"I Didn't Find Out Until 17 Years Into The Marriage": People Are Spilling The Secrets They Learned About Their Partner After Marriage, And It's Pretty Unsettling
We asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to share the wildest secret they learned about their spouse after marrying them, and the results are prettyyy all over the place. Have a look for yourself:
1."After being married for six years, I learned that he had been sleeping with his 'sister.' When I began dating my now ex-husband, he told me he had a non-biological sister. The story he shared with EVERYBODY was that they were neighbors at a very young age, and through the years, became super close. So, the truth was this: Once they both hit puberty, they both decided to fool around with each other. In high school, they began to get sexual. After high school, things of the sexual nature stopped. When I came into the picture, we would all hang out and drink, party, and have reunions and vacations like a family. After we married, I noticed that he would go and visit her often (she lived three hours away). I didn't think much of it because he was visiting his sister!"
"Well, she came over one day (I knew she was going to stay the weekend). I had a late shift, and I called him on my way from work. Something was off, and he told me he'd see me when I came home. Well, I left work a little early to surprise them. The house reeked of marijuana, and I heard moaning coming from my guest bedroom. On the way to the room, clothes were thrown in the hallway. I opened the room and saw the two of them having sex. He had his phone open with the GPS tracker tracking my car. I guess he was too busy to notice that I had arrived. I lost it, and she ran out to her car naked. He cried and told me how sorry he was and that it was all about sex and nothing more. He told me everything — even how once when I had to leave a day early from vacation, they stayed up all night having sex. Needless to say, I'm no longer with him. And, they're still hooking up, even though she has a boyfriend."
—Anonymous
2."After five years of marriage, I found out that my husband's family had tried to take out a 'hit' on his ex-wife years earlier. They ended up not going through with it, but I ran like hell and have never looked back."
—Anonymous
3."We were planning on getting married, but before setting a date, I found out I was pregnant. Unfortunately, I miscarried, which was devastating and confusing as it was my first ever pregnancy. When expressing her condolences, his mother said it may have been a sign that he wasn't ready for ANOTHER child. What? Another...? He has a child or children? With? Where? When? WTF?"
—Anonymous
4."A few years into my marriage with my now ex-husband, he claimed that he was no longer interested in sex. He explained that I shouldn’t take it personally and that his disinterest came from him being too tired and that he felt like he had outgrown the sexual phase of his life (we were in our 30s). I later found copies of text messages from his phone that were downloaded on our family computer: 30,000 messages featuring naked pictures of women, text exchanges between himself and various women about meeting up for sex, and sexts between himself and random side pieces. He was having sex with multiple partners every week, sometimes with two or more different women on the same day, and the stuff he was into was DIRTY. Turns out that he wasn’t uninterested in sex, he just wasn’t interested in sex with me, his wife. He later admitted in divorce court that he was a sex addict."
—Anonymous
5."I have, unfortunately, had multiple revelations about my husband after we got married. 1) As far as I can tell, he cheated on me the entire time we were dating. We had a long-distance relationship for some time, so I guess joke's on me for assuming otherwise, but I didn't find out until I saw a string of texts back and forth to the same numbers (plural) on our now combined cellphone bill after we got married. 2) He is absolutely terrible with money! He couldn't save a dollar if you paid him to, and has maxed out multiple credit cards (ones he applied for and didn't tell me about). I found out because I had a collections company calling me asking to locate him."
—Anonymous
6."My husband burned down his house for insurance money when he was married previously. No one ever found out."
—Anonymous
7."A letter arrived in the mail from a child support collection agency. Unbeknownst to me, my new husband had a child with another woman before we were married. Even with the arrival of the letter, he continued to deny the child was his, but I knew he was lying."
—Anonymous
8."That my husband had lied to the IRS and owed more than $50,000 to the government on taxes, and he married me to get my paycheck."
—Anonymous
9."One month after the wedding, I discovered he’d been cheating on me the entire three years we had been together. He was careless enough to leave many cards from her in a dresser drawer, including an envelope with the date. I wanted to annul the marriage, but didn’t because of my children. We had just moved into a new house in a great neighborhood close to their schools."
—Anonymous
10."We weren't married yet, but we were going through the pre-approval process for a mortgage to buy a home together, and it was then (after a year and a half of dating) that I discovered he had NO money to his name. I'm talking not a dime in his savings, $50 in his checking, and so much debt owed to his bank for overdraft fees and such. His credit score was abysmal despite what he told me and led me to believe. He was living paycheck to paycheck, but he didn't have ANY bills. We were lucky to be living in a home owned and paid for by a relative TO SAVE for a home of our own. He was just spending every dollar he made on frivolous things like sneakers, concert tickets, and more. He let me believe he was saving money the way I was (he made more money than I did, so I figured he was just able to still spend some while saving some), but he was doing no such thing."
"How he thought he'd get away with it is beyond me. He claimed he didn't realize he'd need to provide bank statements to get a mortgage, and to this day, I have NO idea what he planned to do when it came time to pay our down payment on a home. Needless to say, I moved out weeks later, and now, five months later, I am closing on a home BY MYSELF in a few weeks."
—Anonymous
11."First, he lied about graduating from high school. I was away at college getting my degree, and he pretended that he'd taken the ACT and scored at the same level as me. But, he didn't actually even get his GED until AFTER we were married, and he kept getting fired from multiple jobs. He had me creating résumés with fraudulent graduation dates and everything! Then, he lied about cheating throughout our relationship. We'd been together since high school, and he absolutely screwed whomever whenever, while saying he'd always been faithful. He even called me out when I honestly admitted to sleeping with someone else. He slept with someone the same year we were married and had a full-on relationship with them. I didn't find any of this out until 17 YEARS into the marriage with two children. Yes, we're still married. Send help!"
—Anonymous
12."He was addicted to dating apps and never stopped using them throughout our entire dating phase, relationship, and our marriage."
—Anonymous
13."He told me he had custody of his children, but let them live with their mom. He hadn’t seen them in years because he walked away from them. He was bouncing child support payments and quitting jobs to avoid paying his ex-wife. It was one lie after another. He also hadn’t filled income taxes for years because his ex-wife would have gotten it. He has lied to me so many times, I have lost count. It’s sad really."
—Anonymous
14."After my spouse and I got married, we went on a great honeymoon. After arriving back home and being in total bliss, I found out my husband was talking to/texting/seeing a woman we both knew. When I approached him, he confessed. He even showed me all the messages between them. The one that hurt the most was the message from him to her that said, 'Did you miss me?' sent to her the day we got back from our honeymoon."
—Anonymous
15."Two years into our marriage, I discovered that my now ex-husband had been a member of the KKK during high school, before he joined the military."
—Anonymous
16."A little under a year of marriage, I found out my spouse (at the time) obsessively dreamed of vacationing at a swinger's resort. He'd send me links to websites and paragraphs about how going to places like that would be good for us. I'm not opposed to people participating in those lifestyles, and I'm not even opposed to nudity, but swinging and public sex aren't and were not my thing. We finally ended up going on a two-week vacation to one in Mexico, and while no one was ever inappropriate or forceful, I hated how he was the whole time we were there. I quickly realized that what we were interested in were very, very different things. I wish he'd told me about it before we'd gotten married. It could have saved us both an expensive divorce. He told me that if I'd been a good wife, I'd have supported him in that pursuit."
—Anonymous
17."He liked sex workers and would sleep with them in our house. I found out after seeing a video of it on my son’s iPad."
—Anonymous
18."We dated for a year and a half before we got married. He was funny, a little geeky, and totally committed to our relationship. Almost 10 years and one young child into our marriage, I discovered a secret email account where he would communicate with men for sexual favors. He claims he is heterosexual. Our couples' therapist explained that it was trauma re-enactment from something that happened to him in college, but I don’t accept that. I was traumatized by the email strings about glory holes and my husband referring to other men as 'daddy.' Compounded by the fact that he entered into our marriage with deceit, we now share a child together, which makes this infinitely more complicated. We tried therapy to see if we could salvage what we had, but in all honesty, my sexual attraction to him has disappeared. We’re now getting divorced, and it's scary how well some people can hide who they really are from their partner."
—Anonymous
19."Found out after 26 years of marriage that my husband had been married and divorced twice before me, supposedly to get a green card. A lie is a lie."
—Anonymous
20."My husband told me we couldn't fly to Hawaii for our honeymoon because his doctor diagnosed him with a heart condition. Turns out he was on probation and couldn't travel due to checking in with his PO."
—Anonymous
21.Finally: "He was addicted to masturbating. He was doing it excessively, five to six times a day, and our sex life was going downhill. We went to couples therapy after I found porn on his work laptop, and that's where I found out he's addicted to touching himself. He also gave me gonorrhea while he knew he has it. Thankfully, the therapist advised me to make a decision regarding all of this, and we divorced this past September."
—Anonymous
Anything shocking you learned about your partner after getting married? 👀
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
