My Husband Visited a Strip Club — and My Reaction Shocked Us Both

Mainly, I learned never to try to predict my own feelings

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

We’d been married for two years and we were away on a mini-break, which was a rare thing in those days because we had very little money. Also, we’d taken our children with us, because they were very small, so it wasn’t exactly a romantic mini-break. But still. We were on holiday. It was a treat.

The deal was this: we would meet some friends for lunch and have a day at the aquarium with the children, and then we would put the children to bed in the hotel and I would stay with them while my husband would go out for the evening, to have a meal and party with his friends from school and university.

We were in our twenties, and no one we knew had kids yet. No one was married. We felt like aliens; this whole mini-break had been planned around a catch-up with friends who still had very different lives to ours. My husband’s night out with his friends was my idea. I wanted him to enjoy himself. I felt like a very good wife.

Everything went as planned. The children pointed happily at various colorful fish and we had a cheap lunch at one of those Chinese buffets where everything is slightly dry and curly from spending hours under golden warming lamps. It was fine, it was…