Cuckolded by my friend and brutally humiliated by my wife in secret... I wanted to kill the man who had ruined my life. But the unexpected saved me from my all-consuming rage

Anger was not my ally. It never was.

But it was at least understandable when I found out my wife was having an affair with one of my friends and neighbors.

It felt righteous even – in the moment at least – as I read, in real time, a series of late-night text messages between them that changed everything.

We'd been married 14 years, with two boys, a big home, all the usual trappings of mid-life routine, and all its friction points.

I knew our marriage was in a bad place, snared in a tangle of petty grievances that had turned into resentments.

I didn't know how bad it was, exactly, or how my wife might manifest her unhappiness in a different way than I had.

But, reading those texts, my usual anger, a kind of inexplicable, constant irritability, now had an obvious and explosive cause.

Most people in my situation would have felt the same way.

Gary, the therapist who eventually helped me work through the break-up and beyond, told me it would have been strange if I hadn't felt angry. He called it 'a totally normal human emotion.'

But because I felt angry almost all the time, my 'normal' anger was elevated, and it made me a genuine threat to myself and to others. It was outsized, raw, all-consuming, awful.

That night, I confronted my wife in what used to be our bedroom, hissing invectives at her in the dark so that I didn't wake our children.

Ten years removed from that terrible, blistering night, I don't like to think how that scene might have played out had I discovered her affair in different circumstances, in daylight, or when we were home alone.

I would not have been quiet, I know that much.

Violence still entered the frame. My best friend, Phil, was visiting, asleep in our attic. While I was reading my wife's texts to her lover, I'd also read her latest texts with Phil. She had complained to him about me for months, about how I was fat, jobless, moody, a loser. He didn't come to my defense. He told her she deserved better.

I kicked Phil awake and told him he had to be out of our house at first light. Otherwise, I told him: 'You're going to leave in an ambulance.'

I meant that, and Phil knew me well enough to know that I did. He retreated to the first floor with my wife. I replaced him in the attic. I stayed up all night, imagining many things, including how it would feel to throw Phil through a window.

I watched him leave my house just as the sun broke over the trees and felt relief, but also a strange disappointment. It would have felt pretty good to throw him through that window, I thought.

Instead, the other man, we'll call him Brad, became an object of nearly uninterrupted fantasy. That first night, I thought seriously about driving over to his house with my baseball bat.

I had an aluminum one in the basement. I knew Brad's house well, so I could picture the scene perfectly. I imagined driving over there with my headlights off, smashing through the glass of his front door, walking upstairs and finding him, probably hiding, and beating his brains out.

I carried that fantasy and others like it for so long, they began to feel almost routine. If my anger had been normal, it wasn't normal anymore.

In 2017, more than a year after I'd discovered my wife's affair, I went to see Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. There's a scene when Sam Rockwell's character walks across the street to obliterate someone. It was so close to my fantasy eviction of Brad, almost beat for beat, that my heart started pounding in my throat.

I sat in the cinema and realized just how close I had come to being the villain.

It took a lot of work to get rid of my anger, or, more accurately, to free myself from its nearly forever grip.

It took many hours with Gary, trying to figure out why I had been so angry in the first place, and to accept my role in the end of my marriage, too. 

It took meaningful time with my children – coaching their soccer, swimming with them in rivers – and a recognition that their lives had changed enough with our divorce. They didn't need their father in jail. They needed a better father.

It took the love of the people who still loved me, even though I wasn't easy to love, and the kindness of strangers-turned-saints: an emergency room doctor who saved me from myself, a cop who told me how to get through another day, a judge who took my side when it didn't seem as though many people might.

It also took, perhaps most surprisingly, a little English football club called Burnley. They were my family's team, on my late mom's side, a long way from my adopted home of Ontario, Canada, and I found an unlikely inspiration in them and their endless yearning for better days.

They reminded me of my mom that way. 

Burnley were never going to be champions, not in the traditional sense. But they did win their version of victories, and I looked for my own alongside theirs.

I wanted to walk into a room and have people glad to see me. I wanted people, friends and strangers alike, to feel better for my company, not worse.

I don't know that I always achieve that, but I achieve it more often than I did. I feel more peaceful and content than I have in maybe my entire life, and I think, or hope, people can feel that in me.

My existence is almost unrecognizable from what it was ten years ago. That's because I'm unrecognizable from the man I used to be.

I won't pretend I'm fully cured. Anger is addictive. Anger, my anger anyway, was a coping mechanism, a way for me not to feel harder feelings, like sadness, or loneliness, or insecurity. It's a way of projecting a different version of you to distract yourself and others from the real you.

Whenever I feel my anger returning, rising in me like sickness, I fight to turn it into something else.

I try mostly to turn it into forgiveness. One good thing about being a man who's made as many mistakes as I have is the understanding that other people will also make mistakes. Hardly anyone wants to behave badly. Sometimes people just blow it. Being angry about that does nothing but expand the blast radius.

I've made up with Phil. He didn't know about the affair, and he wasn't trying to be a bad friend to me. He was trying to be a good friend to my wife.

We first met again by chance, in a liquor store not long before Christmas. We barely acknowledged each other, and I walked out and sat in my truck for a bit before I decided to go back into the store to wish him a Merry Christmas.

When I found him, he was already crying. The end of our friendship had wounded us both. Like my anger itself, our estrangement hadn't solved a problem. It had made our problems worse.

We're not quite where we were, not yet. But we recently spent a week in London together, laughing and crying in equal measures. It felt like medicine.

I recently wrote a book about my experiences. It's called Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies. I wrote it in part because I saw – I still see – too many men like me, young and middle-aged men who face the world the way I faced it, and I know they would be happier and healthier if they didn't. So would the people around them.

There is an element of the 'manosphere' that even prescribes anger, that preaches the supposed virtues of a ruthless and unrelenting violence.

One of my sons has autism, and I can see autism in others from a thousand yards away. I can see anger, too, and I can see clean through those angry men. I know them a little too well.

They don't seem tough to me. They seem fragile, joyless, incomplete. I don't look at them and see danger, although they are dangerous.

I look at them and think: That man needs a hug.

Legs Hearts Minds – Loss and Its Remedies by Chris Jones is published by Random House.