When John,* 40, found out that his partner had cheated on him, the mental obsession about why she’d done it began to consume him. They continued to live with each other, but after 13 months he left their shared property on England’s south coast to live elsewhere, and his mindset got worse. “It messed with my head a lot,” says John. “When it sunk in, I started to drink heavily.” Then when his ex-partner finally cut all contact, it exploded. “I wanted the answers,” he tells me.
He bombarded her for four months last summer with “20 unwanted emails a day”, he tells me, calling her endlessly, leaving voice messages, and checking her social media, as well sending texts to her friend to find out what she was up to. “My behaviour became disgusting really,” he reflects.
