Struggling to come to terms with this
Tagging this reconciliation because I’m still on the fence.
My wife and I have been together nearly 7 years, married almost 4. Things haven’t been easy these last three years. My wife has significant mental health struggles and trauma. Over the past 3 years our sex life became non existent and our emotional intimacy has really struggled. We felt more like roommates. I did everything I could to support her, doing all of the cleaning, laundry, cooking, working full time to pay the vast majority of our expenses. She’d say constantly that I need to initiate intimacy more or emotional closeness only to then reject my advances or cancel the dates I’d planned.
2 years ago my wife and I had a conversation about an open marriage and agreed to some boundaries. First, we’d have to work through all of our issues first and repair the emotional and physical intimacy, second that we’d look for a couple (I’m aware now having looked into the ENM community more that deliberately seeking couples isn’t necessarily a good idea but this was partly for safety for my wife as she again has trauma from the past).
Over my birthday weekend this year, she’d planned a girls trip with a few friends (who are known by everyone to cross the boundaries of their own relationships and lie to their SO’s constantly) to go to the beach. She told me before she left that the girls wanted to make out with some guys but made no mention of herself. I got a call from one of the girls she was with trying to praise me for letting my wife do whatever she wants and I said what? My wife took the phone immediately and started saying that she told me she was going to make out with someone but that’s as far as it would go and promised me that. I said fine, hung up and went back to what I was doing.
She met someone while there and when she came home she told me that she swapped Instagram info with him but couldn’t take his number because she needed to talk with me first. I agreed on a trial basis that we could see what an open marriage would look like.
The two of them fizzled out pretty quick and she was really upset about it, she actually cried a lot the night they broke things off. The very next day she told me she had a crush on a guy we both knew from the gym we go to and asked if that was too close to home. I said I’m not friends with him and won’t be now but go ahead and talk to him. I then couldn’t sleep after and told her I’m having a real issue with all of this because none of the boundaries were adhered to and she told me she needs this now to feel fulfilled in our relationship, so we set new boundaries of nothing physical happening but we’d continue to try this and see where it goes. The two of them also didn’t work out and they’d had one date that didn’t go well.
The next week I told her I wanted to close the marriage, that I don’t like how it all started or how it progressed and that it was really weighing on me. She agreed.
I found out about 2 weeks ago now that her whole story about taking the first guy’s Instagram only was bullshit and she swapped numbers from the start. She spent the weekend she was there sexting with him and flirting with him, she even called him on the drive home from the beach. Everything she told me was a lie.
I don’t know what to believe anymore and am really struggling with whether I can ever trust her again. I’m constantly going back and forth on divorce versus trying to move forward and when I confronted her with this she swore they never actually did anything physical while she was gone but that she didn’t tell me any of it after she saw how I felt about it and didn’t want to make it worse.
I don’t know if I can ever trust her again or if I’ll ever feel the way I used to about her, this has shaken me to my core and I feel like I’m leaning more and more toward divorce vs trying to fix everything and move forward. For anyone else that’s gone through this, do you have advice?
Posted Jul 30, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC