‘It was a joke!’: Woman’s attempt to torch her friend’s marriage has found new life on Reddit after it backfired spectacularly

A story is circulating on Reddit again, involving an email sent to blow up a marriage. Instead, it ended a friendship that had lasted two decades.

The thread resurfaced this week on r/BestofRedditorUpdates, the subreddit that pairs old posts and includes updates so people can learn what happened next. The original post was from years ago, its author allegedly a 28-year-old man who was at work, fighting a cold, and unsure how to reply to what had landed in his inbox that morning.

The person who purportedly sent the email was his wife’s oldest friend. The women had known each other since middle school, the OP claimed, with several ruptures along the way. The latest came when his wife missed an event the friend was hosting.

The couple had been together four years by then, and married for less than one of them. Based on his recounting, roughly three or four weeks into their relationship, the wife’s previous boyfriend came back from a months-long trip he’d taken with an ex of his own. She met him a handful of times and they slept together. She had told the friend about it years ago, in confidence.

Back to the present, he opened Danielle’s (the pseudonym the OP gave the friend) email to learn about the affair. His wife then started sending him texts, asking whether he’d read the email, then confirmed the accusation herself. It apparently involved one sexual encounter, three coffees, and no contact since. The OP added that he had suspected something at the time, because his girlfriend had come to him a week or so afterward wanting to confirm the pair were exclusive.

Readers spent less energy on the affair than on the person who reported it. One reply asked the OP to “put trying for a kid on hold no matter what.” They also encouraged him not to rush into a decision.

Others went after the friend. “No matter what happens between you and your wife, get as far away from Danielle as humanly possible,” one wrote.

A surprise cast the whole thing in a new light

The OP gave an update six days later, revealing that the Redditors’ sage advice didn’t quite work out. The man, by his own account, spent a day flat on cold medicine and, once he was upright again, woke up to a positive pregnancy test on the table with a bow on it.

The conversation that followed shifted the picture. Exclusivity had never been agreed to out loud. The encounter fell during what the OP twice called a “rough patch,” a period when he had been rejected by one graduate program and accepted by a better one out of state, and his girlfriend was weighing whether to move with him after barely three months together.

The two had been fighting about it, in the same week she slept with her ex. By her account, she was afraid he would leave her. She cut contact with the ex almost immediately, and the couple didn’t sleep together again until about a month after the move.

In the present day, the husband revealed that he chose not to detonate their marriage, and they ended up shopping online for baby supplies and booking a doctor’s appointment later. The husband and wife asked the friend to leave them alone permanently. Her reply? “It was a joke!”

She added that she had meant it as humor, but the husband blocked the email address and the wife removed her from Facebook and Instagram.

Now, while there’s no way to confirm any of this happened beyond a stranger posting something on a social platform, people are still invested in the story. “Wonder how they’re doing now with a 5-6-year-old,” one user asked.

Whether you consider that a happy ending or not, a lot of folks shared their opinion on the resurrected Reddit thread, and one person even discussed how the same thing happened to them, but they ended up getting a divorce over it.