Woman ends marriage after learning husband refers to her as ‘SWMBO’ in texts to friends
How an acronym pushed this woman to leave her husband.
What would push you to leave a marriage?
For one woman, it was finally seeing how her husband really viewed her - by glimpsing a text message he sent to friends.
The anonymous woman posted her story on Mamamia, with the headline: 'The text my ex-husband sent about Friday night drinks that ended my marriage'.
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So, what happened?
The woman first gives a bit of background - she gave birth to a child two years ago, and notes that when their son was born, "Nothing changed for my husband".
While she moved into the nursery to do night duty with the baby, life continued as normal for her partner - he still went on long lunches, Thursday night sport matches, Friday drinks, the works.
The writer says she fully supported him in his job, and would "happily" give him downtime, but there was one problem: she wanted him to let her know his plans, but that was something he "absolutely hated" doing.
"It was a weird shift in our marriage that I hadn’t expected – this stubborn reluctance to tell us when he was going to participate in our lives," she wrote.
As you can probably imagine, this resulted in a whole lot of fighting, and she felt their marriage slowly fall apart.
The final nail in the coffin was when she saw text messages from some mates on her husband's phone, after he'd got in at midnight the previous evening.
"This morning, he’d woken at 8am, and headed straight for the shower, without even checking in on me and the baby in the kitchen – meaning that we hadn’t seen him since the previous morning," she wrote.
"But evidently, my husband had made the time to send a few replies. I didn’t know what to make of his last one, which read:
"'Don’t think I can make it tonight. SWMBO will say no.'"
SWMBO isn't exactly a common acronym - so you can understand the woman's confusion when she read it.
So she did what any normal person would do and confronted her husband, asking him what SWMBO actually meant.
He told her it meant 'She Who Must Be Obeyed' with the woman writing: "I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.
"It wasn’t a matter of ‘obeying’ me, or asking my permission, as he often complained. It’s not called ‘asking permission’ like he’s a teenager and I’m his mother.
"It’s called respect. Courtesy in checking to see if you’re needed – to say what your plans are."
That was the final straw for the woman, who said the next week she took the baby and left her husband.
She wrote: "To me, I didn’t have a choice. Staying with a man who valued us so little wasn’t an option."