This story is about a woman who didn’t go looking for betrayal, she slipped into it through loneliness, silence, and the need to feel seen.
People think betrayal starts with a decision, a moment where you choose wrong over right. Mine didn’t start that way. Mine started with loneliness so quiet I didn’t even know it had a voice. This is the story of how I let my marriage fade, how I built a second life without meaning to, and how both eventually collapsed on top of me.
I met my husband eighteen years ago, back when he first came to Malaysia for work. He is a German, quite in a shy sort of way and at the start everything felt easy.
We were young, romantic, and reckless enough to think love alone could carry a lifetime.
People say routine kills passion, but for us, it wasn’t routine. It was the gradual fading away that happens when no one really looks at you. He grew colder over the years, more anxious, more withdrawn. I grew louder to fill the silence. We had a daughter, built a home, played our roles. On the outside, I looked like I had the perfect life. On the inside, something in me was drying up.
I work in the consultancy field, mostly freelance. I spend long stretches alone, preparing for projects, watching the light change through the windows, letting hours disappear into work. That kind of solitude does something to you. It leaves room for thoughts you don’t say out loud. It leaves space for loneliness to grow roots.
I didn’t go looking for trouble. It found me through people I knew, and then through people they introduced me to. I got to know through a friend of a friend, an Iranian man was looking for a Malaysian to help open a bank account. He was not able to, because he was a refugee here, and due to the sanctions on Iran. I felt for his story, which I read on a Facebook post.
I was touched by his journey and his story and decided to help.
When I first met Aryan* for coffee to discuss what he needed help with, I was taken aback by the way he carried himself. He was tall, slightly muscular, young, with a thick luscious beard. He smelt of oud and had a pleasant smile on his face. We shared stories over a coffee, and I was taken by the resilience his journey had forced him to have. We parted ways that evening, but it was the start of our friendship.
At first, I kept in contact with him to see if he needed any help and to check up on how he was doing, and if he had found a job to take care of himself. He introduced me to other friends of his, mostly from the middle east, mostly here to find a better life. Someone else needed advice about work or money. One person would thank me, then another would text me, then another would ask if they could talk. These men lived harder lives than mine. They were younger, restless, full of stories that made my world feel small. They listened to me. They looked at me like I mattered.
I helped them because I could. Because it made me feel useful. Because it filled the hollow spaces inside me that routine had carved out.
Then one of them started confiding in me. Trauma. Fear. Loneliness. I listened. He thanked me with a softness that hit deeper than it should. Another man cried while telling me about his past.
I comforted him. Another told me I was the only person who believed in him.
And hearing that made something warm tighten in my chest.
I didn’t sleep with them immediately.
That’s not the kind of story this is.
It was slower than that.
Long messages.
Late calls.
Lingering touches.
Moments where I knew I could walk away but didn’t.
I don’t justify what happened, but I won’t lie either. Gratitude is a powerful drug. So is attention.
The first time I crossed the line, Aryan was shaking when he hugged me. I felt his breath on my neck. I felt my heartbeat stutter. I felt alive in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
We kissed.
I didn’t stop him.
I didn’t stop myself.
After that, it became easier. Not because I was proud of what I was doing, but because part of me had already fallen off the cliff, and there was nothing left to hold onto.
I told myself I was helping them.
I told myself my marriage was already dead.
I told myself I had needs too.
All of that was true.
And all of that was a lie.
I had affairs, more than once. Each one different, each one filling a different part of the emptiness I’d been carrying. Some friends found out, and their silence told me everything they didn’t dare say. Others cut ties entirely.
Then I met him, the one who made everything dangerous.
He was younger, intense, unpredictable. The kind of man who laughs with his whole body and loves like the world is ending. When he ran his fingers along my back, I felt the years peel off me. When he held my face and whispered my name, I believed in things I had no right to believe in.
With him, desire wasn’t just physical.
It was oxygen.
For three years, he was the pulse under my skin and the secret rhythm of my life.
With him, I wasn’t someone’s wife or mother. I was a woman again.
And then he was resettled to the United States. As part of his UN applications, he had to leave. He wanted a chance to live a normal life, not confined to the restrictions of being a refugee.
I cried in the bathroom so my husband wouldn’t hear. I held on by sending him little things, handmade gifts, birthday packages. He replied less, but I clung to every message like a starving person clings to crumbs.
Until the day he told me the truth.
“Please don’t send anything anymore. I’m seeing someone here. I need to move on.”
That was it. Three years gone in one message. A life I built in the shadows taken away from me by a man who had already forgotten how tightly I held onto him.
I broke quietly. No one knew. Not my husband. Not my friends. I kept working, kept cooking, kept smiling like nothing had died inside me.
One evening, another man I helped bail out before came by the house while my husband was at work. Usually my daughter would greet him. But that day, she barely looked up. She stayed in her room. Doors shut. Music is loud. When he left, she walked past me without saying a word.
Her silence cut deeper than any breakup.
She knew. I don’t know how. A message she saw. A tone in my voice. The kind of intuition children have about their parents.
She didn’t judge me. She didn’t confront me. She just looked at me like she didn’t recognise the person standing in front of her.
That look haunts me more than anything else, because no matter how many men held me, desired me, touched me nothing prepared me for the moment my daughter couldn’t even look at me.
I’m still married. I still pretend. My husband still believes I’m the loyal wife he built a life with. My daughter still eats dinner with me, but sometimes I catch her studying my face like she’s trying to decide who I really am.
And the man in the USA? He lives a life I will never be part of. I sometimes scroll through his old messages just to remember the way he made me feel, even though each one now hurts like pressing salt on an open wound.
People think tragedy is loud. Mine isn’t. It’s quiet. It’s in the way I avoid mirrors. The way I flinch when my phone buzzes. The way my daughter keeps her door shut a little more than before.
I built two lives.
Now I belong to none.
And the worst part?
I did it to myself.
And even after everything collapsed, I still extend a helping hand to desperate men, as if saving them might someday save me.
Write in. Tell your story. Get paid.
Share your story on our Facebook page and you may become a contributor for In Real Life Malaysia.
I Made Sure My Ex-husband Lost Everything After He Cheated On Me With A 21 Year Old Influencer
More from Real Relationships
I don’t feel anything about his death,’ shares M’sian betrayed by best friend
This story is about a man who learns that the childhood friend who once stole his happiness is now dying, …
‘I Chose Faith Over the Man I Loved,’ Shares M’sian Who Let Go of Her Boyfriend for Her Religious Beliefs
This is a story about a M’sian who found herself torn between the man she loved and the faith that …
“I ran away from my ex-husband,” shares Divorced Malaysian Woman Living In Hiding
This is the story of a Malaysian woman who married young against her family’s wishes, endured ten years of escalating …
