My husband’s affair destroyed me: A story of divorce and renewal

Five years ago — on Valentine’s Day of all days — I had an appointment with my oncologist. It was good news. 

After ten years of treatment for breast cancer, he told me that I was — well, not exactly cured, oncologists don’t use that word — but as good as. My chance of a recurrence was no greater than for someone who had never had cancer contracting the disease. 

I stumbled out on to the street, past a florist’s shop decked with red roses and texted my husband. 

Good news, he replied. No kiss. 

That was a clue, on top of all the other clues that had been mounting up. Although, it was to be another ten days before he finally admitted he was having an affair and I initiated a divorce. Until that moment I had every reason to believe that I was in a very happy marriage. A mere five months earlier I celebrated my 60th birthday with a party for 100 family and friends. My husband, Mark, proposed a toast to me: ‘This woman changed my life,’ he told the assembled guests. ‘I love and adore her.’ 

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Along with my daughter, Hope, I had come through so much to arrive at this place of joy, this happy ever after. 

But all that was to change as, not long after, I was driving home from my mother’s house in Essex when, to my horror, a lorry that had been travelling in the nearside lane suddenly jack-knifed across the dual carriageway. I was travelling at 70mph and although I swerved on to the central reservation I could not avoid the high-speed collision and the left side of my BMW was crushed under the lorry. 

Incredibly, I was unharmed, as was the lorry driver and as we stood amid the wreckage we saw the body of a man, a pedestrian. It would later emerge he had tried — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to take his own life by throwing himself under the wheels of the lorry. 

My car was undriveable and needed forensics, so my grown-up daughter left work and came to collect me. Shocked as I was, it didn’t occur to me to ask at the time why my husband didn’t come and collect me himself. 

I took a week off, then went back to work in the job I loved as editor of Good Housekeeping. In the weeks that followed the crash, Mark seemed distanced and heavily involved in his new hobby of open-water swimming. 

Something had changed in our relationship but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was — I thought I was still suffering the after-effects of the crash.

And I believed I knew all about shock. Mark was my second husband. I was tragically widowed at age 36 while pregnant with Hope, my second child. 

Remarkably, I didn’t let this stop me from pursuing a career I loved. I worked hard as a single parent to become a magazine editor, only for tragedy to strike a second time when my eldest daughter, Ellie, contracted the same form of leukaemia that killed her father, claiming her life when she was only nine years old. 

Lindsay (pictured), the ex editor of Good Housekeeping explains how she suffered a nervous breakdown and moved out of the home she had built with her cheating husband Mark

Devastated beyond words, I devoted my life to raising Hope — and to my work. I gave up all expectation of any man being prepared to take on a grief-stricken, workaholic single parent. Until, in 2003, I put my house in North London on the market. 

Hope was struggling at school and I needed to move to an area with more resources for her special needs. When I opened the door to the estate agent, I thought: ‘He’s nice — but I bet he’s married.’ 

He wasn’t — and within 18 months we were man and wife. At 11 years old, Hope had a father-figure in her life for the first time. She loved him immediately. 

It wasn’t all plain sailing. My devastating diagnosis of Stage 2 breast cancer came just two and a half years after my wedding to Mark. I assumed I would die. My original family had died — why wouldn’t I? 

My employers were supportive, but I still flip-flopped between steely determination and utter despair. Even as I realised I was going to be on the good side of the statistics, I felt a terrible guilt that I had not suffered what my brave first husband John and, even more terribly, my adored child had to endure. 

I lost all my hair during chemotherapy and was as sick as a dog. I still have a seven-inch scar down the right side of my chest. Suffice to say, it changed the way I felt about my body for ever, although Mark did everything to reassure me that he was still attracted to me. 

We came through it and having survived the deaths of my first husband and child, not to mention my own brush with death, I became even more obsessed with work, which was my hobby as well as my career. 

Mark liked to spend his spare time by the water, on the water or in the water. In 2014 he decided to swim the Channel and my heart melted when he said he wanted to raise funds for Blood Cancer UK, in memory of John and Ellie. 

I didn’t accompany him on the boat. My reaction to chemotherapy had made me wary of anything that could induce nausea. But both my brothers went with him, as well as Hope who, unbeknown to him, slipped over the side of the boat and swam behind him the last 500 yards to the French shore. 

Two months after Mark’s incredible Channel swim, I opened the brand new Good Housekeeping Institute, launched a website and was named Editor of the Year for a second time. 

Meanwhile, Hope had made such progress at school that she was able to go to university and study Mandarin Chinese — incredible for a child who was unable to read or write at eight years old. I believed that out of tragedy the three of us had created a perfect life. 

Lindsay is getting stronger every day and has stopped taking anti-depressants after five years. Pictured: Lindsay and Mark on their wedding day

Ever since buying my first home with Hope’s father, I had lived in London. After marrying Mark we had moved several times but always on the same pages of the A to Z.

Now the time had come, we decided together, to move out of London. Mark found a converted barn and we spent eight months living in rented accommodation refurbishing it to perfection. 

We moved to what we both called our For Ever Home in September 2015. With hindsight, Mark found it harder to adjust to country life than me. So, I was happy when he found open-water swimming groups to join. I am not a keen swimmer — only really liking water heated to bath temperature. 

The December after the car crash we were due to go to Scotland, as we had done for the past ten years, but Mark didn’t want to go — he wanted to go the South Coast and swim. 

I remember shouting at him: ‘It’s not like you want to take me to Paris or Venice is it? You just want to swim!’ 

Neither of us would give in, so I went to Scotland alone. The friends we had spent so many holidays with assumed he had become addicted to exercise. 

Then, on my way home, as if fate hadn’t dealt me enough blows, I was involved in a second devastating accident. 

My car had been inadequately repaired, the steering failed as I negotiated a bend and I ploughed into a ditch. Another near-death experience. Again, miraculously, I wasn’t hurt, although my car was now indisputably a write-off. 

I hoped, as I retreated to a Lake District hotel overnight, that Mark would come to rescue me. He didn’t even return my panicky phone calls. 

Alone in my hotel room, I suffered intense flashbacks to John and Ellie’s deaths. All night I was imagining the walls of the room running with their blood. 

I had no one to help me and I couldn’t call a doctor, who would have explained that I was suffering from PTSD. All I could do was bury my face in a pillow to stop my screams from waking other guests. 

By February 2017, the two recent car crashes were starting to recede into the past and I was feeling more like my old self. 

Until I saw the first three lines of an email on my husband’s phone — he hadn’t disabled the screen alerts — from a woman with whom, it appeared, he was intending to spend a weekend in Dover. 

Incredibly, despite everything at that moment, I hoped with all my heart that I had misunderstood. That there was an innocent explanation. Or maybe it was a flirtation and the affair hadn’t started. Or that it was just a fling. 

I begged him to reassure me. I told him it made no sense, reminding him of his beautiful words five months earlier. He denied he was having an affair, but told me our marriage had been over for ages. 

One evening, desperate for the truth, I tried to grab his phone to see for myself what the messages said. 

The phone slipped out of both our hands and smashed. What happened next, I could never have predicted: my husband dialled 999, claiming that I had attacked him.

Two police cars arrived, with flashing lights. And, unbelievably, I was arrested. I spent a night locked in a cell before being released without any charge; the duty solicitor assured me, without a stain on my character.

Fearful of further accusations, I fled with my beloved dogs to my mother’s house, which meant my husband was able to stay in the family home.

Very soon after I heard he had his girlfriend there and was seen strolling hand in hand with her around our home town, taking her to the cinema where we had recently spent our 12th wedding anniversary. Even, I heard later, introducing her to the neighbours. 

I filed for divorce as soon as he admitted adultery. To this day, I have never met the woman who, while I was at work, was in my bed with my husband. 

I was broken-hearted by the end of what I truly believed to be a happy marriage. And felt that at 60 I was too old to start over. I was already exhausted from having had to pick myself up after the deaths of my first husband and child and after the cancer.

Lindsay is looking forward to her daughter Hope’s (pictured) wedding to Jamie (pictured) and is proud of Hope’s faith in ‘enduring love’

Isolated, alone and subsequently made redundant from my job at Good Housekeeping after more than 18 years there, I suffered what, looking back, was a fairly major nervous breakdown. 

There were days when I didn’t bother getting dressed but wandered around the garden of my rented home swigging Sauvignon Blanc from the bottle. I became suicidal, ironic given that the car crash had been caused by an attempted suicide.

My GP prescribed anti-depressants and a few sleeping pills — not enough to kill myself. I was diagnosed as suffering from Post-Traumatic Shock and had EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) therapy — more usually prescribed for soldiers returning from combat zones. 

Eventually, I recovered enough to get a court order evicting Mark — it was just one year since the party where he toasted my health and told family and friends he loved and adored me. 

Even with the divorce settled by November 2017, the struggle back to mental health was long and hard. 

There were no jobs for editors, the tough market conditions that had led to my redundancy has changed magazines for ever, and I was too unhappy to write enough to make a living. On a whim, I applied to train as a life coach, oblivious of the fact that I was in no shape to help anyone else. At least, the psychology training helped me understand the effects of all the trauma I have experienced in my life. 

I started helping at a local ­Riding for the Disabled group, menial work, mainly shovelling muck, but the fresh air and exercise lifted my mood. 

I rediscovered my love of riding and even bought my own horse, Pablo, braving getting back in the saddle at an age when I thought such activities were behind me. 

Lockdown left me even more isolated, especially in the early days, when I was on my own except for my dogs. As soon as allowed, I bubbled with Hope, who had moved into a flat with her partner. 

Without any expectation to go out or socialise — let alone date — I was finally able to heal in my own time, not just from the divorce but from the past tragedies, too. 

Mark has now re-married and I wish them well, although he and I have no contact. After a period of understandable hurt, Hope has reunited with him. He is the only father she has ever known. 

My recovery has been slower and it is only this month, five years on, that I have finally been able to stop taking anti-depressants. I still see a therapist every week.

Hope is getting married this month. And I have enjoyed all the traditional mother-of-the bride activities, such as choosing the wedding dress and planning the reception.

The wedding will be bittersweet because I will fulfil the father-of-the-bride role as well, being the one to give her away. Mark and his new wife will not be there. 

Despite the extraordinary run of ill-fate we have had in our lives, I am proud to have still — despite everything — raised a daughter who has faith in enduring love. 

And that is what I wish for her and her future husband, what I had with her father, true love that lasts a lifetime — ‘til death us do part — and even, maybe, for many years beyond that.