In hiding: Toni Terry has escaped to Dubai after discovering her footballer husband John Terry has had an affair
Dear Toni,
You don't know me. I am not one of your girlfriends, a family member or even a marriage counsellor. None of these people is of any use to you right now.
They will sugar-coat the truth, make you feel there is something worth salvaging in your husk of a marriage, and may not even have your best interests at heart. Who knows, they might inexplicably be quite fond of your middle-finger-jabbing oik of a husband.
They might just feel sorry for him, as you might feel sorry for a rat drowning in a sewer, even though the rat gnawed its way into the sewer in the first place. They quite possibly enjoy the drama of the whole situation, and want to prolong it. They might think they are doing what is best for your children. Who knows? Harden your heart to them.
I understand you have agreed to give your husband one more chance and in this situation what you need is to hear from someone who has been where you are now. What you need is a wake-up call on the reality of men, marriage, infidelity and the futility of forgiveness.
I remember the shock I felt when I found out my husband had cheated on me - not once, but several times. Having read an incriminating sequence of text messages on his mobile phone, I confronted him and he confessed, having the temerity to smirk at the warm, dirty memory of his latest assignation.
I wanted to hurt him, badly. I battered him with his horrible, giant, smelly, juvenile, never-ran-anywhere-in-them trainers, and threw both him and his possessions onto the street in the middle of the night. It was Christmas Eve.
I knew I had done the right thing in kicking him out. I admit I was in a strong position, financially. I owned the house, earned my own money, and unlike you we didn't have any children.
But I know that many women are too powerless to act, or too afraid. You are probably terrified of losing your lovely lifestyle: the holidays, the bags, the houses. But, and I'm sorry to tell you this, love: you have already lost the lovely lifestyle. What's the point of a hot tub with gold taps if you have no one to share it with?
Show him the red card: Liz Jones says John and Toni's relationship will never be the same again if she agrees to take him back
What use is a mansion, if all you do is pad from room to room, trying to find which corner your husband is hiding in, or waiting for him to come home, wondering who he is with and what he is doing? What use are the designer clothes, if when you put them on he looks at you and you know he is finding you wanting?
What use are the expensive restaurants, if when you sit across the table from him he will not meet your eye. What use is the expensive car, if all it does is take him away from you?
Because when you find out your husband has had sex with another woman, you change. He doesn't change. He probably always was a slimy, weak-spined, needy, fragile-ego-nursing cheat with no loyalty in his heart, only vanity. But you become someone you never thought you'd be: you become suspicious, of everything. And most of all you blame yourself.
I remember I went into work the day after finding out about the affair. I hadn't slept, and almost fainted.
My boss took me into her office. 'Some men need to have affairs, you should learn to live with it. It doesn't mean he doesn't love you. He'll never leave you,' she reasoned with me. But that wasn't enough for me. It shouldn't be enough for any woman.
Your girlfriends, his family, the media, will blame the other woman, in your latest case a French waitress who claimed to be your friend, in my case a travel agent, a work experience girl, a backpacker.
Mistress: Liz advises Toni not to waste her energy blaming Vanessa Perroncel (pictured)
Don't. No matter how predatory these idiots (Oh, how I loved to point out to my husband the bad grammar in their lovey-dovey emails), you should not blame them, or waste energy on them.
Instead of focusing my rage on my husband, I turned it on the women he had slept with, looking them up on Facebook, Googling them. I even corresponded with and stalked the first woman I found out about, a girl named Daphne.
I sent her an email telling her she was 'number five out of six' of the women he had slept with on a trip around India. I even turned up at her place of work in Manhattan to deliver a bogus package, just to see what she looked like in the flesh (she was annoyingly working from home that day).
My husband even had the cheek to defend these women. 'Don't talk about Daphne in that way, she's not a big-nosed whore,' he would say.
Don't even blame yourself, either. Fine, you might be boring now you've had children, you might be tired, you might possibly have let yourself go just a teenytiny bit. But that is never an excuse for a man to cheat and to lie, and in your case this is sadly far from his first indiscretion.
If you take him back, as I did, briefly, your relationship will never be the same again. Because you are not really forgiving him, you are allowing him to remain close to you so that you can punish him.
Everything he does from now on is charged. If he is extra nice, he is covering something up. If he tries something new in bed, he learned it from her. You cannot police what is in a man's heart.
Do not listen to those who say, well, you should have expected this sort of behaviour, marrying a footballer, for chrissakes.
Well, I married someone without a car, who lived with his mum, had no income to speak of, was a sedentary bookworm, and
still women fell at his feet.
There will be tears so copious you'd almost think he'd missed a World Cup penalty shoot out.
Think only of yourself, of your future and your children's future.
You should be with a man who worships you, who is your best friend, who will be at your side, no matter what life throws at you.
If you do take your errant husband back, he will do it again, as he has before. He will resent you, start to think of you as his style-cramping mummy, compare you and ultimately betray you. Don't wait for that day to happen.
You deserve happiness. Strike now. End it. Show him the red card. And don't look back. With love, sympathy and solidarity,
Liz Jones
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