Ok before I rant, the background to this story is that I have a friend (female friend) that I used to work with about six years ago. We occasionally catch up for coffee at the shops or a cafe and have a chat and a laugh for a couple of hours. Often we catch up on Wednesday when I am home from work and looking after my son while my wife is working.
We are both happily married (my wife and I went to her wedding) and we both have young boys (born about three months apart). My wife and her also go out occasionally and do stuff with the boys. Her husband is in the navy and just spent six months in the Gulf and they have now moved to the other side of the country for 12 months with his work.
Anyway, last Tuesday my wife received this message on facebook from a fake account/fake name:
Hi there,
I just wanted to let you know that Anna ***** (blanked out by me) had an affair with your husband Chris. I would want to know if my husband was having an affair. The affair has now stopped now that she is in Canberra. However, she is only there for 12 months. The affair has been going on for a long time. Maybe you should thinkk about working the same days as Chris when he gets back.
From a friend that is sick of watching people go behind your back. I would tell you in person but i didn't want it to be awkward between us. I am so sorry i couldn't tell you in person.
Now, my wife rang me at work straight away (she didn't believe it thankfully) and I emailed it straight to Anna, and correspondence went backwards and forwards between the three of us. My wife didn't believe it was any of her friends on facebook, most of them wouldn't either know Anna, or know me, etc. Only two of them actually know the three of us. One of them was away on holiday (and not likely to write such a thing anyway) and the other one expressed such disgust, dismay, concern etc that my wife is pretty sure was genuine (basically my wife asked her outright, before the second and third messages).
We tried to fish for information from the sender, my wife asked for further information, trying to get the person to say something so that one of us could recognise who it was.
The second message from the same fake account was:
Look i shouldn't of become invovled. Anna has left and hopefully when she comes back it will all be over. I am sure now that her husband is back she won't be as lonely. I hope all goes well. Just change your days at work next year.
Plus a final third message:
I am sure it is over now
My wife finally sent back message basically telling the person that it was untrue, that if the person wanted to identify who they were and discuss it with her then they could, etc.
Initially we thought it might have been one of my wife's friends who thought I was having an affair, but having ruled out the one possible candidate, we can only think that it is a malicious, nasty message designed to cause trouble either between my wife and myself, Anna and her husband, or myself and Anna. We do tend to think it is probably one of Anna's facebook friends, but whether she has upset someone, or if someone wants to cause trouble, I don't know.
I know it is unusual for a 37 year old guy to perhaps have platonic friendship with a 26 year old woman, but if you see two people having a coffee with two one year old boys, would you automatically think it is an affair?
The whole thing has upset my wife, not because she thinks I would have an affair, but because she wonders if the person is actually one of her friends (and soon to be ex-friend if we find out who it is).
As for my, I'm angry that someone has done this, in what I think is in a very unpleasant way. There a few flags in the messages that hopefully I can use to track down the person, not least of all the "
shouldn't of" grammar mistake. I have spent the past week reading through the Facebook walls of both Anna's friends and my wife's friends trying to find the same writing style and the same "
shouldn't of" mistake, but without success. I have every intention of catching them out eventually though, even if it takes a while. I'm sure more messages might come through once Anna gets back next year.
Anyway, I needed to rant at someone and now I'm done :)
