In the spring and early summer, my wife was spending way
too much time out drinking with people, and I talked about it here. We talked about it a lot, and she cut down on it a lot. I also started going out with her to these bars, moderately, not often, but more often than before. Things seemed good.
However, they are not good. I'm a fucking mess, and you can tell me you told me so, that there was something I could have done, whatever. But I need to vent this out before I croak from stress. Some of this stuff doesn't make me look very good. I realize that. I've made my share of mistakes, and I don't claim to be a saint.
In late June, I noticed one day when my wife was on her PC that she would always minimize a chat window when I walked by, and then resume typing and occasionally laughing while I sat back to type on my laptop. After a while I got upset by this and told her as much. She had not used Messenger for about 5 years (which is as long as we have been married) and had just installed it again. I had to walk around in the room a lot because I was working on a paper at the time, and this continuous hiding was ticking me off. When confronted, she said she was talking to a guy who was just a friend, and the reason she didn't want me to see what they were talking about was because she was complaining about me. I thought, fair enough. I would want her to have friends that she can talk to and complain about her husband to. Married people need that outlet, it's natural.
But something about how she said it raised some suspicions that just would not die. When she told me that, she didn't meet my eyes. And, I don't know...it just didn't feel right. After some time of this gnawing on me, I decided to break some ground rules. I know my way around so it was not particularly difficult for me to break into her messenger. She had some suggestive avatars, the worst one being of her tit.
It was confrontation time again. She broke into tears and admitted that she had been "flirting online" with a guy from work. She said it was "stupid" and that she has no feelings for the guy, that it had just been "fantasy" and she had convinced herself that it was "harmless." She said the guy was just a friend. She said nothing has ever happened between them in real life or on the phone or even online, aside from the bit of flirting.
I told her that you don't show parts of your body to a "just a friend" of the opposite sex and joke with them online. It is unacceptable to me, and I told her I wanted her to stop communicating with him, period. As far as I was concerned, whatever friendship there had been, was finished. She agreed to cease contact. It would be easy anyway, she said, because the guy was quitting his job and would no longer work at the same place as her.
I felt awful about having broken into her messenger, however. At work, I used to hear women talking about how they spied on their husbands phone calls or text messages, or how their spouses did that to them, and I would think to myself, "how can they do that? how can they stay together with all that mistrust?" Now I knew. I had always thought poorly of that behaviour, and now I was no better. A sobering realization.
It was around this time, after she had agreed to cut him out of her life, that she had found this site with all kinds of funny and humorous t-shirts. She ordered one of them, which we both got a kick out of. Basically it's a suggestive t-shirt that both looks completely harmless, and at the same time suggests that the person wearing it loves to give head. She wore it when we went out with friends a few times and it was all good fun.
However, after the whole chat thing I had a lot of trust issues with her, while she seemed to bounce back more quickly from the whole experience. One night I said I was still dealing with the whole thing and wanted to talk. I asked her if she had had any contact with the guy since she promised not to. She admitted that she had emailed him and told him about the t-shirt.
You could say I was livid. The way I saw it, there should be no pressing need for her to inform this guy, with whom she had flirted online and shown her tit to, of her buying a t-shirt that suggests she loves to give head. Especially not since she had promised not to have any contact with him. I asked her once again about the nature of their relationship. I told her that I had looked up her phone records and noticed that she had placed calls to him that were almost an hour and a half long at a time. Sometimes at 1 or 2 am. She maintained they just talked about life, and work.
She said that night that beyond that email about her new t-shirt she had not and would not contact him or communicate with him in any way.
Later the next day, in the evening, I was feeling particularly down about the whole thing, and just felt like something in life was not in its place. Know that feeling? You can't place it, but you feel it.
By this time breaking into things that weren't any of my business had become rather easy for me, from an ethical standpoint, since every time I did I found evidence as to being bullshitted. I broke into her email, and even though she always deletes incoming and outgoing mail (she had told me as much) there was an email response from this guy. He was responding to an email she had sent to him that morning, just mere hours after our row and having promised me there would be no more contact. She had emailed him and all she said in the email was that I can see her incoming and outgoing calls.
That was it for me. Far be it to say that my trust-breaking and email-hacking behaviour should be considered "a OK," but I was getting pretty damn tired of getting validated every time for doing so, by what I discovered. I walked into the bedroom and she woke up as I started moving into the guest bedroom. I yelled, I slammed doors. That was so unlike me. I don't think I had ever raised my voice before in the five years we have been married. I am not passive in bed, but I tend to get very composed when arguing. That no longer applied.
She admitted that she was still in touch with him. She said she had felt that my ultimatum, my telling her to cut off all contact with him was unreasonable because the guy is her "friend." She said she had been annoyed at me for demanding it. I told her exactly why I felt that way, and she did not contradict that I was right in my reasoning for wanting her to cease all contact with him.
I asked her why she had carried on with the communication, and why she had told him about the dick-sucking shirt in the first place - why would he need to know about it? All she could say was that she had "been stupid," but that was the same line I had heard the very first time we had had a row about this guy. First time, it's stupidity. Maybe even the second time. But she had lied again, and again, and stupidity was no longer a valid excuse coming from a girl who has a college degree with honors.
She seemed visibly shaken by my moving into the guest room, and she was very apologetic. She reiterated that nothing had ever happened between them and that there was no romantic interest whatsoever. Somedays I believe it. Somedays I don't.
I explained to her that her repetitious lying is eroding this relationship (and I am sure my breaking into her email etc is doing something similar, for my part, I don't pretend to be without fault or flaw here) and that if she does not respect me or our marriage more than this then there is little hope for us. I did move back into our bedroom that night.
The other night I pulled up the phone logs for July since they were finally available. She had placed over 30 calls to him since her initial promise not to contact him anymore. We had a very long conversation and I made it clear that our marriage was touch & go at this point. She explained that while she was not attracted to the guy, she was attracted to feeling pursued by someone who could not and would not ever have her. I can't really figure out the motivation there, I've never felt that. I can understand needing to feel pursued and wanted, but by someone who could never have you? It smacks of some kind of power play, but I could be wrong.
We have talked very frankly about our life and she claims to be very committed to me and our marriage. I'm not really seeking suggestions like "marriage counseling" and whatnot because I am already looking into that possibility. I am starting to see a counselor this coming week, but at least at first I want to go alone.
I also don't need to be told that I should just leave her - I love her like mad, and I want to work this out. People do worse things than show a tit online and flirt with a co-worker. And lie repeatedly. Yeah, okay, there's not a whole lot that is worse than that, but anyway...
What I do need your advice with is my jealousy and anger. I am having a very hard time with believing her and trusting her now. I need to learn how to deal with these feelings or else they will hinder any progress we hope to make together. There is just all this anger and bitterness and mistrust inside me now. I am especially fixated on that guy, because he's married and has two very little kids, and according to my wife he would send her pornographic descriptions of how he wanted to do her. This guy, whom I spoke to once on messenger soon after the whole thing first came to my attention, told me that I need to be there more for my wife, and that they were just friends. It was all bullshit, and I feel like he's walking away from this with a smile, untouched, unharmed.
And it is fucking pissing me off. There is so much rage inside me right now I can feel it pulsating in my temple. I can't sleep without alcohol, and I have a bad craving for cigarettes just for the soothing effect, even though I haven't smoked in 15 years. I was up all night last night, and went to bed around noon...slept a few hours at a time, and when I am awake this shit is all I think about. I don't know what to do. I'm sure counseling will help, but in the meantime I feel like I am just self-destructing. I just wish I could do something with this anger. Place it somewhere. It feels unbearable to have it inside me like this.