Was working on reconciliation and he has deceived me again
Hi all, first time posting and actually outside of therapy this is the first time talking about any of this to anyone. I will try to be as brief as possible in explaining the situation, me (37f) and my husband (36m) have been together since we were teenagers and have been married for 13.5 years. DDay was 7 months ago and I only found out because AP share her location with him and it came through on his work cell phone. This led to me confronting him and initially him saying she was just a really good friend he met through Instagram, over the course of several days I found out how extensive their communication was by looking at phone call records. Trickle truth I guess is what you call it when slowly things emerge as you confront the betrayer. He admitted it was more than friends and admitted to the emotional affair and assured me that they never met, she lived in a different state 6 hours away. He agreed to stop talking to her and I was still trying to decide what to do. The week after DDay while I was still weighing options, I found out he was still talking to her and reached out to her myself. She shared the whole truth in which I found out they had met in person, once while he was on a golf trip he drove a couple of hours to meet her and have sex. I also found out that she came to visit a very popular theme park that we live very close to and he met up with her then as well (this one was the week after I found out about her and after he assured me he cut ties). At this point I was ready to walk away, but I allowed myself to be swayed, he begged and pleaded for me to try couples counseling before calling it quits. So I did, we worked through so much and I was beginning to feel like this was going to work. It was like a totally different marriage, we were both communicating our needs well and having the tough conversations. This was going to work and it was turning out to be a better marriage than it ever was before, I fell hard in love with him, harder than I had ever before. That’s where we were up until yesterday… We met with our counselor last week and he extremely overreacted to something that was brought up about him hiding something, honestly wasn’t even a big deal, but I wanted to address it so it wouldn’t become something bigger. After the session I felt uneasy and have all weekend, so yesterday morning in my feelings of unease I logged into his Instagram (he shared all passwords with me after DDay so I could feel reassured and log in at any time), and as I was scrolling through DMs I came across two messages to two random women telling them “I just wanted ti say I see your profile and think you are gorgeous”, immediately my heart sank. Neither women had responded so I was just going to talk to him about it when he got home and ask for explanation and why he felt he needed to do that. I will add that I had surgery last week and the messages were the night after my procedure so my initial thought was that he was bored and lonely because I was drugged up in the bed (silly I know). So while I was looking at his DMs he actually sent another similar message to a third person. I confronted him about it when he got home and asked for his phone and he refused and when I took it out of his hands he panicked and all but wrestled with me to get it back. To me that says there was more than Instagram messages he was worried about me seeing. He says there wasn’t anything else there, but I can’t believe that. I feel like I need to leave him, like I deserve to be loved by someone for who I am enough and they don’t feel like they need others to fill some void, but the problem is seeing/feeling how good things were and what they could be makes me second guess myself. And also if I am being honest I am scared, he’s all I’ve known since I was 17 and I’m afraid of being alone as a 37 year old woman. I guess I am looking for advice, or support or just needing to tell my story to someone.
Posted Jan 3, 2023, 10:47 AM UTC