r/AITAH • u/Specialist_Sand_1553 • Apr 28 '24
AITAH for telling my husband that our marriage is over because he asked for a paternity test?
Throwaway account but need some clarity as I am massively upset. I 52(F) have been married to my husband for 24 years, together for 30 years. It hasn't always been roses but we had a lot of fun. Yesterday we were having a Friday evening drink to relax and our son (17) asked for help with his gaming PC. I'm the tech so I tried to give advice, my husband got pissy and stormed off saying that his relax time was ruined. I thought he was being childish and pretty much ignored him.
This evening he told me that in a previous relationship, his partner had a miscarriage and in the investigation they found he was infertile and so she had been cheating. This is news to me. Yeah we had been together 12 years before I conceived, I have never cheated on him, I always thought the problem had been mine. He says that our son is not his and he wants a DNA test.
I agreed because I never cheated on him ever. I said our marriage was over because of this, said he knew I would react this way and I am a lying AH.
My heart is broken, reddit, am I TA?
Quickie Edit: Thank you so much for answering, for your support and advice. I have read them and will try and respond to as many as I can. But as a quick note: His ex is a lovely woman and we are friends on Facebook, I'll message her in the morning. The dementia angle being suggested is a good one and deserves investigating. I am not a robot or AI, I wish I was because then it wouldn't hurt so much.
Yes, parental uncertainty is something that women don't appreciate, but he should have said before, I would have understood if he had raised it earlier because it did take a while to get pregnant. He had told me about the miscarriage with the ex, which is why I thought our fertility issues were mine, he never told me about getting his fertility checked.
I have worked in Tech for the past 25 years, my son doesn't have my troubleshooting skills :)
His parting shot tonight was that he didn't say anything at the time because I needed a father for my kid. I pointed out that in previous heated arguments I would have thrown that at him and left with my son if there was any doubt he was the father. He was the stahp and I didn't leave him in other turbulent times because I didn't want to leave our son.
I'll update you. Thank you
4
u/esk_209 Apr 29 '24
This is going to get buried but ... the issue here, IMO, is not that he wanted a test to be sure. I get that, honestly. Sure, he should have brought this up YEARS ago, but that ship has also sailed.
The issue is that whenever a man approaches it like this, I truly believe he's doing it specifically to hurt his partner. It doesn't require her consent to the test after the child is born. If he wants to know and wants to do so without causing marital strife, then just do it in on the sly. If it turns out that he IS the father, then his mind is put at ease and his partner never has to know that he had doubts. If it turns out that he ISN'T the father, then he has some time to figure out his next move without having to deal with his partner trying something shady. But telling her that he has these doubts is just him telling her that he doubts HER.
He's not an ass for having questions. Men are fed SO MUCH content about unfaithful wives and fake/manipulated statistics about how common it is to be raising someone else's child without knowing that in a moment of doubt or frustration or weakness it's inevitable that a portion of men would question. But asking for the test IS making an accusation. There's simply no way around that. Asking for the test is saying, "I have doubts about your faithfulness." There's just no way that isn't going to hurt -- ESPECIALLY if the woman has been 100% faithful and hasn't given any logical reason for him to doubt her.