When I saw these messages between my husband and his colleague, I was so betrayed I almost ended our marriage. They weren’t having an affair but the truth was even worse…

Three years ago, my husband came home from a work party in the early hours uncharacteristically tipsy and collapsed into bed. He passed out immediately and so didn’t hear the beep of his phone as a message came through. I did though…

Anthony and I had been together for nine years, four of them married, and we have a daughter, then seven, together.

He’d never given me the slightest reason to doubt him, but who could be messaging him at this time? Fingers trembling, heart thumping, I typed his passcode – he’d given it to me previously, though I’d never read his messages before – and opened the message.

‘Are you still here? I want to see you,’ it read. It was from a female colleague, Elizabeth*, at the marketing firm where he worked. Scrolling back through the messages, I saw there’d been quite an exchange between them that evening.

‘Oh, you look good tonight!’ she’d written early on. ‘You too!’ he’d replied. Several hours later, at 12.30am, she’d written: ‘I’m leaving now…’ to which he replied: ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

Her response? ‘Well sweet dreams, it’s a good job I have my best friend here because otherwise I’d have invited you over (to my hotel room)!’

Her subsequent message asking if he was still at the party was clearly a final attempt to see if she could do just that, not knowing he was already home – snoring next to me.

Pain and fury boiled through me. How dare they!

Yes, I know, it could have been a lot worse. You could even argue that my husband was the innocent party and that she’d done all the running, only to be rebuffed by him.

But their messages evoked a level of emotional intimacy that was anything but platonic.

What made it even more jarring was that I knew this woman; only a month earlier I’d seen her at a mutual friend’s house where she’d been telling me how wonderful Anthony was to work with.

Really wonderful, it seemed, judging by the months’ worth of messages passing between them.

That night, as Anthony slept, I stayed up forwarding anything incriminating to my own phone, reasoning I’d need them should we end up in the divorce courts.

Yes, I was so enraged that I was considering ending our marriage at this point.

I discovered all sorts of messages between them: Elizabeth had a habit of messaging him mid-afternoon when she finished work; nothing sexual, just chit-chat, asking about his day, and he’d reciprocate.

They’d call each other before work in the morning too.

My goodness how that hurt! I felt so jealous at their obviously close and affectionate bond and tortured myself with thoughts of what could have happened between them if the messaging had continued.

Until then, if someone had asked me to define betrayal, I’d have said something sexual or another intimate physical act – a passionate kiss, for example.

But with email, WhatsApp, social media and texting, the lines have become blurred, eliciting so many perceptions of what constitutes a betrayal these days.

Now, my own view is that it’s anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable with your spouse seeing – including flirtatious text messages that lay bare an emotional connection with someone else.

And I know from painful experience that a perceived betrayal is enough to derail even the strongest of marriages. In fact, it’s only thanks to a year of couples’ therapy that ours survived.

When Anthony woke, bleary eyed, the next morning, I let him have it. I dialled Elizabeth’s number whilst screaming at him: ‘I hate you and I have her on the phone!’

I’m normally a calm, pragmatic person – I’m a senior director of a wealth management company in the City, with a portfolio of high-networth clients – but that day I was neither of those things.

I shouted, cried and punched Anthony, while he wept and apologised, telling me over and over that nothing physical had happened between them.

Elizabeth said the same. She apologised and repeated that nothing untoward had happened, nor would it ever have done, but I’d heard enough and hung up on her.

For the next few days, the atmosphere was toxic. While I did my best to remain civil while our daughter Sarah* was around, I barely spoke to Anthony. She, luckily, thought the whole thing was terrific fun – Daddy having a ‘sleepover’ in the spare room.

At this point I didn’t think about throwing him out. In all honesty, I wanted to punish him and to see his pain for myself.

I even thought briefly about getting revenge by sleeping with someone else – anything to make him feel as bad as I was feeling.

I know some may say I was overreacting, but was I? I’d always trusted my husband… and now I didn’t. Everything I’d treasured about my marriage felt sullied – it’s hard to see if I could have felt any worse if he’d actually slept with her.

Another feeling creeping in was shame. Part of me started thinking that what happened must somehow be my fault. Had I missed something? I thought we were rock solid.

Anthony and I had known each other since we were children but bumped into each other again in 2013 when I was 39 and he 44.

I was newly single, my seven-year marriage having ended two years earlier. For the next month we messaged and chatted by phone constantly, before eventually having our first date at the cinema.

My first marriage had ended badly, which left me very wary, but Anthony and I fell deeply in love. I’d sworn I’d never marry again, but that all changed when Sarah arrived in 2015.

As we took our marriage vows in Jamaica three years later, Anthony had tears in his eyes and looked at me with so much love that I didn’t have a single doubt in my head about spending my life with him.

Of course, like any relationship there were niggles. He said I talked too much and was preoccupied with my career; I worked long hours and sometimes at weekends.

Meanwhile I’d get frustrated with him, thinking he was too soft and let people take advantage of him.

But we had a great relationship –which made it all the more devastating when I found out about his seeming betrayal. Within a week of discovering the messages, Anthony suggested we should go to couples therapy. At first, I refused. But when a friend recommended Tina Laws – a therapist who’d helped her through a difficult time in her own marriage – I contacted her.

I have no doubt that Tina saved our marriage.

We had both had a few solo sessions with Tina online. But by our first joint session in her office – by which time Anthony had requested a transfer to another company away from Elizabeth and changed his phone number, both at his own instigation – we were still barely speaking.

And things did not get off to a good start. Tina told me that I should apologise to Anthony.

‘Like hell I will!’ I replied. Why should I apologise? I wasn’t the one swapping flirty messages with a colleague behind his back.

Yet as we progressed, she helped me to see that maybe both of us hadn’t been giving each other what we needed in our marriage. Anthony admitted that he had already confessed to Tina how he’d been suffering from low self-esteem – something that seemed impossible to me, as socially he was always so outgoing. But apparently having a breadwinner wife, earning a six-figure salary, made him feel inferior – as did all the high-flyers I worked with.

His previous romantic partners had always needed him for emotional or financial support, whereas I didn’t.

By contrast Elizabeth, he said, had massaged his ego and told him how wonderful he was.

I was furious; how dare he blame his behaviour on me?

Yet as he continued talking, I felt a wave of sadness upon hearing him say: ‘In my own mind I have nothing to offer you compared to what you bring to our marriage.’ I’d no idea that was how he felt. But then, when did we actually talk?

I never called him to chat throughout his day, like Elizabeth did. I never texted him a joke or a bit of gossip, just to make him smile, like she did.

Tina helped me to see that although I’d been preoccupied with my career for all the right reasons – paying the bills and ensuring we could have fabulous holidays – balance was needed.

Between therapy sessions she gave us practical exercises and we got into the habit of sending little notes to one another and making time for proper date nights.

Anthony focused on seeing himself as an equal and learning to share his feelings openly with me, while I needed to be more mindful of his insecurities and making him feel appreciated.

Basically, we needed to work as a team. It was around six months into therapy before I could look at him and not either cry or get angry. After that, the warmth began to return to our marriage with more hugs, kisses, playfulness and intimacy.

Today, three years on from that night, Anthony and I are in a very happy place.

He’s a wonderful man and an amazing husband and father. Neither of us is perfect, but there’s no one else in this world I’d want to spend my life with.

The irony is, without his ‘betrayal’, our unseen issues would eventually have surfaced in other ways – and the ending may have been a far less happy one for our marriage.

WHAT ANTHONY HAD TO SAY…

At the time, I didn’t think I was betraying Latisha – it was just conversation with a colleague that essentially massaged my ego. I didn’t find her attractive and would never have entertained the idea of anything physical happening.

But it’s my wife I should have been talking to, not Elizabeth.

And I should have been open about how inferior I was feeling – not that she’d ever given me any reason to, it was all in my own head.

Though I’d never have cheated on Latisha in the sexual sense – two previous partners had done it to me and it hurt like hell – I can see now that what I did was still a betrayal.

After a week sleeping in the spare room, I knew we needed some professional help. Tina helped us to see we’d been silently pushing each other apart – me by putting on a tough guy act and Latisha by being fiercely independent.

Now, I can’t ever imagine turning to another woman for conversation or flattery; my wife is the only person I want to confide in.

• Elizabeth and Sarah’s names have been changed

• As told to Sadie Nicholas