Cheater math and guilt flowers

Recently, one of my besties shared a memory about her wasband in our group chat.

She had driven by a restaurant and was suddenly pulled back to his last birthday while they were still married. They had gone out to dinner, and the server spent so much time at the table flirting with him that my friend felt like a third wheel on her own date.

By that point, she had already emotionally left the marriage, so it didn’t rattle her the way it might have before. Not long after, she discovered he had a Tinder account. When she confronted him, he actually asked if that same server had told her.

I laughed along with everyone else in the group chat. But the next morning, the story lingered. It stirred up a memory I hadn’t thought about in a while… the moment I realized what my own wasband had become.

It was four years after I first discovered he had cheated. Like my bestie’s ex, mine had evolved into a serial cheater.

The Sunday before I kicked him out and told him we were getting divorced, he went grocery shopping. He was supposed to take our daughter, but made some excuse to leave her home, claiming he had a “surprise” for me.

He was gone for over two hours and came back with only five bags.

That isn’t girl math. That’s cheater math.

Tucked inside those bags were chocolate and a bouquet of flowers for me. The chocolate wasn’t unusual, it was part of our regular shopping. But the flowers? Completely out of character.

I would later learn what they really were.

Guilt flowers.

By Thursday, I had solid proof he was cheating again. And that Sunday grocery run? It wasn’t shopping. It was a meetup with his latest affair partner… who, for the record, was also married.

What strikes me now, just as it did then, is this:

• Do they really think we are that oblivious?

• Do they believe they’re that clever?

• Or is it something else entirely?

  
  

Four years earlier, when I first discovered his online cheating had turned physical, we talked about divorce. We even started down that road. But before filing, we both said we didn’t want to end the marriage.

So we tried to fix it. Well… I tried.

He didn’t do the work. He didn’t sacrifice anything. And looking back, I have to wonder if he ever truly stopped cheating at all. Or if I was the one choosing not to see it.

When he was caught the first time, it almost felt like he wanted to be caught. Maybe to force a change. Maybe to force my hand. And when he said he didn’t want a divorce, I believed him. I believed we were moving forward.

We weren’t.

There’s no clean answer here. I’ll never know if he thought I was naive, or if he simply didn’t want to be the one to end the marriage and hoped I would do it for him.

I do think my bestie’s situation is a little different. Her ex is a full-blown narcissist, so he likely didn’t care if he got caught. He probably believed she’d never leave.

He was wrong.

What I do know is this:

My bestie and I are stronger now. Wiser. More grounded in ourselves.

And for me, the greatest gift to come out of all of it is this:

I trust my instincts.

Something I struggled with for years… and something I will never give away again.

Oh, and those guilt flowers...they ended up dying a slow death inside his grill and remained there until he collected the grill months later.