Reddit Stories - BETRAYAL in the Bank_ My PARTNER's SECRET Gift_

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #betrayal #bank #partner #secretgift #relationships  Summary: A tale of betrayal unfolds in a bank when a partner's secret gift is discovered. Trust is shattered as secrets unravel, leaving hearts broken and relationships tested.  Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, betrayal, bank, partner, secret gift, relationships, trust, secrets, heartbreak, deception, loyalty, honesty, betrayal story, emotional, relationship advice, personal finance, financial secretsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.

I hope you enjoy this story. Spouse used $25,000 from our joint account to buy a present for his sibling. When I brought it up, he insulted me and suggested I find employment. A fortnight afterward he's begging for my help. My husband Peter, 33M, and I, 30F, have been married for three years and before that, we had been together for three years too. I've known his family for almost six years and I've gotten along with most of them except for his sister Lucy, 27F. Brad is usually a word reserved for younger kids who tend to act out a lot

when they don't get their way, but I think it fits pretty well for Lucy as well. She's the youngest of three kids and the only daughter, so I guess that's why her parents have always spoiled her and to a certain extent, so we have our brothers. But as an adult, her father and my brother-in-law don't really treat her all that differently anymore, but I can't say the same for her mother and my husband. I get along decently with my mother-in-law most of the time and I love my husband, but the two of them are mostly responsible for the spoiled way that she still acts. When I met her for the first time, she didn't like me right off the bat because I did not treat her any differently from the rest of the family, but I didn't think I should have had to.

Anyway, since then, she has never been nice to me and has always had a very weird attitude when she's around me. The sad thing is that it doesn't even bother me because I know that she's a and a grown woman who cannot handle not being the center of attention everywhere. I don't think I need her approval in the first place so I've never tried to be her friend. Peter doesn't like this, and he has tried to tell me that I should at least make some effort to befriend her several times, but I've never paid attention to it and after we got married, he stopped trying. But he has always treated his sister like a princess and I've never had an issue with it until recently. So far, it was only his behavior through which he was spoiling her by validating

her all the time, even when she would do something wrong and always prioritizing her over everything else. And occasionally, he would splurge a little on her, but that was a pretty reasonable amount and he would never go overboard. But two weeks ago, at her birthday party, he gave her a present worth $25,000 and that's where I draw the line. It was a stunning jewelry set that she had been talking about for weeks and had told him that she was saving up money for it. So he decided to give it to her as her older brother to make her day and not even for a second did he consider the fact that financially, we were not in a position to be just giving out such expensive gifts from luxury brands. He hadn't discussed it with me earlier, which I think

he really should have because it's a huge amount and what's worse is that he had withdrawn that amount from our joint savings account. After he gave her that gift at her birthday party and everyone started going crazy over it, I had to pull him aside for a second because I was really confused about what was going on since earlier. We had decided that we were just going to give her a normal gift and that's what I had brought along. He explained to me that he had been assigned a pretty big project with an extremely prestigious client at work and that meant a big fat check as an advance and he had deposited that in the joint savings account but a few days after that, Lucy started talking about the jewelry said that she wanted and he just knew that he had to get it for her.

So he decided to make a withdrawal from the account and purchase that set for her so he could give it to her as a present on her birthday and he told me that the rest of the payment for the project that he had taken on would come through in a couple of months, so it didn't matter that he had splurged a little right now. I thought it was strange that I hadn't received any notifications from the bank since I had alert set up for every transaction and my husband confessed to me that the day that he had deposited the check at the bank, he had come home and while I was sleeping. He had disabled all text alerts from the bank from the app and he knows that he knows that he

knows that I don't really check my email very often, so he knew that he was safe and I wouldn't find out. He told me that he had initially done it because he wanted me to be surprised when he told me about the project, but after that, when he decided to use some of the money from the advance payment to buy that present for Lucy, he thought that it would be best that I wasn't notified by the bank, so he did not enable those alerts again. I thought that this was very dishonest and disrespectful to me and had been feeling quite annoyed while he was explaining all of this to me. So once Once he was done talking, I told him that this was absolutely unacceptable behavior and that I did not appreciate the fact that he had purchased such an expensive gift for his sister without

even consulting me first. Especially considering the fact that the money that he had withdrawn had been from our joint savings account and it was supposed to be for both our futures, not just him. After marriage, when we had made that account, we had decided that we were not going to touch any of that money until we had a baby because this was for the future and both of us had honored that agreement until recently. When I confronted him about all of this, and I told him that I was not happy with this decision,

he got really nasty with me and he told me that I didn't have any siblings, so he didn't expect me to understand what he was doing. He also said that Lucy was really important to him and as her older brother, he could give her as many expensive gifts as he wanted to, and I had no right to stand in the way of that. I tried to argue with him, telling him that we had already agreed

that we were going to start trying for a baby by the end of this year so we had to save money for that, and as his wife, I had every right to talk about our finances if I thought he was going overboard. But then he said something really mean and called me a stupid and irrational housewife who was just jealous of my sister-in-law and told me to get a job so I wouldn't waste his time and energy by creating drama about such petty stuff. Then he went back to the party and left me standing all by myself in a corner and I had to try really hard to hold back my tears while I walked to the car and started driving back home. Once I was inside the car, I drove a little farther away, and then I finally broke down.

While crying, I called my parents up and I asked them if they would be okay with having me stay with them for a couple of days because I just needed to get away from Peter. What he had said about me just being a housewife and needing to get a job really got under my skin because I had only been a sue for the past four months. I had to quit my previous job because I wasn't getting the kind of opportunities that I wanted. and I felt like my potential was being wasted there. I had spent quite some time there and had been feeling trapped, so after some discussion with Peter,

I decided to quit and he knew that I was going to do this. At the time, he had been very supportive of it and had told me to go for it because he said that I had better employment opportunities in store for me, given my talent and dedication. I had been looking for job opportunities to my taste for the past four months but hadn't been able to find anything that really appealed to me, so I still kept looking because I didn't want to waste. my time at another dead-end job. In the meantime, I had taken over all the household chores

because I didn't want to sit at home uselessly so I guess I was a housewife, but just because I was in between jobs at the moment. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being a housewife, but the way that he said it, that was obviously meant to insult me. Even when I had quit my job, we had decided that he was still going to keep putting aside a share of his income for the savings account and once I started working again, I would resume as well. But, just because I had told him that I didn't appreciate him buying expensive gifts for Lucy, especially when we were not even sure if we could afford them yet or not, he had turned the entire situation around on me and made me feel terrible about things that

he himself encouraged initially. The fact that he had insulted me because of money made me feel terrible and after the party, I drove back home, packed some of my things, and moved in with my parents. Since then, I have been living here because he refuses to acknowledge that he did something wrong and apologizes for it. He had reached out to me the day after the party and told me that he really wanted to make this marriage work, but he's not going to apologize because he didn't think that he did anything wrong by giving his sister a gift. He also told me that the reason he had said all those things was because he was really annoyed with me and he knew that he had taken things too far,

but I had been the one provoking him on purpose, especially since I knew that his family was his weakness, but I just kept triggering him. But I didn't care, I told him that I was going to stand my ground, and that I was not coming back home until he apologized, and since then, we had been arguing back and forth for quite some time. Two weeks have passed since then and I've been miserable, but at least my parents have been by my side. He hadn't even been here to see me, we had only been talking on the phone and through texts. However, last evening, he showed up in person and told me that it was an emergency and that he absolutely needed to talk to me. My parents were not exactly happy to see him, but they still allowed him to enter and we had a chat in the living room,

where he told me that I was right about everything and he had been a total jerk. So he had come to apologize to me for it and also to ask for my help because something happened at work and now, he needed to return all the money that he had received. Apparently, his company had lost the project and the client had made a deal with another company. So now, according to the contract, they had to return any advance payment that they had received, in full, and as we all know, he had already spent $25,000 of that payment on a gift for his sister. While he had been at work, his boss had told him all about it and demanded that he clear the payment by the end of the week. He was in big trouble now because before he came to me, he had gone

to his sister's house and told Lucy about the situation that he was in. And with a heavy heart, he had to ask her to return the gift to him and since he still had the receipt, he could get his money back. She hadn't had any occasion to wear it yet, so it was still in used but in true Lucy fashion, she refused. I don't think anybody who has known her is going to be surprised by this because she has always been a spoiled and selfish brat and this was exactly what I expected from her. But for whatever reason, Peter was surprised, and while telling me what Lucy had said, I could see that he really hadn't seen this coming, which just speaks volumes about how naive even blind he had been. Apparently, Lucy had told him that she already felt very emotionally

attached to that gift and she was really sorry. But she couldn't return it to him and even when Peter requested her to understand his situation, she started throwing a temper tantrum and told him that once he had already gifted her something, he couldn't take it back and asked him to go away after they got into an argument over this. Then, he decided to call his parents, and while his father was at least sympathetic with him, his mother told him outright that he had no business asking for his gift back, and that Lucy was right, she was not obliged to return it to him. They told him to figure out another solution on his own and left it at that. After that, he even reached out to his younger brother out of desperation, but my brother-in-law

straight-up refused to get involved. So when nobody from his family had come to his rescue, he had decided to come to me with nowhere else to go. All of a sudden, he had a conscience and he felt like he needed to talk to me, which he obviously did because he had nobody else. else on his side right now. He told me that now, he would have to dip into our savings for another $25,000 so he could clear the payment by the end of the week or else he would be in big trouble at work and might even get fired and he couldn't afford that. Peter also said that he could have easily withdrawn the money beforehand and then told me about it after it was already done, but because he wanted to be honest with me and show me how sincere he

was about his apology. He had decided to approach me before he did any of that so he would of my consent since it was money that belonged to both of us. I could tell that he was just grasping at straws because he didn't want to lose me, but he also didn't want to lose his money so, he had come to me, pretending as if he was really sorry about what had happened. So I told him that since he had screwed up personally, the $25,000 that he needed to return would have to come out of his own pockets and not from our joint savings. I also told him that he hadn't been doing me a favor by coming to me and telling me about his intentions of withdrawing another huge sum of money from our joint account just so he could cover up his own mistakes. I would have found out

about it eventually because this time, the bank would definitely notify me since I had enabled the alerts again and I was not staying with him, so he couldn't disable it without my knowledge. The only reason he was even apologizing to me right now was because he felt guilty since I had been right about everything, especially about Lucy, and since nobody from his family was on his side. He needed me to be there for him. I told him that he was an extremely selfish man and and that I did not have any intention of agreeing to his plan of withdrawing the money from our savings. He had to use his personal savings for it because he was the one who had messed up. And if he was really sorry, then he would not argue with me,

but he still continued to fight with me and told me that he was the one who had been saving money all on his own for the past couple of months and I hadn't been able to make a single contribution because I hadn't even been working. So just to make things fair, I should have agreed to his terms, but I was being unreasonable and he told me that as his wife, I should stand by him in such difficult time since he had ended up in a fight with his family and has also lost a huge project on the same day. I just reminded him of what he had said to me and he had insulted me on purpose the other day at the party

and then I told him that I had behaved with him in the same way and put him down like that. He wouldn't have thought twice before filing for a divorce, but at least I was still trying to make it work and giving him a chance to fix things because I loved him. And to defend himself, he couldn't come up with anything valid so he just started yelling about how money isn't everything and that I should think about his feelings in a situation right now as well instead of being just as selfish as his family. I literally laughed out loud when he said that money wasn't everything because if it wasn't, then why not sacrifice your own money instead of our joint savings? He had no answer for that, so I told him that ultimately, it was his call what he wanted to do

since technically, I couldn't stop him from using the money from our savings account. But I had made up my mind about what I wanted to do when I was going to speak to a lawyer the next day and put an end to all of this. I was done being pushed around and made to feel bad about myself, so I told him that I was no longer willing to fight for our marriage anymore. When I implied that I was going to speak to a lawyer and file for divorce, he completely lost it and started screaming at me, telling me that I was being selfish and unreasonable. Then, from When yelling at me, he went to just screaming in general about how everything was unfair and how everyone was letting him down in ways that he didn't even know were possible.

At that point, I felt kind of bad for him because he had lost a huge project at work that day, then his family had let him down, and after that, when he came to me to feel better, I also told him that I was not going to be there for him anymore. Needless to say, his day was not going very well, and he started having a breakdown in the living room. At that moment, I really didn't know what to say or do for him because on one hand, I felt terrible, but on the other hand, I couldn't forget the insult. So I just ended up standing there quietly for a few minutes before going to his side,

patting him on the back, and telling him that everything was going to be fine eventually, but he needed to pull himself together. I tried to be as kind as possible, but in my head, I had already made up my mind that I was going to leave him, and I was firm about it. A couple of minutes later, once he was done having a breakdown, he just abruptly got up and left without even saying goodbye. After he left, I called up our family lawyer and explained the situation to him and he put me in touch with a divorce attorney late at night and on the phone call itself, we decided to meet today and within this week, we are going to file for a divorce.

I was pretty sure about everything until this morning, but then I received a text from Peter, saying that he was sorry about everything and that he was going to pay the $25,000 out of his own pocket and not use our savings. He told me that he hadn't been thinking straight last evening and he had been a complete mess because he had lost a big project, which is why he had ended up acting out like that. But he really wanted to make it work with me and he knew that I loved him and he loved me too, so he wanted to give us one final chance and wanted me to consider it as well. So now, I'm suddenly having second thoughts about getting a divorce from him because I do love him, but I know that right now, leaving him would be the best choice for me.

But for him, it might lead to another breakdown and I don't know what to do. I'd defer wanting to leave my husband when he's already going through a rough patch. Update 1, for days have passed since I posted and I decided to go through with the divorce and told my lawyer that I wanted to file the petition. It was not an easy decision to make for me because I genuinely used to think that Peter was my soulmate. But in light of recent events, I don't think I can go on pretending to believe that because it's obviously not true. If it had been, he never would have said the things that he said, and no matter

how hard I try, I just can't get it out of my head. His behavior recently has been terrible and I'm not the kind of woman who is going to put up with this just because I love him and he needs to realize that. Maybe there are better people than me with bigger hearts who would be willing to forgive in such situations, but that is not me and I feel really sorry for us, both of us, since neither of us had wanted things to end this way, but it is what it is. After the message that Peter had sent me a few days ago, I didn't reply to it for a couple of days but yesterday, I told him that I was really sorry, but I had decided that I was going to go through with the divorce because I couldn't be with him anymore. Even if I wanted to,

things would never go back to the same way that they were before all of this took place. And maybe it was better for both of us to try and move on because clearly, neither of us were happy with each other anymore. I told him that I hoped that he would understand and then I blocked him because I didn't want to hear back from him again because this is quite difficult for me as it is. I didn't want it to get worse. I've been miserable but, thankfully, my parents have been very supportive and they think that I'm doing the right thing for myself. I don't know if it's the right thing for Peter, but that's his lookout now. Update 2 so Peter was served with the divorce papers today, almost five days after we filed the petition and he came over in the evening. He had a bunch

of bags with him and when I opened the door to him, he told me that he had packed all my things that I had left behind in the house and brought them all to me because I would probably be needing them. I could tell that he was very upset and had probably been crying in the car before he came here, but I didn't want to discuss it because that would just make things unnecessarily awkward and difficult. But he wanted to talk about it, so while I was bringing the bags inside, he asked me how we managed to go from planning a baby a couple of weeks ago to getting divorced now and I honestly did not know how to answer that. I still tried, though, and I told him that he had been quite unkind to me,

and by the time he realized that I was right, it was way too late for us to fix things. He tried telling me that it was not too late, since the divorce had only been filed, and it hadn't actually been finalized. We could still try couples counseling and try to make it work, but I shut it down instantly. For couples counseling to work,

both of us would have to be willing to try and make it work, and I wasn't willing to do that anymore. I had kept my dignity and self-respect several times in the past, but I wasn't willing to do that anymore because, at some point, you just started feeling like a pushover and a complete doormat. And just because I loved him, it did not give him the right to walk all over me and not expect me to stand up against it. So while it was really sad that we had gone from planning a family to getting a divorce in just a couple of months, I think it was for the best that we hadn't actually gotten pregnant

because that would have only complicated things even more. Then once all the bags had been brought inside, I tried to wish him the best for the future and say goodbye to him, but he had already turned around and started to leave. So I ended up saying nothing and just shut the door after he left. I don't think he realizes that this is just as difficult for me as it is for him and has only been thinking about himself, which I think is pretty selfish. It just makes me believe that I'm doing the right thing by getting a divorce

because if I had actually decided to have a baby with him, I'm pretty sure he would have been just as self-centered and my personal life and mental health would have gone for a toss. I know that he was trying to kind of emotionally manipulate me into coming back by bringing up the topic of starting a family, believing that maybe that would make me reconsider everything, but it had the opposite effect and now, I'm even more determined to end this marriage as soon as possible. Update 3. So two months have passed since I filed for a divorce and today, we finally managed to get it finalized. We don't really have a waiting period here in my state, so things were wrapped up relatively quickly. I'm very grateful for all the help from my lawyer to make the mediation sessions as easy and peaceful for me as possible because I had been having a very hard time coming to terms with the divorce emotionally and was on the verge of crying every time I would have to see him. As much as I want to deny it, I can't say that I don't love him. him anymore. But ultimately, that didn't matter because I think everyone knows that you need more than just love to make a marriage work. I know for a fact that even he loves me because he handed me a letter today and told me to read it once I got home and I did. In the letter, he basically just apologized for everything that he had put me through and told me that ideas served way better and he was too late to realize it. But now that he knew, he was going to try and become a better

man, so maybe in the future, if I wanted to, then we could give this another shot since he can't imagine his life with anybody else apart from me. He told me that he would love to be friends and at least be a part of my life in any capacity that he could because he didn't want to completely lose me, but he would understand if I was not open to it right now. He just wanted me to keep an open mind and think about it for the future and I guess I will do that but right now, I need my space and I need to be away from him to move on and heal. I'm hopeful that may be something in the future when circumstances are better and he is a changed man,

we might be able to make it work, but for now, I just want to focus on my new business and be free for a while. All our assets and money have been divided and I'm pretty sad, but I'm trying to cope with it. I'm taking one day at a time, like most people have advised me to and I don't know how things are going to turn out in the future,

but I know that right now, I have done what was best for me and I'm going to try and not have any regrets. I'm going to start this new chapter of my life by channeling all my energy into my business which I started because I hadn't been able to find anything that I liked in the job market, so I created a job for myself and fingers crossed.

Life will go well now.