Hello and welcome, fellow yogis! Today I have a very juicy bit of gossip that happened in my studio that I just needed to share with you all!
I have a student – let’s call her Sydney – who has been with me almost since I opened my studio. Over the years she’s had her ups and downs with her husband and children, but I’d noticed for the past six months or so that she was acting unusually downcast and missing an unusual number of classes.
I pride myself on the relationships I share with my students. I am a friend, a mentor, a teacher, and a student to many of them, often all at once. Sydney was one of the first friends that I made when I moved back to Orange County, and the two of us often exchange long text messages describing our trials and tribulations.
I began reaching out to her once she missed two weeks in a row, which was unheard of for her. She didn’t respond, and I began getting worried. After the third week, I called her to ask where she had been.
After she answered I breathed a sigh of relief, but needless to say I was not prepared for the story she tearfully began to weave for me. As it turned out, her husband of 17 years – let’s call him ‘Brian’ – was being unfaithful, but his infidelity was not the usual affair.
Brian had been acting strangely for quite some time, spending long periods of time in his home office outside of his normal work hours and becoming quite surly when Sydney tried to get him to come out and join the family. He explained it away as stress from his job, and Sydney had accepted the explanation since his workplace had downsized his department recently and he was picking up the slack.
She had only become suspicious after receiving a note from a bank that neither of them used that was requesting some additional information for a new account. After years of letting Brian keep an eye on the finances, she began looking into the money coming in and out of their shared account and noticed he had been transferring money for a few months to an outside account.
She had heard of this happening to other couples before, but couldn’t accuse him of cheating considering he almost never left the house. To get to the bottom of this, she forced him to go run some errands and began searching through his computer.
He had an application that automatically wiped his browser history, but he had saved the banking website credentials. She began going through the history and discovered the recipient of the errant funds – a Ukrainian ‘camgirl’ named Sophia.
Brian had spent tens of thousands of dollars on Sophia over the past seven months. Sydney could not believe it, but Brian sheepishly confirmed upon his return and even revealed that he was already negotiating to bring Sophia to the states and set her up with an apartment nearby.
She was at a loss for what to do. I told her that this was a prime example of financial infidelity, where one partner hides money away from the other using a secret account, and was definitely grounds for divorce if she wanted to pursue the option.
Sydney – and I’m sure all of you! – asked how I would know this, and I told her about my good friend Colleen McNamee, who had gone over this very patiently with me when we were talking about the effects of Seeking Arrangement on modern marriages. Financial infidelity is actually pretty common, and it can be the cause of especially nasty divorce cases!
Learn more by watching her video on the subject:
Luckily, Colleen is an expert in the field of mediation, which gives couples looking to separate a more peaceful method of ending their relationship. We ended the call with me providing her with Colleen’s number. I don’t know if Sydney will end their marriage over this, but I’m glad she has a great resource such as McNamee Mediations if she does.
If you’re going through a similar situation as Sydney, give Colleen a call:
McNamee Mediations
+19492233836
4590 MacArthur Blvd Suite 500, Newport Beach, CA 92660