I was married to a cheating rock star

As the Foo Fighters star’s wife will find out, the man’s infidelity is quickly accepted – even praised – while the women are blamed instead

On Tuesday evening the Foo Fighters frontman, Dave Grohl, published a statement on Instagram saying that he has fathered a child outside of his marriage. 
“I love my wife and my children,” he said, “and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”
A post shared by Dave Grohl (@davestruestories)
Apart from the very passive admission of this other child – as if she had simply happened to him, rather than the fact that he clearly had unprotected sex with a woman outside of his marriage – his statement brought back memories for me, because I too was once married to a “rock star” who found it utterly impossible to be faithful. I wasn’t surprised therefore at Grohl’s statement or his lack of a public apology for his wife, because for time immemorial, it has been acceptable for male artists to wreak havoc on their family for the sake of their “art”, and often it is instead the woman who is to blame. 
In fact, when the news broke, a friend was sitting at my kitchen table, and her first reaction was “Well, he’s a rock star, what do you expect?” forgetting the same thing had happened to me. 
I met my ex, Mark Morriss of The Bluetones, back in 2011. I didn’t know who Mark was when I was introduced to him at The Groucho Club in London: I wasn’t familiar with his band and so it wasn’t as if I was one of those starry-eyed fans, the type it turns out he was used to picking up. We quickly fell in love and started trying for a baby together, but when I became pregnant he left me. I won’t go into all the comings and goings over the next eight or nine years, but finally in 2017 we married and then separated for good when he was in bed with another fan before the paper on our marriage certificate was even dry. 
Perhaps your first question is, why did I ever marry him? I’d answer by saying I never knew for sure that he was cheating: I might find the odd message from a fan but he would always talk his way out of it, telling me she was obsessed with him, or delusional, and accusing me over and over of being paranoid and suspicious. These types of men are very convincing. 
I went along to gigs with him and saw the women who would hang around him, but I – like Dave Grohl’s wife Jordyn Blum presumably – didn’t think he would put our life, our family, at risk for these women who hang around the merch stall in sticky-floor music venues. 
But he did, just as Grohl has. 
I don’t think people take seriously the effects on your mental health of living in this type of relationship. They instantly blame the woman – why didn’t you just leave him? But often we are striving under impossible circumstances to hold our family together for the sake of children. Perhaps Blum has been doing the same. 
People don’t take seriously the fact that, to cheat on your wife, you need to be a very duplicitous character. You need to lie every day to the people you are meant to love most in the world. And yet Grohl has this reputation as “the nicest guy in rock”. I know people said similar things about my ex – just swap “rock” for ‘pop’. 
People don’t pay attention to the fact that if a rock star is sleeping with other women behind his wife’s back, she has no way of protecting her own sexual health. She’s not consenting to sex with a man who is sleeping with many, many different women. If she did know what he was doing, she would perhaps choose not to sleep with him. But she is “spared” that little nugget of information, and we all know why. 
These types of men do not have any issue with being accused of being cheats or shaggers, so these revelations will not do Dave Grohl’s reputation any harm at all. In fact, it only enhances their alpha male status – it makes them more desirable, not less; more women want to sleep with them, more guys look up to them. But what about the utter carnage they leave behind?
In Grohl’s statement he places great emphasis on all the characters in this particularly sorry tale moving forward “together” and rebuilding trust. But I can’t help but wonder how much of this “togetherness” his wife has been a part of. I mean, was there a lot of “togetherness” when he was sloping off to have unprotected sex with another woman and then getting back into bed with her? 
I doubt very much Dave Grohl will be rebuilding anything. If there is one thing I know about cheating “rock stars” – whatever statements they put out to the contrary to save their reputation – it is that they certainly do not change their ways. Why should they? Their ways are working just fine for them.
I’m sure this other woman, the mother of Grohl’s newest child – whoever she may be – will also be copping some of the blame once she is uncovered. Surely she knew he was married? She must be a temptress, a she-devil to have corrupted him like this? But if these men are capable of bare-faced lying to their wives, don’t you think they’re also capable of lying to their mistresses? “Yeah, we have an open marriage…” I can hear it now. “My wife doesn’t understand me…. we only stay together for the sake of the kids…”
These are the clichés you should be worried about, not the “temptress” women tropes, because these are the clichés that allow men to do what they like to who they like.
People think that a cheating man in the public eye is only lying to his wife (and that’s her problem), but he’s not, he’s lying to everyone. And when he puts out statements about rebuilding trust, he is really even lying to himself because, if you get to 55 and you’re still cheating, you really have no intention of changing. 
A life on stage is very seductive to these men, especially if they started young like Grohl and my ex. They are addicted to the love from the audience, the adoration, the women who are willing to go to bed with them, no questions asked, and no strings attached. It has spoiled and corrupted them  – anything else just seems like an utterly boring life now. They deserve our pity not our adoration.
For us ordinary folk, cheating is fraught with stress, upset and guilt. We run through scenarios: what if so-and-so found out? We weigh up the risks of how hurt they would be, what we stand to lose and decide (mostly) not to do it.
After I outed my ex, many people said to me: “Why would he choose to make his life so stressful? I can’t even deal with one woman… ha ha!”
But what you don’t understand about serial cheats and liars is they don’t feel guilty – they don’t care if they’re found out, and they feel pretty confident they can charm their way out of it if they are. In fact, that then becomes the game. They’ve been lying to at least one woman in the scenario and then they basically just carry on lying to everyone else. Yet a person who doesn’t care, or doesn’t feel guilty, can pretty much do anything. That should be something pretty concerning to us all.
It may be that the mother of Dave Grohl’s new child has forced him out into the public. I am sure she does not want her baby daughter to be a dirty little secret, or seen as the “unwanted” child. I would imagine that she wants him to tell the world about her before she (or someone she knows) does. Because, of course, we mothers are fiercely protective of our children, we want them to have the best of starts, we do not want anything to harm them or upset their world, whatever their age.
What a shame these types of fathers do not feel similarly.