Why Do Husbands Cheats On Their Pregnant wives (A Victim Writes)

Hearing her mobile phone ringing, Adele Barkley rushed to answer, worried that the noise might wake her six-week-old son.

However, it soon became clear that a screaming baby was the least of her problems.

‘Calmly, this female voice I didn’t recognize announced: “I’ve been dating your husband for three months. We were together on the night your son was born,” ’ she says.

‘She told me that if I didn’t believe her, I was to check his bank account. Apparently, he’d withdrawn £1,000 two months earlier, when I was pregnant with his child, as a deposit on a flat they were going to rent together as a little love nest.’

It was a vicious blow to deliver to any woman, not to mention someone who was hormonal, sleep-deprived and vulnerable, having giving birth only weeks earlier.

Adele, 39, a learning support worker from Doncaster, rang her husband Paul, 40, at work and ordered him home — immediately. He raced back, fearing something was wrong with his wife or son. When she confronted him, he flatly denied it.

‘He laughed in my face and said: “You’re going crackers, you must have post-natal depression,” ’ says Adele. ‘But I reeled off my conversation with his mistress and said: “I’ve got her number here. Shall I call back and put her on loudspeaker?” ’

Cornered, Paul confessed all. The woman was someone he’d met on a night out. The pain, Adele says, can best be described as a ‘glass figurine, thrown to the floor and shattering into a thousand pieces’.

Paul was the only man she’d ever loved: as well as Cain, who is now eight, the couple have two older children, a 19-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. Her life, her trust in men, her future and family would never be the same again.

What makes a man cheat when his wife is pregnant? Surely, there is no greater betrayal. According to the psychologist Robert Rodriguez, author of What’s Your Pregnant Man Thinking?, 10 per cent of fathers-to-be cheat on their partners during pregnancy. Some say they do it because they feel usurped by the impending arrival and fear their position in the family is being undermined.

Relate counsellor Denise Knowles, who has counselled many couples — with varied success — through these betrayals, says some men try to excuse these dalliances as an escape from the stress of stepping up to the role of father and family provider.

Many attribute their betrayal to feeling unloved and undesirable as sex is put on the back burner.

Others, Denise says, claim they were driven into the arms of another because they found their wife’s changing body a turn-off.

Ironically, Adele puts her husband’s infidelity down to his new-found body confidence: around the time she became pregnant, Paul lost an astonishing 12 stone after being overweight for years. He revelled in the attention he was getting from other women.

Adele says: ‘Paul basically accused me of letting myself go and blamed me for making him stray. 

‘I’ve been a size 10 all my adult life and always took pride in my appearance, so dealing with the big changes in my body during pregnancy was always hard for me. 

‘The curvy woman who stared back at me when I looked in the mirror took a bit of getting used to and made me feel quite vulnerable.

‘Ashamed though I am to admit it now, in those dark months following my discovery of Paul’s affair, I would look at our son Cain and wonder if he hadn’t happened whether our family would still be complete.’

Adele threw Paul out of the family home shortly after that bombshell phone call in October 2006. He moved in with his mistress, but the relationship foundered after a few months. Then, in December 2007, Paul begged for another chance. Keen to give their marriage another go for the sake of their children, Adele agreed.

But the relationship was never the same again. The husband Adele loved and trusted had gone. They eventually split for good in December 2013.

‘I should never have forgiven him. I would have spared myself and my children a lot of heartache. There’s simply no forgiving a betrayal like that,’ she says.

When contacted by the Mail, Paul admitted he’d cheated on his wife when she was pregnant, but blamed her for the split.

‘It happened because she was a control freak,’ he said. ‘She wanted to control everything I did.

‘I’m not sorry I cheated because by then we were clutching at straws pretending our marriage would work.

‘We got back together afterwards for the sake of the children, but it couldn’t work because, instead of forgiving and forgetting, every time we argued — which was often — she’d sling insults at me for being unfaithful.’

Clinical psychologist Roy Shuttleworth says it is not unusual for partners who have been forgiven after an affair to struggle to make the relationship work.

‘Whatever desire drove them to create a distance between them and their partner by cheating is often still there,’ he says. 

‘So it’s not a huge surprise when they keep sabotaging the relationship with their poor behaviour.’