After 18 years of marriage, I thought I knew everything about love and loyalty—until my husband walked in with a girl half my age clinging to his arm. “She’s just a friend,” he said. “Only for a few days.” But deep down, I knew better.
Eighteen years of marriage isn’t just love.
It’s laundry at midnight. It’s biting your tongue when you want to scream.
It’s sleeping back to back some nights, just because you’re too tired to face what’s really wrong.
You can date someone for a year and think you know them.
But eighteen? That’s your whole life.
That’s choosing the same person over and over — through slammed doors, lost jobs, and the sound of your child crying in the next room.
I met Ben in college.
I was the girl who kept quiet, always writing things I was too scared to say out loud.
Poems in the margins of my notebook.
Ben?
He was loud. He filled the room. Laughing too much.
Always surrounded.
He never had to ask for attention. It just came to him, like air finds the lungs.
I was his first real girlfriend.
He wasn’t my first kiss, but he was the first person who looked at me like I mattered. Like I was more than just quiet.
I fell hard. The kind of love where you imagine rocking chairs on a porch before you even make it past graduation.
Now I’m in my forties.
My body feels different.
My heart, too. I look in the mirror and see creases I don’t remember earning.
I catch women — young, perfect-looking women — glancing at Ben in the grocery store. In the bank. The gas station.
They don’t know heartbreak.
They don’t know how hard it is to stay.
And I wonder… how do you compete with youth when all you’ve got left is loyalty?
Still, I shook those thoughts off. Kept folding laundry. Kept boiling rice.
Until the day the door opened.
I was vacuuming the living room.
Wearing my old sweatshirt, the one with the tomato soup stain near the hem.
My hair was pulled back, messy, not even brushed.
I heard the door click open but thought nothing of it.
Then I saw him.
Ben.
With someone behind him.
She was young. Couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
Long brown hair.
Big eyes. A wide smile.
She clung to Ben’s arm like she belonged there.
Like it was normal.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
He looked at me like this was all fine. Like this wasn’t strange at all.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
