This first thread may be a bit long. If you stay with me, thank you in advance.
My story is convoluted, but I'm a BH (38) with a WW (37). I posted on here a few years back, and immediately deleted it all because I was scared my wife could somehow find it. And I was in speculation mode without a real, true "smoking gun" and I wanted to believe her back then. I've been on these forums reading voraciously ever since. Standard advice has been done. I've been STD tested, I do have an attorney on retainer with whom I've consulted and found out what a divorce may look like, and he's on hold to file the divorce papers, I've told the OM's wife. I just need a place to talk this out and see if my story is beyond broken at this point, and maybe just writing out the timeline will help me too.
In march of 2022, I found out that my wife had been in a full blown affair since July of 2019. Emotional, sexual, love, limmerance, and all of it. I work night shift, so they'd take day trips while I was sleeping and our 4 kids were in school. They'd go to a different city and get a hotel with day rates so they could be intimate during the day and then go out shopping and eating or whatever and be a "real couple" without risk of being caught in our home city. It started off at work between them, and somewhere right before Covid shut everything down, around February of 2020, he took a job an hour and a half away, so they started seeing each other way less. He still lives very near us, but he started commuting and the time they'd spend together at work (and office sex, of course, because why not) had to stop. So they no longer work together now. In March when I discovered it, I think she was trying to get caught. She left a phone with all their messages in the front pocket of her bag, with no password on the phone, knowing good and well that I was in blood hound mode searching her stuff and convinced she was cheating. She knew if I saw a strange phone in the front pocket of her bag, I'd read it. After confrontation, she managed to convince me to stay in the marriage and give her another chance. It's been a brutal 7 months, but I thought there was real progress. Things were different. She'd plead that I wasn't competing with this other guy, that he meant nothing to her, and she went out of her way to be the loving wife she had been before all this started years earlier (I forgot to mention we've been married 19 years). She was open with her phone, sharing location with me whenever she went places, we were living like a husband and wife serving one another and trying to be kind to one another, she started doing my laundry for me again and I started cooking for her again. Our sex life was incredible, but it always was even throughout her affair (except for a very short time where she did cut me off in the very early stages of her affair and I suspect the height of limmerance, butterflies, or whatever with him). But it was even better these past 7 months, with a deeper, more spiritual intimacy compounded onto the great physical part of knowing each other so well after all these years as a very sexual couple. She's sincerely been everything I think anyone could ask for in a WS committed to reconciling.
That's why I was utterly shocked to find out it's been a lie a couple of days ago. I'm now trying to find out how utterly of a lie it's been, from a spouse whose word I can't trust really at all. There's a much deeper back story going back five years, with a couple other men and what would be called emotional affairs that may have been physical, and one of which almost certainly was to some degree. But suffice to say, there's a long history of inappropriate messaging and conversations, even before her current affair partner that was discovered in March of this year. And I'm still not sure how much of that I fully believe her on. I almost tend to believe she's telling the truth about the flirting stuff in messaging stopping, but only because of her loyalty to her primary AP, not anything to do with us or our marriage. I think he stopped the other men.
Regardless, two days ago I went through her phone thinking I'd just be reassuring myself. I didn't expect to really find anything. I haven't looked in months and months. I'm just not wired that way, I just want to live and not be a detective all the time. But I look and behold there's sexting between her and a man from our kid's ballgame earlier in the week. They were at the ballfield, he told her to come sit beside him, and she responded with a meme saying "yes daddy" and then he sent her some 50 shades of gray memes and she responded in kind. This guy isn't the primary affair partner. She says it was all a joke, but acknowledges it's all cheating still. Crying, sorry. But freezing up and refusing to let me have her phone after she took it out of my hand. I call the guy because I know him since our kids have played ball together for years. He tells me how deeply sorry he is, acknowledges that it was screwed up, but assures me that he's never touched her and his story lines up exactly with her. It's all more jokes than anything else. But he tells me, "There is another man, and it's not me you have to worry about. You need to go through your wife's phone and you'll find stuff between her and someone. Even if I wanted to be with her, she just jokes around with me. There's a guy she's actually with." I ask her what he's talking about, and she says she has no idea. She hands me her phone and says I can go through it now, but she's had ample time to delete whatever she wanted. (God this is a long, complex story, and I'm sorry).
At this point, I tell her I'm just done. I'm going to file for the divorce. I've had an attorney on stand by since March, and I'm just done. She begs and pleads, swears there's nothing with this guy from the softball field, that I'm her soulmate and she can't imagine living without me. She wants so desperately to see our grandchildren grow together and enjoy this next phase of life as our kids all grow up and move on (and we would be a young empty nester couple because we started so young, and we've always dreamed about those days of child-free 40s to just enjoy one another and travel and be young grandparents). Then she tells me she will not live without me, and makes very credible suicide threats. It could well be manipulation, stopping me from leaving. And I believe in some sense it was, but I also don't know that it's merely that. I didn't know what to do. I called the police. We had her taken to a hospital, and now she's been committed to a mental health unit by order of a psychiatrist. She's been in there and will be for a few more days. I've talked to her on the phone since then, and found out that for the past 5 years (about the time everything started going very very south in our marriage and her personality), she's been abusing adderrall. I've known she took it,but had no idea how incredibly high the dosages were or how much she was taking it or that she had been crushing it and snorting it to get high. She finally confessed to all that, and she's going through some pretty intense withdrawal in the hospital right now. I've talked to her, and she says right now she finally has a clear mind. This is rock bottom. Yesterday was our youngest son's (her baby, the mama's boy of all mama's boys) birthday. Today is our oldest son's 18th birthday (busy winters around here with all these october babies). She's missing them both in a mental health unit. She's finally being confronted with the fact that she's out of control with this drug addiction. She always felt like she had it under control, even though she knew she didn't feel like herself and had wanted to be clean for a long time, and never quite could because every time she tried to get clean she'd become so unproductive that she felt like she wasn't able to even be a mother or go to work without the drug. She swears this is rock bottom. No more secrets. She just desperately needs another chance. But the problem is that I've heard all that before, and I thought rock bottom was back in March, adn there's one last twist that I found out about last night, and not from her even after she was in the hospital crying about being at rock bottom and wanting to be open and drop all the secrets she's been carrying.
She's been talking to the original affair partner this entire time that we've been "reconciling". I never ever saw that coming. She had me convinced he was gone. She's been so emphatic in that. She had his number blocked, and I'd check to make sure it was still blocked and every time it was spot checked, he was still blocked. Instagram. She'd never used instagram in the past. She had it, but never really liked it. So that was how they communicated because she knew I'd check facebook messenger and snapchat (that only has our children on it as contacts and the affair partner is blocked as a condition of her keeping that due to some weird ways her and our daughters use it to communicate). But I never knew to check instagram, and with "vanish mode" it's a cheater's paradise. I found out because I decided I was tired of keeping her secrets like I had since March. Our kids kind of knew because they'd hear us argue, but we didn't explicitly tell them things. They knew the AP's name. They knew there was something. But this time when I came home I just directly told our oldest 3 about me catching the sexting with the dad at the ballfield and how I think I'm filing for divorce and she's in the hospital. At that point my oldest daughter says,"Dad, I wanted so badly just to stay out of everything, but I love you and you need to know Mom still text's AP). That blindsided me. She had photo evidence. She had confronted her mom about it and said, I know you're not supposed to be talking to him, and WW just lied to our daughter and said she was going through and deleting stuff and that's why his name was pulled up. My daughter didn't believe her, so she took a live photo one day of her instagram chatting him over her shoulder, and once I told them what was going on, she gave me that with the timestamps. Then my other daughter, younger, speaks up and says, "yeah she talks to him all the time, I didn't realize they weren't supposed to be talking."
I asked my wife about this while she was in the hospital, and I felt like I was getting a bit of trickle truth, but eventually she admitted that she'd been talking to him. She said the primary reason right now was because A) He wanted to get a restraining order on me after I went to his house and tried to tell his wife and went to his work (an hour and a half away) and confronted him after a really bad day recently, and she was trying to convince him not to do all that, and B) because he had threatened suicide and said told her how he gave up having kids with his wife for her and gave up a big job promotion moving states away to stay here to be with her and she felt guilty and worried about his mental health (yeah, the irony of him being suicidal and her feeling stuck to stay because of that coupled with what she did to me a couple of days ago is not lost on me at at all). Then she admits that at first, it wasn't that. She kept him unblocked on Messenger at my request early on. I wanted him to be able to reach out, and I wanted to see her show me and prove she'd be faithful when he did. And she says that for a month or so he never did reach out through that one avenue where he wasn't blocked (he was blocked on the phone the whole time). But then he did. And she missed his friendship because during the affair, she had given up everything for him. She didn't even have any girlfriends left to talk about life with, and she was just lonely. Her only person at this point was me, and I was raging still and going through the things BS's go through post D-day, and life was really really hard on her with no friends and worried I'd leave any day (and I did at times say I was, and I was in an ocean of up and down and good days and bad days like I'm sure so many here can relate to). So she responded. And they started just talking as friends again. And she lied PASSIONATELY AND WITH CONVICTION to me all the while that there was no contact with him. And she admitted that they became sexual again, twice. She says at that point the guilt was so great over all the lying that she had to get zombie like high in order to give him what he wanted, and that while she admits that during their affair before she was in fact an enthusiastic sex partner, not just doing it for him, that this time was different. Now she did feel awful, and she had to get incredibly high just to give him robotic, zombie like sex, when all she wanted now was the friendship. She says that did stop after that, and she quickly realized that a friendship wasn't possible. She felt awful, but that's when he started with all the things he had given up and the mental health challenges, and she didn't block him simply because she couldn't live with her conscience if he harmed himself (the fact that he has a WIFE, and she should be his confidant, apparently didn't cross her mind). But there's no way to prove any of this. It's all her word and a bunch of vanish mode instragram messages. She admitted that they met in a parking lot last week and talked for a few minutes, but swears there was no physical contact, not even a hug. She says she does still tell him she loves him in their messages, but it's not the same as before. They don't talk about a future together anymore, and now she's completely willing to go totally no contact. She'll give me whatever I need. She'll delete the social media completely. She's going to get clean and off the drugs, and is in the process of doing that now. She's being set up with mental health professionals and a plan once she gets out. It's going to be different this time. That her last contact with him was in the hospital telling him what happened and where their relationship had led her to, and that she was finally and totally done (again, I've heard all this before). She's committed to doing whatever it takes to prove that she can be the wife she once was, and we can have that future we always dreamed of, and that I'm enough and she wants only me (heard it all before). This is, according to her, a true final rock bottom (heard that before too). This time she's getting clean off the drugs (I haven't ever heard that one).
I just don't know what to do. I don't know how to view everything. In some way it's cathartic just to write it out. And I've left out a lot of details, even as detailed and transparent as I've tried to be in this post. It's a book to write just this much, and if you read this far with me, thank you. I'm open to people's thoughts and opinions, as I'm just in no man's land of not knowing what to do. I know in a perfect world, for my own sake, if I could have everything I ever dreamed of, I want my faithful wife who used to exist. I'm just not sure that person exists any more or ever can again, and even if she can how I could ever trust that she is being true. And I don't want to live like this. If she can't be faithful, I feel like somewhere out there is a new life, and there are women out there who would love to be faithful to a man who's faithful and loyal to them (probably many BW's on here feel that way). And if I can't have my wife, then the next best thing is to cut my losses and try to one day find that with someone new. I want to and feel like I deserve to be someone's "guy, one and only, that dude for her" and be able to safely give that same level of loyalty to another imperfect, but faithful woman. Thank you for reading. I apologize for the book. I won't do this level of writing again, but I felt like it was necessary for the story to make any sense.
[This message edited by 1345Marine at 4:02 PM, Friday, October 7th]