Reddit Stories - BETRAYED by Love_ My Sweet REVENGE on the CHEATING Manager_
Episode Date: September 20, 2025#redditstories #askreddit #aita #revenge #cheating #betrayal #manager #sweetrevenge Summary: A gripping tale of betrayal and sweet revenge unfolds as a protagonist seeks justice against a cheating m...anager in a love-filled story of redemption and retribution. Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, revenge, cheating, betrayal, manager, sweetrevenge, love, redemption, justice, story, tale, fiction, narrative, shortstory, drama, plotBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I hope you enjoy this story.
Upon discovering my spouse was having an affair with their manager,
I decided to send a retaliation dessert to their workplace featuring an image of them together.
I attempted to share the incident on social media, but I ultimately chose to handle the situation privately.
This in surviving infidelity, but the bot didn't like it.
Could really use insight.
I-32M have been married to my wife 30F for five years, and it feels like in the last
year she's become a complete stranger. We were both established when we met, and at first it felt
like we shared the same values. I went to a trade school and learned a very technical job.
I worked shit entry-level jobs before I proved myself and built a reputation in coding,
to the point where my references trumped my education. My wife has a graduate degree and works in a
management position. This created a bit of what I thought was friendly tension at the time.
Early on, I bitched about middle management.
I saw them as roadblocks between me and finishing tasks.
My wife saw middle management as necessary for directing personnel and resources.
Personally, I was stuck with a bad string of middle managers that thought code developers were modular and replaceable.
They set unreasonable deadlines, promised features to clients, and created scope creep.
Every time I told her about the next boneheaded thing my manager instituted, she always took his side.
Note, she never met him. He sees things you don't, she says. After about a year of dating,
I learned to stop telling her about my day at work if it doesn't involve days off or raises.
I always felt like she resented the fact I didn't go back to school for a four-year of graduate
degree. She pushed about it early on before marriage, but when I broke down the loans and
debt, she dropped it. She was relatively debt-free when we married as was I. As I said, we were
pretty close in earning power as well. About two years ago, I started working for a company
that had an owner that talked to me directly. He saw value in me and my potential. I now make
50% more than my wife, and my manager is a guy that works well with me. While not a technical
lead, he embodies what a scrum master should be. I would say he knows how to stay out of my way,
but that makes it sound adversarial. He's a great supervisor. The first four years of marriage
went great, overall. I didn't complain about managers' form work and she didn't push me to dump
thousands into a piece of paper and debt. We had fun, went on date nights several times a month,
shared hobbies, cooked together, read books together and watched movies together. When the first
lockdown hit, we both worked from home. Our house is really nice, with three spare bedrooms for if we
eventually had kids. One was already converted into an office for me, and when lockdown started,
we converted the second one into an office for her. We both telecommuted, but we both had very
different philosophies about it. I would get up, make breakfast, shower, shave, dress in a suit,
then walk into my home office. I hate suits and ties, by the way. But it does put me in the mental
state of okay, this is work time. My wife, however, rolls out of bed, eats breakfast, brushes her
teeth, puts on a t-shirt and sweatpants and goes into her office with the iPad to play candy
crush between emails. I guess I see it as work from home and she sees it as work from home.
I digress. It's the weirdest thing how proximity can create distance. She has several meetings a day,
and I can tell because she keeps her door wide open and I can hear them. I have one meeting a day,
a scrum, and it's short. I close my door for mine. Five months ago she said she felt insulted that I
close my door for the daily scrum. I explained that it's for peace and to keep my mind focused on work.
She said she felt like I was hiding something. I tried to keep up our hobbies together,
but she brushed it off as we see each other all day as is. I should have pressed, but I didn't.
I treated the lockdown as temporary, and maybe I shouldn't have. It got really bad when her
company instituted a partial office reopening. She jumped at the chance to be. She jumped at the chance to
be part of the 50% of the company back in a rearranged office to allow social distancing.
I don't blame her, I miss working at the office too, but my company hasn't opened up the offices
yet, and as long as I have access to my dev environment, it really isn't needed. I think several
of her other co-workers got into her head. She would stay after work to hang out with them,
have drinks at a co-worker's place. I pressed and wanted to know more, but she was secretive and guarded.
She became colder and colder too.
It felt like I had a roommate and not a wife at that point.
Last month, on a weekend, she put her old iPad on the desk and said,
Can you wipe this?
I want to gift this to my niece.
I shrugged, I often do that sort of thing for the family and didn't think much about it.
Off she went to another company gathering and I switched on the iPad.
Maybe my wife was becoming so brazen, maybe she thought I wouldn't check it and just
just do a factory reset.
Point is, I checked it and saw her messaging app.
Picks, videos, I.m's with her boss.
They've been having an affair for two months.
I can't describe the feeling in my veins.
It was like my blood turned to ice.
It reminded me of the scene in equilibrium where the polygraph flatlined.
I copied everything, packaged it into cloud storage I use for dev projects separate from work,
and started looking for a lawyer.
I didn't confront it first because I wasn't sure what I would do.
The new sensation in my body felt like I was both numb and walking through water.
She didn't notice or didn't care.
By that point we were already dead bedroom.
We were really in the roommate stage, I guess.
I contacted a lawyer and he wanted to keep investigating in me to keep my mouth shut.
He suggested I get a private investigator and suggested a good one.
For the last four weeks we were gathering evidence and he was preparing the filing for divorce.
Be patient he kept telling me.
And, my ice-filled veins and her indifference made it easy at first.
Yesterday, my lawyer told me he had the filing almost ready.
Our state is at fault, and the pie got photos, video, plus the texts.
It was pretty much a slam dunk.
Then, last night, I don't know what happened to me.
But the ice turned to fire.
She came home, late of course, and I don't even remember what she said to me, but I went off.
I said I hoped it was worth fucking her boss.
She turned mean, nasty, vindictive.
She said I wasn't there for her emotionally.
I was just lounging all day at home, even if I was earning the lion's share at home.
I wasn't intellectually stimulating even though I work a highly technical job.
I told her I had a lawyer and she laughed, laughed.
She said my bluff was pathetic.
There was no way I was leaving her.
That even if I divorced her, she would get half my paycheck.
If I stayed with her, at least I would get to occasionally have sex, so I shouldn't mess this up.
She was a different person.
I said to her that's not a marriage.
She laughed, again.
Honey, this is the 21st century.
A woman can have her cake and eat it too.
She laughed again and she went to bed.
I emailed my boss and said I needed a week off to handle a family issue.
He of course granted it.
I slept on the couch in my office.
This morning, she left as I was getting dressed and only said don't wait up.
I went to my lawyer's office and he said he had the papers ready.
He had a process server with him and asked how I wanted the papers served.
I told him.
My lawyer, bless him, laughed and said you better not.
I've had so many people want to do a cutesy or revenge serving and I always talk them out of it.
Judges don't have a sense of humor.
He told me how this could cost me alimony or assets.
I didn't care.
Her words burned me.
I wanted her burned back.
The lawyer did his best to keep telling me not to, but he relented when he saw how serious I was about this.
The Process Server, he heard my idea.
He laughed as well and said, you're my hero.
I had to special order something with a rush cost.
Sent the Process Server to pick it up and deliver that, with the papers, to my wife's work.
Process Server told me what happened when he was done.
He said he had two.
He said he showed up at her office with a large box and papers.
He found my wife talking and laughing with a group of co-workers.
and friends and asked her her name. She confirmed and asked what it was about. He put the box
on a nearby desk and opened it. It was a cake, one that you could get a custom image printed on
in frosting. I didn't even know that was a thing until this morning. The image was an image of my
wife and her boss in an embrace. Clothed, but obvious what they were doing with the words,
Here's Your Cake. Eat it. I peed in icing above the image.
Process server put the papers next to the cake box on the table.
You've been served.
He said what happened next was a loud screech from her.
At least eight people in the office saw the cake.
My wife freaked and swatted the large cake box off the table, where it fell on the carpet,
but with the image still visible.
Several of her co-workers started berating her, and she started crying and screaming.
The process server took a hasty retreat.
My phone blew up and I just kept sending her to voicemail.
I don't bother reading her texts.
She hasn't come home, but her mother texted me saying she is going to stay over there for now.
The euphoric rush of the cake felt great.
But as the hours pass, I am considering my lawyer's words now.
Did I fuck this up?
Update 1.
I am overwhelmed with all the support I've gotten in the past week.
I'm still off from work, my boss decided to give me two weeks instead of the one I requested.
Good man, he is. I've already split our savings in half. Put him half in an account in my name and
changed auto pay for the mortgage, credit freezes, etc., everything my lawyer advised me to do with the
household funds. First off, we have no kids. Second, I'm seeing a therapist to help me. I found one that is well-versed
helping with infidelity. Seeing him twice, and I am feeling a lot more balanced out. Still some
weird low points, but nowhere near the same amount of swing between the two. After the cake
stunt, I'm definitely taking my lawyer's advice on anything from this point forward. He said
you can be happy or you can be right in regards to taking his advice, and I get that now. He told
me that if my wife wants to return home that I'm not legally allowed to kick her out, but I should record
all interactions with her. She's not staying at home again, still at her moms, but she did want to
come by Saturday to talk. My lawyer told me I could, but said he would prefer if she wants to talk
to have it done at his office, with her own lawyer present as well as himself. I presented this to
her, in email, of course, and she responded that she didn't have a lawyer. My lawyer said,
barring showing up at his office, have witnesses and record the meeting. I let my wife know that
this was my condition to talking with her. She actually accepted. So, I had two mutual friends
come in, all three of us with our phones on the table ready to record. She came in and tried
to give me an awkward hug, but I just held my hand up and the phone started to record as the
four of us sat down at the kitchen table. She was actually apologetic. She said she felt like
she was watching a movie versus being in charge of her life. But it felt thrilling and with a rush.
She asked if I wanted to know why.
I said I really didn't care at this point.
She felt that she owed that much to me and told me.
She said that when she started going back to the office when it reopened,
she got really close to three female co-workers, each a few years older than her, and two of them divorced.
She said they wormed their way into her head, told her about how she's owed more than she's getting.
They asked her constantly about her home life.
The ringleader apparently was psychoanalyzing me for my wife's stories.
My wife told them about my issue with managers back in my early career,
and the ringleader took this to mean I'm threatened by educated people.
The ringleader told her that I was a submissive male,
and she needed a take-charge man in her life.
That if I found out, I might have shouted and threatened, but get in line.
My wife still has her job for now, but only just.
The people that saw the cake was my wife, the three witches, her affair partner slash boss,
and according to her two other co-workers that were lateral to her.
The boss immediately ended the affair, told her to only communicate with him an email,
and that if she ever tried to show up in his office alone, he would call in a coworker immediately.
The three witches turned on her immediately and publicly berated her for doing such an awful thing.
The other co-workers, according to her, didn't want to get involved.
involved with her soap opera. So, no reports to HR. She said her three friends doing a 180
on her immediately sort of shook her out of her fog. She seemed really ashamed and said she had to
ask for five grand dollars. I was confused, because there was money left in her account.
I made it a point that she had it. She was living with her mom, she didn't have any major expenses.
It turns out the ringleader and the other two witches wanted to be paid for their silence.
They're blackmailing her and gave her a deadline, lest HR will know all the sorted details.
She was pleading for help.
I told her that there is no going back to normal after this.
Everything will change.
That if she bends now, it will be more money later.
Best for her to report herself, her boss, and her co-workers.
It would work better than having sleepless nights waiting for the knife to fall.
She seemed to hem and haw on that, but she did finally ask the big question.
What about us?
Where does that leave us?
I told her there was no us.
That's done, and she best get herself that lawyer to go over the divorce.
The best I can do is tell her how to handle her work situation,
but she most likely needs to find another career after this.
I also said she needs to go to therapy herself, because someone who could go to laughing in my face depleting for help a week later needs help sorting themselves out.
She pointed out the cake and all I said to that was yeah, and I am seeing someone for that.
She left soon after that.
No word on if she will follow my advice or try to pay her co-workers blackmail.
Why is it always the co-workers?
Update 2
First week back at work and my boss decided to tell everyone we could get off at noon today for good Friday slash Easter weekend.
I'm doing a lot better.
I'm still seeing an individual therapist and last weekend I drove out into the rural roads to unwind and saw a dog breeder as I was driving by and was curious.
Stopped in, he was an Asian fellow and had a breed of Asian dogs I've never seen before.
He was telling me about how they were extremely loyal and brave.
After playing with a few of them, I am considering going back to buy one, even if they are extremely pricey.
I believe they're called Jingdis.
The wife always entertained getting a dog, but she never found a breed she liked.
Anyways, the wife still has not moved back in or made any direct attempts to contact, but she did get a lawyer.
My lawyer called me and said something like, buckle up, you're going to visit a marriage counselor.
I said I didn't want to see one, the divorce was happening no matter what.
He agreed, but then said normally, I'd tell the other attorney to pound sand,
but now I have to paint you as a reasonable person, so you have to entertain reasonable requests.
This is why you should listen to your attorney.
If I held back my anger, I would have been able to ignore this request.
He did give me advice for this session.
Don't admit fault.
Don't concede I failed any.
Don't agree to anything, not even a second session.
Just attend this session, and if I wanted to still divorce, answer questions as
neutrally as possible.
Don't yell, don't shout, don't accuse.
The visit, if it could be called that, was via Zoom.
Me in my home, and my wife in her mother's home, and the counselor in what appeared to be in
office.
It was, interesting.
The counselor was interested in spreading blame.
Surely you could see how distance could create need I simply said I don't agree.
It takes two people to create a rift in a marriage, yeah, her and her boss.
Holding on to this is staying in the past.
There could be a wonderful future past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior.
Stuff like that.
I wouldn't pretend for a second that I played mind games or ran circles around her, because
I didn't. I just didn't engage more than I had to. It was two hours of her and my wife just
trying to make me take even 10% of the blame so she can say, see, it was both of your faults.
Now let's rebuild or something like that. Near the end of the session, the counselor asked me
why I was acting so cold. I said something along the lines of did you know infidelity can
create the same mental damage as PTSD. The counselor said I heard something like that before.
Yes. The session's time was running out and I was about to sign out when my wife asked if I was good with attending another session next weekend. I said I didn't think that was a good idea. She then begged what it would take for me to agree for a session next week. I said good night and signed off. Now I'm just waiting to see what the next reasonable request is that I can't turn down just so my lawyer can paint the picture that I'm a well-adjusted guy that had one outburst of bad behavior versus a trend of bad.
behavior.
