when sleeping with her husband.
‘I wonder whether you knew that I’d be at work that day when I received your email, cryptically entitled “Your husband”,’ she wrote.
‘Yes, that’s what he was, and technically still is at this point, my husband. I wonder whether you refer to him as your ex-boyfriend now. It’s so bizarre for me to think that this man I know so intimately had this significant other person in his life that I didn’t know about.’
Carlie had no idea that her husband was playing away. She had her doubts and had even asked him before, but she didn’t believe it could ever happen to them.
Artist’s impression of having an affair using a phone from the 90s
‘We were rock solid, him and I,’ she said.
‘I really thought that. We had a six-month-old baby and he was away a lot with work. Of course things were tough and we weren’t as connected as before but I needed him to hang in there for me, until things got easier. He would have, I think, if you had not come along at that moment.’
Incredibly, despite her heartbreak, anger and devastation, Carlie does not blame the other woman. She is a true believer in ‘everything happens for a reason’ and believes it will lead as a future lesson. She also feels somewhat sympathetic towards the woman.
She admitted: ‘I can imagine what it must have been like for you, living in that small town. One night a good looking guy comes into your bar for a drink. He can be funny and charming, my husband.
‘I can imagine how you would have fallen for him. As he came in each night he would have told you about how hard it is with a baby at home, how he wasn’t getting much attention.
‘All you had to do was listen to him, give him what he said I wasn’t, and soon enough he was yours.
‘I get it, I fell in love with him from the other side of a bar too.’
Knowing how it feels to be at the ‘other side of the bar’, Carlie wondered whether this replication of how they met had anything to do with the affair. Whether her husband’s cheating was him searching for what he felt he had lost in Carlie.
Carlie said: ‘I was once a cute blonde in a short skirt behind the bar at his favourite pub. Ten years later I was the mum in the yoga pants with the silver regrowth and bags under her eyes from being up all night with a sick baby.
‘He was supposed to love that version of me too. And he did, but he missed the girl who had nothing but time to dote on him. That’s what you gave him.’
And though it put Carlie through a lot, she says she is, in some ways, glad that her husband was not alone when away from his family (he worked away a lot).
Carlie wrote: ‘I love this man enough to feel glad that he was able to find love at those times, though it wasn’t from where I wish it had been.’
But, though Carlie is an incredibly strong and understanding person, she can’t help but find the whole situation to be a bit cliche.
The other woman was convinced Carlie’s husband would leave Carlie for her. But he didn’t.
As his daughter continued to grow, and stopped nursing and started sleeping, Carlie’s old self begun to shine through, and Carlie’s husband felt once again all that love and desire he felt during the original ‘other side of the bar’ experience.
And the other woman couldn’t handle this. Instead of letting him move on and attempt to make his marriage work, she wanted to unleash the same pain on him, as he had on her – by telling his wife every sordid detail of the secret relationship they’d shared.
Carlie, however, was focused on saving her family. But no amount of trying or counselling could fix the amount of trust that had been ruined.
She said: ‘We tried hard to put the pieces back together but it just didn’t work. I was different. It was the little details that did it. Those words and images etched into my mind.’
Amazingly, Carlie has come out of this experience with an open mind, and has actually taken away some positives from it.
Her and her husband, though separated, are okay now. According to Carlie, they’re ‘closer than ever’, due to learning so much about each other throughout the process.
They live separately, but they still stay in contact and love and respect each other – which Carlie feels has a positive effect on their daughter. She’s determined that nobody will ever ruin that.
And, in regards to the other woman and the letter, Carlie told the Mail Online: ‘I wrote it for me, not for her. Writing has been such a massive part of my healing. I don’t wish her any ill-will.
‘She did a really, really awful thing, but ultimately she’s just a person who fell in love with someone who was totally wrong for them. And who hasn’t done that?’.
