"Your husband wants to sleep with me."

I never asked for this. What would you do?

This is anonymous for a reason.

Imagine reading about it online?

Imagine logging onto Facebook one day while in the school tuckshop line to put in your child’s lunch order, reading this and knowing.

Imagine finding out it was your husband?

I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I wonder if by not telling…the hurt will come later and be worse.

I am a suburban mum with school-aged kids and a part time job in a local business.

I’m a divorcee, so perhaps a little more wounded than others.

My life is similar to yours, a hurried mix of school drops offs and commutes to work, of frantic ferrying children to ballet and swimming, football and guitar lessons. I race for a take away coffee in the morning and I collapse into bed at night.

Except there is one big difference.

I have a stalker.

He isn’t always there, but he is around enough for me to feel his presence. He bombards me with text messages and knocks on my door. He follows me in the street trying to catch my eye to talk to me and places flowers on my letterbox.

He tried to press up against me in the car park after he trains the twin’s football team.

I can’t seem to shake him, no matter how many times I have told him I have no interest, to leave me be, to go home.

I can’t quite shake him because he is married to my best friend. He lives in my street.

What do you do when a married man begins to flirt with you?

Takes it further, touches you inappropriately, enters your home without warning on the pretext of “picking up his kids.”

What do you do if, while he and his wife are over for a BBQ, he corners you in the kitchen and tries to brush his hands across your breasts all the while your children and his are playing hide and seek, squealing in delight, thrilled to be allowed up after dark?

What do you do when he tries to force his hand down the waistband of your skirt while pretending to pour his wife another glass of Sauvignon Blanc?

What do you do?

I know his actions are sexual harassment, his inappropriate touching bordering on indecent assault. But I am not worried he will take it further, to me he is simply bothersome, I do not fear him.

I fear her. I fear the hurt it could cause his wife, my friend.

I have told him in the strongest possible language that I am NOT FUCKING INTERESTED. That he is a sleaze who doesn’t deserve his sweet wife or two wonderful children. I have warned him that I will tell her if he doesn’t stop. I have said I will call the police.

But I don’t want to tell her. I’ve been there. I have been the wife who found out a betrayal and to this day I am not sure I wouldn’t have been better off if I hadn’t known, that my children may have been better off if I hadn’t known.

I don't want to hurt her, to wrench her out of her fragile, yet happy existence.

Author Shmuley Boteach says that men have affairs because their low self-esteem requires constant affirmation, not just for sex. Do you agree? Post continues after video. 

I know I am targeted as a single woman in a neighbourhood of married couples, and to be honest it is hard to find your place and be accepted.

I know she would be hurt, broken, humiliated, destroyed. I know she would throw him out on his knees with him begging her to take him back, and I know she would find it very hard not to believe that I had no part in it.

That she would condemn me as well.

And so I stay quiet. Trying to limit contact, trying to arrange other mothers to take my boys to the football training he coaches, trying to walk on the other side of the road. Throwing away his gifts. Ignoring his text messages.

But I am angry. This isn’t how I wanted to live this part of my life. I want it to stop, I just don’t know how.

What advice do you give this mother? Should she tell her friend?

Want more? Try:

One reason happy people cheat.

“I caught my husband cheating. I never guessed I would’ve done this next.”