Dear Coleen

MY HUSBAND “bonded” with his leading lady in an amateur dramatics production we were both in.

After the show finished, they kept in touch via texts and phone calls and spent an afternoon in the pub together, all without my knowledge.

They didn’t have an actual affair, just a secret friendship and it only lasted three weeks.

When I suspected something and confronted my husband, he initially denied it and called me paranoid.

Then five months later, I bumped into her and she had left her husband and had a new female partner, who she has since married.

When I told my husband that night that I had seen her and that she’d told me some big news, he thought I was going to say she’d told me about their friendship, so he confessed.

I felt gutted and so let down. Throughout our relationship he’s had female friends and I had no problem with that, so the fact he kept this friendship secret suggests that it was different.

I’m really struggling to move on. I love him and he loves me and he’s said sorry countless times, and calls it a “stupid mistake”. But it wasn’t a mistake, was it? It was a conscious decision to lie to me so that he could spend time with another woman behind my back.

We all have crushes or flirty moments with other people and may do a bit of fantasising but I can’t get over the fact that he took the next step and began something that could have developed into an affair. I’m embarrassed to say that this all happened over two years ago but it still hurts like hell. How do I get it out of my head?