WHEN Vanessa Feltz revealed that the new man she was dating had abandoned her via text message on Best magazine’s Suddenly Single podcast, one woman felt her pain.
Melanie, 52, from Walsall, was shocked when her husband of 17 years dumped her in the same way – and was devastated when she discovered he was leaving her for her best friend.
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Here, she tells Sarah Morton why she will never forget that message and the effect it had on her life.
I struggled to catch my breath as I read the message on my phone.
There they were, a few little words that broke my heart in two: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m leaving.”
The message was from my husband, Martin. We had been married for 17 years, and although things had been difficult in our relationship for some time, I never expected it to come to this point.
And the worst part? I would soon find out he was leaving me for my best friend.
They had been having an affair behind my back for months.
And now he was leaving me and our two children with nothing but an empty bank account and our hearts full of pain.
Vanessa Feltz has my complete sympathy. She may not have been dating her mystery man for long, but being dumped over text is one of the worst feelings imaginable.
Martin was at work when he sent me the devastating message that would change my life forever.
It was a normal afternoon, a day in February 2022.
And even though we had been like ships in the night over the previous months, and I had become increasingly convinced that he was being unfaithful to me, my stomach dropped to the floor and I fell to my knees when I read those words.
Seventeen years of marriage and he couldn’t even face me to end it.
I begged and pleaded for him to come talk to me about it. He refused.
I then spent a sleepless night where he didn’t even come home.
But the worst was to come.
The next afternoon, my children, Jack, who was 13 at the time, and Grace, who was 11, told me, “Daddy said he’s moving.”
He would stay alone with them when I wasn’t around and tell them without consulting me. The children were completely devastated and confused.
Now my own headache has been replaced by seething anger.
The fact that he delivered a message through our children was too disgusting to bear.
I realized at that moment that my loving husband, a perfect partner for many, many years, had been replaced by a monster.
I’ve had my suspicions about him and my friend Jill for some time.
Our children know each other and so we have been friends for a decade.
She was always a good friend, but she was very annoying. She’s seven years younger than me, but I’m bubbly and fun and she was dull.
Looking back, maybe Martin wanted someone super quiet who didn’t ask him a lot of questions.
‘I feel very betrayed’
Call it female intuition, but I knew something was going on between them.
Our sex life had declined and she started liking his Facebook posts more and more.
Then I heard from other friends that they had seen them together, alone, ordering drinks together at a local bar.
When I first confronted him, he made me think I was the problem, that I was crazy.
He kept asking me how I could think he would do this to me.
He only came home from work in the early hours of the morning, but according to him, he was busy working and I was the one who was paranoid.
After that fateful text message, I confronted Martin once again – this time at a house he had started renting – and attacked him.
He finally admitted everything.
He was struggling with a £40,000 debt I didn’t know about from a deal gone wrong – and Jill was his comfort.
Being with her made him forget his problems.
He was in love.
Of course, I was furious and told him what to do, but he didn’t seem to care. He just told me spitefully that he was taking the kids and wouldn’t pay me a penny, and that I would have to take on his debt.
Empty threats
I was hell. He had no reason to take the children and my lawyers knew that. They were all empty threats.
Furious, I took to Facebook and wrote a series of obscenities, which are too rude to repeat, on Jill’s page.
I didn’t want to see her in real life. I couldn’t face it.
So venting on her page was all I had the strength to do.
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t have the courage to respond.
But as a result of the case, I lost an entire community of people.
Friends I shared Jill with, I can’t talk to anymore, even though it’s not their fault. I feel too betrayed to be around any of them.
The friend who warned me has since moved on to a new relationship and it has taken up a lot of her time. So it’s lonely.
Martin and Jill are still together and she will have to put up with him.
He doesn’t live with her because my kids don’t go near her, and he still sees them, although not as regularly as he should.
Jill’s daughter even told my daughter that her mother is not a woman’s woman.
When your own child thinks that about you, well, that says a lot.
Dodged a bullet
My kids are in therapy now. Grace has to study at home because she is too anxious to be with other children. She is still in a lot of pain.
Martin had always been a loving father, but suddenly his priorities changed completely and he didn’t seem to care.
He stopped paying for the children. I struggled to survive on a single salary, having had the luxury of Martin being the main breadwinner throughout our marriage.
The kids and I ended up living on out-of-date food and relying on food banks.
The divorce cost me £6,000, which my parents lent me.
I had to go through the Child Maintenance Service to get a single penny from him, but he takes his mistress – sorry, his girlfriend – away all the time.
The unfairness of it all is sickening, but in many ways I’m in a better place now.
Martin and Jill welcome each other. She will soon find out what he really is like.
However, I get a lot of support from a great Facebook group, which has been wonderful.
I would tell Vanessa that although the pain of being abandoned in such a cruel way is unbearable, you will come out of this situation stronger.
You dodged a bullet – and a coward.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
