SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

How did I find out?

First time, NYE 2009: the wife of my WS's AP came to our door and said to me, "Your wife's been shagging* my husband."

Second time: June 11th, 2010: an envelope arrived at my work containing print-outs of emails between my wife and her AP: very sexual.

Crazy, eh?

*In case you're not up with UK English slang, this means "having sex with."

It was the end of May 2020. We were a month plus into the Covid lockdown, working remotely, taking turns caring for our kids at home, building a garage apartment for his mom to live in, and driving back and forth to a city three hours away where his sister lived. She was dying of cancer and we were helping care for her. Twenty years deep in a good marriage; I was working hard to hold everything together while he was struggling with his sister’s rough road.

One week it was my turn with his sister; I was working remotely, helping her through really tough chemo, talking to doctors about treatment options, etc. that week I was paying bills and happened to look more closely at the phone bill because the overall usage was much higher than I remembered. Our sixth grader had recently gotten a phone, and I was worried I hadn’t set the parental controls correctly. My kids’ usage was fine; my introverted, phone-averse husband’s was through the roof, all to one number. Oddly, though I had suspected nothing on a conscious level, I instantly knew who it was.

It took me a week to work up the courage to confront him; he lied and gaslit me to the point I felt like I was a terrible, jealous unstable person. A month later I was like, nope. I’m not crazy. He’s lying. I hard core snooped and found proof. My world fell apart and I still haven’t fully recovered, even though we’re reconciling.

I know it’s awful and not fully reasonable or fair, but I feel jealous of those of you whose spouses confessed. 😢😢😢

[This message edited by Grieving at 11:41 PM, Sunday, October 6th]

I know it’s awful and not fully reasonable or fair, but I feel jealous of those of you whose spouses confessed.

My wife confessed, if you can call it that. Still got trickle truthed for at least a year, I probably never got something resembling the real, full story out of her. That confession actually seemed to work against me, it made me trust her more than I should have.

My story was that I had felt off for months, and it manifest as a kind of Retroactive Jealousy as I tried to discern what could be so wrong with our lives. I dug into her past and re-examined our life together with a fine tooth comb. I made a significant apology to her that struck a chord and the next night she sat me down at told me she had been unfaithful. I was posting here the next day, and if not for the guidance I got here I’m sure I would have bought her bullshit. But a threat of a poly resulted in a second confession a few days later of a three year affair, as opposed to the "it was just one time" I got initially.

It was the last night on an overseas trip while I stayed with and visited family. I received a message on messenger from AP asking what my relationship was with exWP, as he had been telling her for 2 years we were housemates, and she became suspicious.

I replied that we were definitely not housemates, she then asked if I wanted screenshots of his communications with her, I said yes, and she sent them all through.

I ended it there and then. She didn’t want anything to do with him either.

For the latest one she was texting him from our bed when I caught her. I discovered 2 other affairs previously. The pain from and since discovery was much greater this time.

Around the holidays I got a text from AP telling me everything. Turns out she was mad WH called it quits with her a few months earlier. She sent me 20+ screen shots of their disgusting texts. Absolute worst day of my life.

Spring 2021. One beautiful evening, we went home together and he was driving. He was very protective of his phone but the battery was running low, I insisted to put his phone on the car charger . Suddenly I saw the phone lit up .. I thought our son messaged us , I grabbed the phone and I saw a message in our native language … " Drive safe darling ♥️🥰💋 ".
I saw the name on top of the message , the name I have never seen before.

My son saw him texting her. He didn’t understand what it was all about, but he knew enough that my husband, his step dad, shouldn’t be calling someone else "Babe". My son and I had scheduled to eat dinner just the two of us that night and he told me then. He was tearful and said, "Mom, I have to tell you something that is going to ruin your life." He was 16 years old.

I had a dream that my H was going to ask for a D on a very specific date. So I started paying attention but nothing seemed off.

Then one night a month later he comes home hours late. So at midnight I asked him where he was. He admitted being out with the OW.

Shattered.

10 days later he tells me he’s D me. On the exact date in my dream. I never told him about my dream. But it all came true.

And then the OW told me he admitted cheating in me 15 years prior. I KNEW he was cheating but he gaslit me and lied. This was before cell phones so I had no actual proof. But he would never admit it.

And to think one of the reasons I fell in love was because he wasn’t a player. He was an honest very nice (good looking) guy.

She was very drunk, a regular occurrence over the weekends and she was on the phone boasting to her Auntie overseas about her new love (limerance), I overheard the full confession - which was sickening but made sense, having gaslit me that I was a poor husband and she unilaterally ended our marriage on that premise.

It was truly bewildering for me that she decided to have an exit affair but once it was out in public she turned it into a PA. I was conducting IHS awaiting a move to my home country and transferring my role to work out of another office. That period was the most painful 6/8 weeks of my life, traumatising for me and our tween as she could see how broken I was...

The AP fell at the first hurdle, and when I saw who it was boy had she affaired down! All about his ego and her need for external validation. She was humiliated and torn, scorching an 80% plus good marriage that needed some work, better communication etc.

We're coming up to 2 years in R, things are significantly different. Some call it M2.0, on reflection for me it's a continuation of M1.0 with the work added in to make it stronger, valued, peaceful, loving, enjoyable.

SI has been a lifesaver for me and provided explanations and guidance from the wise, my brain likes structure, logical explanations and facts as to the why/when/how.

Now that I am healing I'm paying it forward and have helped a couple of pals to come out the other side of D etc.

Be well
Salty

Wow thanks to everyone for sharing their stories.

There’s no good reason at to find out but some of these are appalling and I sympathise hugely with you.

I found out by finding a computer file with several pictures and videos of him with other people during our time together. Before that I thought he was 100% faithful. All PA no EA. All from several years ago, nothing recent, nothing since marriage.

I think finding out that way was better and worse than other ways, firstly the bad- the graphicness (which has left me with PTSD). The heartbreak of seeing the person you love blindly with another person. The brutal ness of it all (my memories from that day are blurry, it was a complete and utter shock). The popping back into your head.

However as appalling as it was I can see it exactly for what it is. I know there was no passion, no emotion, no intimacy, no caressing, no kissing. It was all mechanical. I think if id just found out without seeing it I might have thought it was "more" than it was if that makes sense.

Also having kept a copy of the file, clawing back a bit of control that I can embarrass all the people that so hurt me should I choose. It’s illegal so o probably won’t. But having the option gives me a bit of comfort.

However absolutely appalling, I wouldn’t wish all this on my worst enemy.

I was working on a year contract out of state, flying home every other weekend. We talked every night when I was gone, and about 9 months into my contract WH started seeming short with me, angry even, and a bit accusatory about what I was doing when I wasn't answering the phone late (he has a weird schedule and sometimes he gets off work very late - he would call and I would already be asleep as I had to be up at 6-6:30). Things seemed weird - off - so I asked him one night and he said he just wasn't sure about "us" anymore - and laid the blame solely on me - my being gone for work, my being less available to talk, that I only talked about the dogs (I had our dogs with me so I wouldn't be alone and I knew no one where I was working so the dogs were really all I had going on to talk about), that he wasn't sure he wanted to continue and that he needed a few days to think about it and did not want me to call him or reach out during that time - one of those days being his birthday. I asked if there was someone else and he said NO - no one.

So I, like an idiot, panicked and fell for the ruse and sent him this big email discussing all the issues he had with me, how I would try to change some of those things blah blah blah. But, the do not contact me thing made me suspicious - that and the first 4 years of our relationship was long distance until I moved to be with him - so the distance thing wasn't new or particularly hard for us to negotiate. He called after his few days off (yeah he and the AP were of course celebrating his b-day alone), and said he read the letter and that he wanted to work things out - that he just wasn't happy etc but he wanted to try.

A few weeks later I came home for a 3-day weekend. He seemed happy - everything seemed fine, but I was suspicious, and started looking through things...and I found a credit card bill with a charge to a weird company, that when I looked up sold stuff only for women - some of it not sex related at all, but some was. Basically he had zero reason to be buying anything from there. So later that night I confronted him - asked him what he had bought there and he became defensive and loud and incensed that I had looked through the bills and said a bunch of other fast-talking nonsense but it was clear he was not going to admit anything....so I lied and said I had already called the company where the item was bought disputing the charge and they told me what it was and his whole demeanor changed and he got very quiet and said "well then you already know so why bother asking?" My response was: "I want to hear it from you." And at that point he confessed to what the item was and who it was for...and most of the major details about what had been going on.

The reality was, I was bluffing. I hadn't called anywhere. But I knew whatever he bought there wasn't for me and I felt sure that I was being lied to. Sadly, I was right, and so it began...

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 3:59 PM, Wednesday, October 9th]

My friend helped me install spyware on my computer so I could see what my 3 tween/teens were up to.

The kids were fine, just stoooopid teen stuff, cursing like sailors, but somehow I was able to log into my WH's work emails, I just guessed the password, I was correct.

There it was in black and white, my WH was scheduled to fly out the next day across the country to the site his AP worked at and their plans to meet at a local hotel. There were enough deleted emails that confirmed they had already met up in his hotel when he was at her site 3 months prior.

It was a freaking miracle, when I saw all of it, I printed most of it out, then looked at his phone, her number was listed under a man's name (her husband who was also a colleague).

I tried calling those two numbers the next day and realized it was the OW, left a message for her to call me back, which she did but it was late, I lived on the East Coast, she was on the West Coast.

Confronted her by phone the next day and scared the beejeezus out of her threatening to tell her husband.

It was the 23rd of July 2022 that my life changed so dramatically... just one day after I had asked my wife's opinion on whether our eldest son's wife would appreciate a genealogy DNA and family mapping subscription as a birthday gift, which I thought would be a great gift for someone as into family history research she is. My wife replied, voicing her opinion that it wasn't what she thought our daughter in law might like.. which both puzzled me and caused a weird tingling sensation up my spine. I had already decided to purchase the kit and told me wife " you're crazy..she'll love it". The next morning, almost fifty years to the day since my wife had joyfully announced that we were going to have our first baby, she asked me to sit down and said " After I tell you what I have done to you in our marriage, you will probably not want to ever see or hear from me again, I have done many bad, terrible things in our marriage " Of course, as.staggeringly awful as her revelation about several affairs and.paternity fraud was, it was only.part of the story... The rest took almost a year of trickled truth, revised time line, some cards from the AP she had kept and painful confrontation to be given the rest of the sordid story.
And no, the passage of time does nothing to diminish the pain and grief at what was lost between two.people who had loved each other once. If anything the years of prolonged deception, obfuscation and lying just add to the trauma.

My then 14 year old daughter had to tell me - a few days after she'd gone through her father's phone on a dare.

She had to send me over 50 images of WH/LTAP together, naked together, naked separately, screenshots of txts/messages that spanned [at the time] 3 years.

I was cleaning up after dinner one night, the kids were playing and my wife was sitting on the couch watching tv. I was in the kitchen and had something pop in my head re: my son’s school that I needed to confirm. Didn’t have my phone but saw hers plugged in on the bar. Grabbed it, opened messages, and there was a message from a male coworker. I knew the guy semi-well, our families had spent time together. The 3-4 texts I read didn’t make sense, almost like two people trying to work their way out of a relationship. I didn’t scroll through the text thread, I don’t know why… I calmly sent the kids (8 & 6) upstairs to start getting ready for bed.

My wife was in her own world in that moment, and she was alarmed when I said, hey, what is going on with X. I said some not so kind things and let her know that I was going upstairs to help get our kids get ready for bed and then we will talk about whatever the hell this is. I returned downstairs 20 minutes later. She was sitting in the same spot. Her phone was in the kitchen still but of course the message / phone history with him now deleted. Why didn’t I take her phone with me? Ugh. Probably for the best…

She trickle truthed me hard for the next month that it was an EA and it just happened… 100% cheaters handbook type stuff. I then found some real evidence that forced her into facing reality. She then took me through the events, answered every question I had, and it sucked.

That was nearly 5 years ago. The marriage is still challenged. It is great at times, other times it is really tough. Maybe just normal stuff, but it seems like she still struggles to hear me. She whines about not being heard as well or her opinion not mattering to me. Maybe we are both right. The R road is hard. I’m guessing the recovery path is shorter for those who choose to move on.

I needed to draft a resume. Hadn’t ever needed one before and thought I’d use one of my wife’s resumes as a template. Opened her computer file and found flirty correspondence with her former boyfriend from college. This was on 2 Jan 1996. We had been married 22 years. He’d been her secret "friend" for at least 14 of those years. I was completely blind sided. I still look at her and wonder who she really is.

We'd been going to MC weekly for about four months, at his behest, and things were simultaneously getting more and more real, and worse and worse. He'd profess his undying love one day and be cold as ice the next. It was maddening. I couldn't figure him out. I thought he was having a midlife crisis. I seriously never considered that he was cheating, even though the folks on the MLC support forum were like, "Girl, he's having an A." I was in total denial. I seriously did not consider adultery until a couple of hours before the appointment, when I jotted it down as a possibility in my journal.

We had MC on Mondays. The week before he said, "I have something I need to tell you, but I'm waiting until our next MC appointment." When I tried to get him to talk to me, he was rude and nasty and told me to leave him alone.

On Monday, he came right out with it at the beginning of our appointment: "This has all been a lie. I'm in love with someone else." He barfed everything up. A ONS at year two, a PA-only arrangement that lasted several months at about year ten, and then the 10mo full-fledged EA/PA with a COW that he was currently in. I remember firing off a lot of F-bombs and then MC asking us if we had any weapons in our home. I scoffed and said I would never fuck up my life like that.

We talked that night for hours. We decided that he would stay at the house and continue to sleep on the couch like he had been for months. I even broached the subject of R, but he wasn't interested. The next day, I told him that I couldn't stand for him to watch me grieve or try to comfort me while he was the one still actively hurting me, and asked him to move out. He moved to his mom's.

Interestingly, the A was already winding down when he confessed. The hadn't slept together in about three months, and they didn't sleep together when we were separated either.

A month later, NC was established and we began R.

My husband had put satellite position for everybody in the family. One day I looked and he had turned himself off.
So I opened his phone when he was asleep and found the app open, I turned himslef back on and closed the app. The day after I kept checking his position and in the afternoon I saw him moving from the office. I followed him, took many screenshots and checked and checked. He went to a place in a completely different area of the city, stayed like half an hour and left. He came home and never mentioned anything. So I kept checking and another day he did the same but I rang him several times and in the evening when he came home he said he had a long meeting. We had a discussion, I told him I knew he was not in the office. He told me he was at the home of a female colleague who had just moved after separati g from her husband and needed help with the internet. Also a colleague helped her a couple of times. She was just a friend…. Then I found in his phone an app that received notifications but if you opened there was nothing. So I studied the app and found a hidden chat in which I was blocked. I managed to hack the app and told him I knew there was a hidden chat that deleted the messages after they were read. I actually read two and the FB thinks he read them and did give her any reply. My husband is a very technological but why would he block me in an app I did not use with him? Sometimes having a double life makes you make silly mistakes but he told me that he hoped I would find out. It took him several weeks to confess because he kept saying she is a friend…

2 days after the Super Bowl 1999, I found a box under the guest room bed. Lingerie, jewelry, and a stack of emails, all of which I had never seen before.

Skimmed emails-yea, it was PA.

He had broken up with her, and she was crushed (poor baby-NOT).

She came in and found me with the emails on my lap.

So began the next wonderful chapter-TT, lying, gaslighting-everything all BS get the joy of getting traumatized over and over again.