I never thought I’d be posting here, but I am so deeply lost, humiliated, and numb. I just need to get this out because I can’t breathe right now.
My husband and I have been married for a little over two years. We had a beautiful wedding ceremony here in Singapore back in late 2023. I thought we were building a genuine, happy life together. We even went through the HDB flat selection process last year for our future home, and we have a beautiful toddler son whom we both love to pieces. Everything felt like a normal, progressing Singaporean marriage.
But yesterday, my entire reality shattered.
His phone was charging on the kitchen counter, and it kept buzzing repeatedly with notifications from a Discord server and an AI generation app. He was in the shower, so I picked it up to see if it was an emergency. The notification previews showed cropped images of what looked like a bride and groom. Curiosity got the better of me, and I unlocked the phone.
What I found in his gallery and hidden folders makes me physically sick. There were dozens of hyper-realistic, AI-generated photos. In them, he was dressed in a tuxedo, looking ecstatically happy, holding hands, kissing, and posing at various scenic wedding backdrops.
But the bride wasn’t me. It was his ex-girlfriend—the one who broke his heart right before he met me.
The prompts used to generate the images were still saved in his history. He had fed high-quality old photos of her face into an AI face-swapping and image-generation tool, specifically prompting it to create “perfect wedding day,” “happiest day of my life,” and “eternal love.” He literally used AI to manifest the alternate timeline wedding he wished he had.
When he came out of the shower, I confronted him. I was shaking so badly I dropped the phone. At first, he tried to deny it, claiming it was just a “technical experiment” with new AI software to see how realistic image generation could get. But the sheer volume of photos and the emotional prompts told the real story. When I started crying, he finally broke down and admitted it. He wept, saying he loves me and our son, but confessed that a part of him “never got closure” and he used the AI as a messed-up coping mechanism to see “what could have been.”
I feel like an absolute ghost in my own marriage. Every smile, every milestone, our actual wedding day, the family we built—is it all just a consolation prize to him? Am I just a placeholder because he couldn’t have her?
I look at our son, and I look at our upcoming BTO flat timeline, and my heart just breaks into a million pieces. How do you compete with a ghost? How do you move past the fact that your husband is mentally living in a computer-generated fantasy marriage with another woman? I haven’t told my family or friends because the shame is too much to bear. I don’t know what to do.