When Kathy* was holding her husband’s mistress’s hair back as she vomited in her bathroom, she knew her marriage had hit rock bottom.

Kathy knew her husband was cheating on her — and his mistress didn’t seem to mind that she knew — but she admits to feeling “seething anger and resignation” after she left the woman to her own devices.

“You could be forgiven for thinking I’d taken leave of my senses in looking after such a woman,” Kathy told the Daily Mail.

“I’m sure most wives would have sent her packing, at the very least.

“But she isn’t the first, and she certainly won’t be the last woman my husband has had an affair with.”

Kathy has been married for 30 years, and she knows of at least six other women her husband has slept with.

Her adult daughter even caught him with one of the women at his vet practice, but Kathy managed to convince her nothing was going on.

“You might think that our sort of ‘arrangement’ no longer exists, but recently I learned our situation is increasingly widespread,” she said.

“There’s even a trendy new term for turning a blind eye to your partner’s affairs: tolyamory.

“I can tell you that tolyamory is just a fashionable word for betrayal.”

Kathy told the Daily Mail she wasn’t “numb” to her husband’s affairs, but had simply made a decision that his infidelity was a price she was willing to pay to keep the life they’d built together.

“As a result, I’ve kept my handsome husband, who has supported me so much in my life, along with my standing in the community and my beautiful home,” she said.

“But living this way has also eroded my self-worth to the point where I no longer feel I have the strength to start again on my own.

“The truth is, I don’t want to leave my home and my life — why should I have to leave because of his behavior?”

Kathy said she and her husband once had a very healthy sex life, but troubles with endometriosis and a particularly nasty perimenopause eroded that almost instantly.

“I was feeling tired, bloated and utterly out of sorts, but instead of being understanding, he let me have both barrels,” Kathy said.

“He said we’d only had sex a handful of times that year, and then said, ‘Well, I hope you don’t expect me to never sex again.’

“At the time I didn’t think much of it, but I now realize this was his way of telling me he would be satisfying his libido elsewhere.”

Her husband’s first affair was three months after that conversation, and he used renovations at the couple’s nearby property as a cover.

“He started effusing about an antiques dealer in the village who had popped in to introduce herself,” Kathy told the Daily Mail.