When Julie’s husband Tim picked her up at the airport, he had a bottle of champagne on ice in the car. For the last several months, they’d had a long distance marriage as Tim shuttled between two states -- one where they owned a successful restaurant chain and another where they were opening a new restaurant. Julie, who asked that her last name not be used for privacy reasons, and had arrived for new restaurant's opening night.        

After stopping at Tim's temporary home, they arrived at the restaurant where Julie noticed a sign that read “Welcome Julie.” At dinner that night, her father-in-law toasted her as the best thing that had ever happened to his son. But Julie could barely keep it together. During their first stop, she’d found a bottle of Viagra in his medicine cabinet with a prescription for eight tablets. Four were left in the bottle. And she and her husband hadn’t had sex for two years, because, Tim had said, he was too stressed by the job.

Later, Julie found receipts showing that Tim had been in a hotel with another woman on Valentine’s night. Julie’s husband had talked about flying her  to the city where he was on business so they could be together, but, it hadn’t worked out. So, on Valentine’s Day, he’d sent her $350 worth of roses from a local florist, calling later that night and telling her he was just going to "curl up with a book."

Instead, the trail of time-stamped receipts showed that he'd gone to a bar, picked up a girl and taken her to a hotel.  Julie was destroyed by her discovery. "This guttural noise came out of me,” she recalled. “It was like a deep gut scream, like my insides were being pulled out.” 

Discovering your spouse is having an affair can be a life-altering experience -- for either gender. According to accounts published in the New York Daily News, Richard Cohen found a diary illustrated with photos in which wife, Paula Zahn, wrote about her alleged affair with his pal, the married ContiGroup CEO Paul Fribourg. The day after the discovery, one of Cohen’s friends was quoted as saying, "Richard felt like he'd been stabbed in the heart twice when he found out his wife had been cheating with one of his best friends."        

Likewise, according to reports in the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, when Olympic skier Andy Mill discovered his wife, tennis star Chris Evert, was having an affair with Australian golfing legend Greg Norman, Mill -- who considered Norman his best friend --- Mill was heartbroken by his betrayal, saying: "A year and a half ago I'd have taken a bullet for this guy. I didn't realize he was going to pull the trigger." 

WHO IS THIS PERSON? 

“Tim and I had really great times together. We were crazy about each other and he treated me like a princess. When he would introduce me, he would say, ‘This is my beautiful wife, Julie. I’m so lucky to have her in my life.’ We even had male friends who would call him and say ‘cut it out, you’re making us look bad.’ Everyone thought we were the ideal couple,” said Julie. “When I found out he was cheating on me, it was like I didn’t even know who he was anymore.”      

Realizing that you’ve been living with someone who’s betrayed you in ways you never suspected, makes you wonder if anything in the entire relationship was real. Moreover, in today’s world of epidemic sexually transmitted diseases, finding out the very person who promised to love, honor and cherish you until death do you part has engaged in behaviors that could expose you STDs, including HIV/AIDS, can destroy your sense of personal and emotional safety.