'I found out my boyfriend is not divorced or childless when I told him I was pregnant.' UPDATED 2X

"I (27f) found out my boyfriend (33m) is not divorced or childless when I told him I was pregnant."

I’m a mess and on mobile so I’m sorry if this makes no sense. My boyfriend of almost 2 years has essentially been living a double life. I’m baffled as to how he pulled this off.

When we met, he told me he was on the tail end of a nasty lengthy divorce, but that he had moved on and it would never pose an issue, and until now he was right, it never has. Last week I took a pregnancy test that came back positive, and yesterday morning I had a OBGYN visit to confirm.

I was honestly ecstatic, I’ve always wanted to be a mom and my boyfriend felt the same, we talked about our future children many times even though we haven’t been together for the longest time. I was really excited to tell him that night when he came over for dinner, but his reaction was...weird. His face went pale and he looked confused, not what I expected at all, and he got up to go to the bathroom.

When he came back he was really calm and really serious, and he told me that he was really afraid and didn’t know how me and our baby would factor into his life, and he made the decision to come clean. Not only is he nowhere near being divorced from his wife, who he’s been with for close to a decade, but they have 2 kids together, 4 and 6.

I have no idea how I never had even a clue, he works a lot and really early, which is the reason he would rarely spend nights over. That being said, it’s not like he hardly spent any time with me. I’m heartbroken and confused and his confession left me with absolutely no idea what to do.

I’m still pregnant, with his third child, and he’s still very much married. He left right after that conversation, and I’ve called and texted but the only response I’ve gotten is that he’ll speak to me tomorrow night after work. His demeanor is so cold and unfamiliar that I’m terrified he’s going to leave me to figure out this pregnancy on my own.

Another part of me doesn’t want him anymore. If he’s this good of a liar, what else has he lied about? What else COULD he lie about? I also would hate to break up a family like this. I feel disgusted in this whole situation, I’ve never felt more alone and confused. Should I be preemptive and leave him or are there other ways I could go about this?

Not long after posting, OP shared two updates.

Update: I think it’s clear that I need to leave him, but that’s about all that’s clear for me right now. I want to be a mom, but these are the worst circumstances for that that I can imagine. I’m trying to think of ways to contact his wife and can’t think of any. I do believe I was at the house where they once lived at one point, but he has moved since then (allegedly) so I have no idea what the new address is.

I can’t seem to piece this together at all. I don’t understand how I was fooled for so long, I think I’m still in shock. To recap, I am leaving, I’m not sure if I want to abort, and as much as I want to tell his wife I have no way of doing that. I guess I’ll wait until he speaks with me tomorrow. Thank you guys, if you’d like updates I’ll keep posting.

UPDATE 2: I found his wife through a website someone sent me. He wasn’t lying when he said he had no social media, but she does. Seeing the pictures of them made me realize I cannot keep our child, his family is beautiful and it breaks my heart to know he could do this to them, I cannot have the father of my child be someone like him. I still have no idea how to tell his wife.

The internet had lots to say in response.

zerohcoo1 wrote:

You didn’t break up his family. He did that himself.

seahawkguy wrote:

She would be doing his wife a favor.

ExoticaFox wrote:

Oh my heart breaks for you! You absolutely need to leave. You will never trust him. Ever. Decide if you want to keep this baby as a single mom. He will have to provide you child support most likely. Yes, he will have to tell his wife and if she’s smart, she will also leave. She has a right to know.

Please remember, YOU did not destroy his family. HE did that. He alone did that. You have a ton of emotions right now and I don’t blame you for being confused, but please - walk away. Who close to you can you confide in? This is also an epic betrayal and I advise you to see a therapist as you navigate the next year.

legallydevine wrote:

Please tell someone in your life that you are meeting with him tomorrow or meet in pubic just to be safe. Men have hurt women for far less reasons.

theskipster wrote:

He's going to leave you. You were just the side piece to a very immoral and selfish man. Do not expect him to do anything decent to anyone. Not to you, not his wife, and not his other children. This pregnancy with his side piece is not going to change him into a good person.

End your relationship with him and decide what you are going to do about your pregnancy. If you are going to have a baby and be a mom, you will at some point have to inform his family so you can get child support. I suggest talking to a lawyer before you do anything because you could easily financially screw this up for your kid's future.

If you are going to abort, then the question about telling his wife is a different beast. I personally would because I think she needs to know the type of person she is so she can protect herself and in part for petty revenge.

A day later, OP shared an update.

So I wanted to get this up as soon as possible because honestly, I never want to think about this again. I met with my ex this morning instead of after work because I guess neither of us could wait any longer to end this nightmare. I can’t tell what’s true and what isn’t, all I know is my life has been pretty much torn to shreds.

I went from confirming my pregnancy to this mess in basically no time at all, the last 24 hours have been the hardest of my life. Before I get into the conversation I had with my ex, I wanted to clear up a couple points that people kept bringing up: yes, I’ve been to “his” house. I’ll explain the quotations better. We both work a lot, and I never really minded never spending much time at his place.

His story was that after his “divorce” he was left with the house to himself and he got some roommates, he was kinda touchy about the subject but we talked about it once and it had to do with feeling weird about having roommates in his 30s. He was allegedly in the process of selling the joke after his roommates left, so we stopped going there often since it was semi packed up.

Made enough sense to me, and since I live alone I always preferred him being at my place anyway. So no, I didn’t spend two years not knowing where my boyfriend lived, I spent a year and 7 months simply spending more time at my place together.

The second point is how I got pregnant in the first place. We didn’t plan for a baby, we didn’t try for a baby. We simply decided that if it happened, it happened. He had this whole mentality about living in the moment and happy accidents and such, supposedly due to how his marriage “ended”.

So, I stopped using birth control and he would sometimes not use condoms. Come on guys, accidental pregnancies happen all the time. The last point is about my decision to terminate this pregnancy. I don’t care about anyone else’s stance on abortion, this is MY life and MY choice.

For reasons that’ll become clearer when I get to how my conversation with my ex went, this is the most painful and confusing thing I’ve ever dealt with. Yes I’d love to be a mother, but I’m in no rush. I know things rarely turn out as planned, but this is a terrible environment to bring a child into, and I’m not subjecting my child to the emotional turmoil I’m currently going through.

I cannot have a healthy pregnancy with the state of mind I’m in right now, and I’d rather put this behind me and wait to raise a child with someone who truly loves me so they can have the life they deserve.

It’d be selfish to have the baby just because it’s what I want, I have to think about what’s best for my future child, and this is not it. Since this all happened so quickly, it’s literally been a day since the bomb dropped, I’ll take some more time to think about it, but I think my stance is firm. Now onto what you all came for.

I spoke to my ex first over the phone, and later outside of a coffee shop, I took y’all’s advice to not be with him alone. I have no idea if any of what he told me was true, but I plan on never speaking to him again so it’s the closest to the truth I’ll ever get. His demeanor was very... odd.

He looked almost close to tears but his tone and what he was saying was cold and emotionless and almost like he was debriefing me and not apologizing. Here is his story: his wife and him got married 10 years ago when she got pregnant, she was 18 at the time and her family is very Christian, so they married while she was pregnant and she eventually lost the child.

Since then, he’s felt trapped in his marriage but couldn’t bring himself to leave as he describes his wife as a very sweet, innocent, and fragile person with very strong views on marriage and very high hopes for the relationship.

After having their two kids, she became very focused on them and he started to stray from his marriage at this point. He claims that it wasn’t until he met me that he realized just how dead his marriage was. Being the coward he is, instead of leaving his wife, he decided to just start another life with me, completely separately.

This is where his lies started to get messy. He does have a job, but it turns out he works from home, so that’s where he was when he was “at the office”. His coworkers/work friends I met are kind of like partners, but their all independent and don’t see each other too much, which is why he was okay introducing them to me, they had no idea about his wife.

In hindsight I was very stupid to never think about meeting more of his friends, but neither of us are extremely social. While with me, he would tell his wife that he was out with clients, running errands, or on business trips, all things he did legitimately have to do for his job.

The house I visited wasn’t his, which is why there was no sign of children. It’s his brother’s house, he works out of town a lot so when I’d be over would be when my ex was housesitting. His story about moving in with roommates after his divorce? That’s actually what happened to his brother, it was his brother that was in the process of selling his house after his roommates left, not him.

So it turns out he does have family nearby. It gets more complicated, too much to type out, but his web of lies is very detailed, very well thought out, and unfortunately for everyone but him very well executed, somewhat through sheer dumb luck, but I’m 1000% sure he’s had practice living a double life.

This could all be lies, but this next part is the strangest to me. He claims that when we had the conversation to stop birth control and have kids, he had a different conversation with himself. He decided he was happier with me, and if a baby came along, that’s when he would cut things off with his wife.

But that makes no sense, would he be cutting off his children too? Was he planning on ever telling me? He said that when that moment came and he found out I am pregnant, he felt unexpected panic and reconsidered his life, and decided he couldn’t leave his family. I guess that explains the confusion on his face when I told him.

He then came to the conclusion that the best course of action would be to end things with me and ask me to get an abortion, and we’d be on our merry ways and he could go back to his normal life, he still thinks I have no way of knowing who his wife is and have no way of contacting her.

NOPE. Though he doesn’t need to worry about having a third kid, I cannot in good conscience let this man continue to lie to his wife, who sounds completely clueless.

I took the advice of one of you and recorded the conversation on my phone. It’s a garbage recording but there’s just enough that’s audible to keep as evidence. I’m going to spend some time compiling all I have and thinking of ways I could help her out of her disaster of a marriage, and then I will contact her.

The reason I wanna help is because i feel I am playing a part in the ending of her marriage and I feel obligated to help if she’ll allow me. I did not give him any indication that I’d be doing this. I told him I just wanted to never see him again and leave this in the past, which is true... but i want his wife to make the same decision.

I'm sorry for the novel of an update, thank you every one for your love and support. I missed so many red flags, about his friends, his family, his home, everything, but I was blindly in love and hindsight is 20/20. So much of this still doesn’t make sense and never will, and a part of me believes that his explanations and confessions are fabricated and the truth is a lot messier, but I’ll never know so i can’t hold on to that.

I’m considering moving to put this all behind me. Again, I wanna thank you guys so much for your input and guidance, my brain is still such a mess and it’ll take a long time to heal, but you guys have helped me go towards the right direction.

The comments kept coming.

j_birdddd wrote:

I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I definitely agree that this is not the way to bring a child into the world. Your kid will eventually want to know about his father and that will turn into a whole other can of worms that you probably don’t want to have to deal with.

How ever you decide to reach out to the wife, make sure your approaching it with empathy and not anger. Her 10 year marriage has been a lie and I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like for her. Good luck, OP.

FeminineEnergy01 wrote:

Thanks for the update. This guy is an absolute coward, liar, and a complete loser.

[deleted] wrote:

I'm so sorry you're going through this. Don't kid yourself that she's going to want your help though. Odds are she will partly blame you for everything he's done and will want nothing to do with you. She may even decide to stay with him, even after knowing everything.

You said she is from a Christian background and they often put forgiveness above everything and stay married for the sake of the children, no matter how angry and unhappy they are. So don't be surprised if she blows up on you and defends him.

PeteyPorkchops wrote:

I’m 100% with you on all your choices but saying you didn’t plan for a baby and “it was an accident” while simultaneously saying I didn’t use birth control and he didn’t use a condom is the dumbest thing I’ve read today. It’s called NTNP (not trying, not preventing) and can be considered a method of trying to conceive. I really really hope this is a s#$tpost.

Five days later, OP shared another update.

Short update because I realize it kind of seems like I left you guys hanging. First I’d like to address that the pregnancy was not unexpected but not explicitly planned. “Accidental” was not the right word, but I’m aware of how babies are made.

I was in a sense trying to get pregnant, but only because my ex lied to me and convinced me he was onboard. I’m not gonna sit here and explain the ins and outs of how I was duped, I was stupid and missed some flags but I absolutely planned on bringing a child into what I expected would be a healthy, safe, loving environment.

That environment is not real. I am not ready to be a mother under the current circumstances, I am not mentally or emotionally fit to carry out a pregnancy, and I am most definitely not going to put a child through the adoption system. It is just not a guarantee of a good life and I can’t in good conscience do that. For those and other reasons I’ve explained before, I have begun the process of getting an abortion.

I collected photographs, videos, screenshots of texts, and everything I could find as evidence to show my ex’s wife. I tried to find texts in which he referenced being divorced or just any lies to prove that I’m not at fault, but I heeded yalls warnings to not try and help her or push her too far since I don’t know how she’d receive these news.

I simply found her on social media, sent her all the pictures and screenshots, and a short run down of what her husbands been doing for 2 years. It took a day for her to respond but all she said was “thank you” and once I saw that, I blocked her.

I have not heard from anyone and I hope to never have to hear or think about this situation again. It’s behind me. I have no idea what happened with my ex and his wife, and I probably never will. Thank you guys for your support.

The internet continued to share their thoughts.

KittenWhispersnCandy wrote:

One of the hardest lessons of my life was learning that if someone is damned and determined to lie to you, it is hard to detect. And what a punch to the gut when the truth comes out..ugh.

This is a risk we run when we deal with people. But just like having a car wreck is unfortunate, it doesn't keep us from driving or using cars. We take reasonable precautions and just keep on because the benefits out weigh the risks....just as they do in relationships. Best of luck OP.

PS...Thank you for sending the info to the wife. that was the kindest, best thing to do. I was the wife. I wish someone would have done that for me.

[deleted] wrote:

You've handled this in prob the best way possible given the circumstance. Props babygirl, good luck in future relationships.

Anthelmi wrote:

Hope the best for you ! I dont know if i ld have blocked her but its because of curiosity to see if she has something else to tell but i think you did the best to continue and begin your New life. Stay strong and good Luck !