‘I was making love to my husband when I saw a look of horror on his face…’ Confessions of a reformed ‘party girl wife’ – and the shameful act that keeps her up at night 15 years later

I was the life of the party. Always the first one on the dance floor, the last one standing when the sun came up, the girl who could drink anyone under the table and still be ready to do it all over again the next night.

My friends used to joke about my tolerance for party drugs, that I was built for this kind of fun. And for a long time, I believed them.

I wasn’t just partying – I was making memories, living my best life. What could be wrong with that?

The answer hit me like a freight train at a four-day music festival, where I finally learned that there’s a fine line between having the time of your life and losing complete control of it.

My husband and I arrived at the festival with a bag of pills, a tent that would be our home for the next four days, and a plan to go as hard as we could.

The days blurred into nights, the music pulsed in my veins, and every hour was filled with dancing, laughing, drugs and drinking. And more drugs. And more drinking.

At some point on day two, I lost him. Not just for a moment or an hour, but for an entire night. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen him, couldn’t piece together where I’d been or who I’d been with.

When I finally stumbled back to our tent, it was sheer luck. I collapsed, unconscious before my head even hit the makeshift pillow.

The next day, I woke up with a pounding headache and that creeping, gnawing feeling of something being off. He was there, beside me, but I knew something was off with me. It was a strange feeling of guilt that I couldn’t quite place.

We had sex. For me it was meant to be a way to reconnect after the chaos of the night before, a comfort in the disorientation. But as we moved together, something was wrong. Something was there inside me causing a weird friction. A shift, a pause, and then – a used condom.

And it wasn’t his.

Time stopped. A thick silence filled the space between us, pressing against my ears like deep water. My mind scrambled for explanations, but deep down, I already knew. 

Fragments of the night before started to surface – flashes of me in someone else’s tent, the weight of an unfamiliar body, a drunken haze swallowing my better judgment whole.

I remember gasping. Shaking. My husband staring at me like I was someone he’d never met.

Then he left. I heard him vomiting outside our tent and then him running away.

When I finally found him again, we fought. I was hysterical, crying, still coming down – a mess. He was silent and full of rage.

He was too nice of a guy to abandon me at the festival. Instead, he packed up our gear in a fury and drove home in icy silence, ignoring my cries and wails for forgiveness.

By the next day, he had told our friends. I could feel the whispers before I heard them, their eyes sliding over me, full of judgment, disgust. I was the joke of the festival, the cautionary tale, the girl who drank herself into a decision she couldn’t take back.

I had never felt dirtier in my life.

The shame was unbearable. I wanted to disappear, to crawl out of my own skin. My phone buzzed constantly – some friends messaging to see if I was okay, others lashing out, calling me things I can’t bring myself to repeat. 

Even those who didn’t say anything outright didn’t have to. I could see it in their faces, feel it in their unanswered calls and messages. I was ruined.

For weeks after, I didn’t sleep. When I closed my eyes, I saw it all over again – the moment in the tent, the look on my husband’s face, the sick realisation of what I’d done.

I stopped eating. Stopped going out. Stopped answering my phone. There were moments when I thought about ending it, when the weight of it all seemed too heavy to bear.

My marriage didn’t survive my betrayal. 

And then, one day, a message came through from someone I barely considered a friend. She wasn’t part of my inner circle, not someone I’d ever been particularly close with. But her message was simple: ‘Are you okay?’

That message saved my life.

She didn’t judge. She didn’t ask for details. She just listened. And then she said something that changed everything: ‘Maybe you should try talking to someone. AA, therapy – anything. You don’t have to feel like this forever.’

It was the first time I’d even considered that option. That maybe I didn’t just have a problem with drugs and alcohol that night. Maybe I had a problem, full stop.

Walking into my first AA meeting with her felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, my stomach in free fall. But the moment I sat down and heard the others speak – people who had stories that sounded eerily like mine – I knew I belonged there. 

It wasn’t easy. Sobriety is brutal at first. When partying has been your identity, your coping mechanism, your way of fitting in, stripping it away feels like losing yourself entirely. But piece by piece, I rebuilt.

That was 15 years ago.

Now, I’m remarried. I have a young family, a husband who loves me for who I am now, not who I was then. He knows the condom story, but I do have an underlying fear that others in my new circle might hear it and not be so understanding. 

I think they’d find it hard to reconcile who I am now with that girl in the tent.

But my life now is full in a way that it never was before. Real, tangible joy. A happiness that isn’t dependent on the next drink, the next party, the next moment of reckless abandon.

I still think about that festival sometimes. About the moment I found that condom inside me, about the way my entire world crumbled in an instant. 

I feel sick when I remember it – physically ill. It’s a reminder of how far I fell, of how much I lost before I finally found myself.

I used to think partying was my freedom. But in reality it was a prison. Sobriety isn’t always easy, but it’s the only reason I’m here, telling this story instead of being a cautionary tale whispered at another party, another festival, another messy night lost to oblivion.

I hit rock bottom. And I never, ever want to go back.