We are on an idyllic family holiday in Greece. The day is one of those surreal, blue-sky beach days that can only be described as a dream. My husband, always full of energy, suddenly jumps off his sunbed, kisses me on the forehead, and asks: ‘Want to go for a swim?’

I don’t. As he walks down to the water’s edge his mobile pings and I lazily reach an arm out to see who is contacting him.

In life, we all experience moments that sharply divide time into before and after. This was one of them. Part of me wishes I hadn’t looked at his phone that day, yet with hindsight, it might have been the right decision.

It started with a WhatsApp photo. It was of a woman, probably in her 30s, wearing a tight, low-cut dress and giving the camera a flirtatious look. ‘Last time was sooo much fun,’ she wrote to my husband. ‘Let’s do it again as soon as you’re back.’

I remember staring at this message, thinking: ‘This has to be a joke.’ When I looked up, I saw my husband, Peter*, splashing in the sea with our teenage son Zac*, who was trying to climb onto his shoulders. The scene was so at odds with the message that I felt detached from reality. Panic-stricken, I put his phone back facedown, noticing that my hands were trembling. Moments later, I grabbed it again, unable to believe what I’d seen. But now the phone was locked, and I realized I didn’t know Peter’s passcode to get back in.

Ten minutes later, we were heading up to the beach bar for lunch. We were a picture-perfect family, casually discussing the menu—should we order calamari again?—as well as dinner plans, mosquito bites, and the villa’s spotty wifi.

I somehow managed to get through this, though the white noise in my head was deafening. I couldn’t stop watching Peter, my husband of two decades. Had I been naive to believe I truly knew him at all?

It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself probably more times than most wives. Five years ago, Peter, who works in construction management, was posted to Dubai by his firm. As a family we were thrilled.

Obviously the lure of a tax-free salary was huge but it also represented an exciting lifestyle change. I wasn’t enjoying my job in HR and this would mean I could give up work, focus on our son who was eight at the time and enjoy being an expat wife.

For the first three years this is pretty much what happened. Zac settled into a lovely junior school near where we lived.

We had a bougainvillea-fringed townhouse with a small swimming pool, went to the beach every day and had lots of weekend BBQs with other British families.

Dubai isn’t everybody’s cup of tea but I loved being there. It’s a crazy hotbed of different cultures all, somehow, rubbing along together. Everyone works insanely hard but then plays equally hard at the weekend.

It’s a turbo-charged city that also feels like the ultimate adult fun factory. Anything seems possible.

Probably, with hindsight, not the most ideal place to leave a husband living alone. But that’s exactly what I ended up doing when we decided that Zac, who has specific educational needs, should start a state senior school back in the UK.

This also coincided with my mother, a widow, beginning a heartbreaking descent into dementia and desperately needing more support. I felt hugely conflicted but, tough decision as it was, it made sense for Zac and me to move home to the UK and leave Peter working in Dubai.

I had no reason at the time to worry about this. Peter and I were solid. He’d never, to my knowledge, been unfaithful and we’d always prided ourselves on being a loyal and committed team.

Anyhow, he was a workaholic and a gym fanatic. When he wasn’t in the office or on a construction site he was on a treadmill or lifting weights. Not the kind to hang around in bars waiting to be picked up by women.

And yet… one thing people might not realise about Dubai is that there is a shocking hypocrisy at its core. It’s an emirate governed by Sharia law with supposedly strict Islamic rules about alcohol and public displays of affection in shopping malls. Extra-marital sex was only decriminalised in 2022 and can still be a crime under some circumstances.

But you can also walk along a pavement that is littered with prostitutes’ calling cards. Zac used to really hate these. He would desperately try and pick them all up so that Peter didn’t see, and Peter would gently tease him by saying: ‘Don’t bother sweetheart. I only have eyes for your mum.’

I knew for certain Peter would never go so far as to slip one of those cards into his pocket. Could I be equally sure he wouldn’t have affairs – one-night stands, even – with women he met at nightclubs? I thought I could, but that’s exactly what he did.

In fact I have a sinking feeling that it probably first happened quite soon after Zac and I moved back to our village just outside Oxford, two years before I even saw his phone in Greece.

In his defence – if there is one – Peter was desperately lonely in the beginning without us. He went from being a husband and father in Dubai with a family by his side to being a man living on his own.

I should have paid more attention to this but I was knee-deep in trying to find another job in the UK and settling Zac into year seven. Not to mention my mother who was, by now, wandering into town in her nightie at night and putting her front-door keys in the cat litter tray.

Then one morning, about 12 months in, Peter called me in a state. He’d been out with work colleagues the night before and apparently had his drink spiked at a hotel bar. He didn’t remember getting home and he had woken up on his bed with his suit still on. But someone, at some point, had stolen £15,000 from our bank account using his bank card.

I’m no naive fool and my questions came fast and incredulously. Who did he leave the hotel with? How did anybody get hold of his card? Why was he crying? And why, more to the point, did he keep telling me he was sorry?

It was a major wake-up call and when, a few hours later, I eventually got to the bottom of what really happened I was staggered.

Apparently, a Russian woman had ‘targeted’ Peter at the bar and during the evening had somehow managed to memorise his pin number as he paid for drinks. She had then persuaded him to leave the hotel with her. He told me he had no recollection of this and that nothing had happened because he’d woken fully clothed. But she had, by this point, scarpered with his card and a significant amount of our savings.

Did I believe him? I tried to, but serious doubts were creeping in. It seemed improbable that he hadn’t slept with her. Certainly, intent was there. But as any wife knows, you believe what you want to cling on to. And I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my best friend and ally, a man I’d known more than half my life, could behave like this.

Friends were hardly reassuring, saying to me: ‘What did you expect? He’s a man on his own in Dubai.’ I became used to this tone from everyone I knew. There’s a kind of judgment towards people who move to Dubai. It’s almost like, if you’re going to be that financially greedy, you get what you deserve.

Yet, the whole situation seemed such a cliché and, stupidly, I just refused to believe my husband was the kind of man who’d pick up women, or be picked up, for sex. I knew my Peter. He lived for our family. And he kept telling me the only reason he was still in Dubai was to build a secure financial future for the three of us.

He is hardly alone in this goal. There are so many men like him in Dubai. Of the 4 million people there, 70 per cent are male and while a huge proportion of these may be young and single, I know many husbands who have chosen to boost their pension fund by working in the United Arab Emirates for a stint, leaving their wives back home.

There are of course very many young single women out there too, and some inevitably will be looking for a rich husband or simply a good time with a man who will buy her dinner.

Are we all so naive to think our marriages are immune to these expat escapades? It looks that way. The temptation for a husband, almost 4,500 miles away from the nuts and bolts of family life, must be overwhelming.

Especially when they’re on a different time zone and it’s almost impossible for their wives to really have any clue what they get up to. It requires trust in bucket loads. But what wife can compete with that level of unshackled freedom?

Of course many would say the onus is very much on a man to behave and take his wedding vows seriously. Surely the ‘nice ones’ don’t have sex with random women? And yet in every other respect, Peter is a nice one.

Fast-forward two years to Greece and this was very much at the back of my mind as I wrangled with how to ask Peter about the woman in the tight dress with the big boobs. And what I decided was that I needed to go through his phone, thoroughly, before confronting him.

But how? It was always locked and I didn’t know the passcode. I then realised that if he put it down and I quickly picked it up before it locked then I could gain full access. OK, it felt a sneaky and slightly grubby thing to do – but not, I reasoned, as grubby as exchanging messages with a scantily-clad woman. Also, I needed to know the full scale of what I was dealing with.

The opportunity presented itself a couple of days later. Peter had been doing Wordle on his mobile in bed and then got up to shower. I seized the opportunity, grabbed his phone and began scrolling quickly through all his WhatsApp messages. Everyone uses WhatsApp in the UAE so I knew that if I was going to find anything it would be there.

And it was. Like a Pandora’s box opening, several similar messages from other women were revealed. Of course these could have been spam. But then I found my unequivocal proof. A message actually sent from Peter to the woman in the picture. ‘I’ll be free in an hour if you want to meet me at…’ and he named a restaurant I knew well myself.

It felt like that split second at the top of a rollercoaster where your stomach lurches and then your world drops away.

Now I knew, without a doubt, that my husband had at the very least planned a rendezvous with another woman.

As soon as Peter came back into the bedroom, I held his phone up to him saying: ‘And don’t even start having a go at me for spying…’ He knew immediately there was no point at all in lying.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ was his opener. At which point I almost laughed. Strangely, I didn’t feel like crying at all.

I just wanted to get to the bottom of how much trouble our marriage was in. I guess it was some weird survival instinct kicking in.

Turns out, as far as Peter was concerned, our marriage wasn’t in any trouble at all. He loved me more than ever. He had only had sex with the woman in the picture twice and it was never, he promised, ever, going to happen again. He felt utterly ashamed and terrified of losing me.

I can practically see the eye-rolling as I write this. And no, I didn’t entirely buy it either. But after a sleepless night in the spare bedroom of the villa mulling everything over, I woke thinking: ‘Is this really so bad?’

I mean, obviously, I don’t want Peter having sex with her – or anyone else – and it’s going to be incredibly hard for me to trust him not to be tempted again.

The one thing I did feel furious about was the health risks. Had he been careful? Was there any risk of passing an STD on to me? He was sufficiently humiliated but adamant that he had used protection. I think it was abhorrent to him that he had caused me this concern.

Where does this all leave me now? Should I insist he comes back to the UK where I can keep a closer eye on him?

That just feels controlling and also a bit like cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Thanks to the Dubai money he sends home, I have the kind of comfortable life we could never have previously afforded. Ski holidays at Christmas, a top of the range family car and we’ve finally paid off our mortgage. I know many women might consider that too high a price to pay, but I’ve always been a realist.

I’m also a realist about sex. It would have been easy for me to blame myself in some way. But, honestly, our sex life had always been good.

Not experimental good, or weird good. Just loving and close. I guess men sometimes seek more. It’s the thrill of the unknown. I get that.

And in other ways, only seeing my husband every six to eight weeks also gives us an enviable marriage. We have none of those day-to-day irritations that a long-term relationship can so often suffer.

The bickering, the resentment, arguments over who empties the dishwasher. Peter and I actually do miss each other and we have a fantastic time when we reunite.

When I reasoned all this with friends they looked at me like I was utterly insane. But, as I pointed out to them, marriages in Victorian and Georgian times accommodated indiscretions not dissimilar to Peter’s. You only have to watch Bridgerton to see proof of that.

I am aware it sounds as if I’m in denial. But I’m simply trying to be practical while also rationalising what has happened without losing everything I hold dear.

In all honesty, I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Why should I have to give up the life I have created because of my husband’s stupid mistakes?

I have strived for stability and I really don’t want to lose what we have built together. Neither, crucially, does he.

So, for now, this is our marriage. But perhaps next time I’m in Dubai, I’ll look a bit closer at the women who frequent that restaurant, or Peter’s local bar. And if she’s there, I’ll think again.

Caitlin Stone is a pseudonym. All names and identifying details have been changed.