A woman ended her marriage after seeing herself referred to as 'SWMBO' in her husband's text messages.
The last thing you want to do in a relationship is to break trust and snoop through their phone. But for one woman, a quick glance at a text message changed everything and ultimately ended her marriage.
Sharing her story on Mamamia, an anonymous woman explained the moment she ended things with her husband.
Without any context, it can sound like a pretty dramatic move. But the real meaning behind it is so much deeper.
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The poster dives into a time when her son was two years old and things started to take a turn for the worse.
"From the moment our son was born, nothing changed for my husband," she wrote.
"He stayed in our marital bed whilst I moved into the nursery to do night duty with our son. He continued his long Friday lunches, that always turned into Friday night drinks, because they were networking opportunities.
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She added: "He had always played Thursday night sport – he didn’t ever even miss one week."
Although she felt an imbalance in the relationship, she still allowed him to have his downtime as he was the 'main breadwinner'.
A big issue started to unfold in the marriage when he didn't want to be open with her about his whereabouts.
"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.
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Then, the last straw was a text message her husband received after a night out. She allegedly saw herself referred to by the acronym 'SWMBO'.
After confronting her husband, it turns out that means 'She Who Must Be Obeyed'. As you can probably imagine, this made the anonymous wife feel pretty terrible.
"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," she wrote.
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"It’s called respect. Courtesy in checking to see if you’re needed – to say what your plans are."
A week later, she updated that she had packed up and left her husband.
She said: "To me, I didn’t have a choice. Staying with a man who valued us so little wasn’t an option."
One person summed up the situation by writing: "This is heartbreaking for each individual in that family; [there are] no winners."