Rover
Quite a few years back we had a betrayed husband come here and share his story. I don’t remember the actual details, but what I recall was something along the lines of his wife and her boss using extremely intimate and personal language in texts, hiding phone and deleting logs and texts, buying and hiding lingerie before going to conferences, getting waxed and beauty-treatments, not answering her phone in evenings and not being in her hotel-room when he called late at night. If I remember she didn’t answer her mobile in the evening, so he called the hotel directly and asked for her room and got no answer. The answer when she called him next day was that she had turned off her mobile (something she never did at home) and had an early night, not bothering to answer the hotel phone.
Basically – the picture he drew was lacking nothing but a recording of OM and WW in bed.
No. That wouldn’t even cut it because she did grudgingly admit to having been in room that evening and later grudgingly in his bed – only clothed and no sex and it was simply to do some work… or whatever dog-ate-my-homework excuse she came up with. While she insisted she was doing dictation, most of us here were clear she was doing dick-tation…
Now… when you add all the factors together: sexy lingerie, waxing and beauty treatments before leaving on a business-trip to a conference, two company representatives being wife and her boss, two rooms – but wife not there in evenings or nights, not answering phone during evenings, being in same room as boss in evenings and night, being in same bed as boss…
What does common-sense and logic tell you?
Nobody – not the husband nor us that were guiding him – could say with 100% certainty that she was having sex with her boss. But she was definitely having some form of affair simply based on what she admitted, and the odds of it being fully physical were something along the lines of 9999 to 10000 based on what was known and admitted.
His wife eventually had a poly and on the question about sex definitely 100% flunked. The operator was experienced and reputable, and he stated that there was no false-positive or positive-false on the questions she failed: she was lying.
She convinced the poster to have another test, and again she failed just as clearly.
Despite this – despite all the evidence and two failed poly’s – the poster stated that he didn’t know what to do, he was doomed to try to reconcile without knowing what he was really reconciling from.
I just looked him up. Hasn’t been active for 12 years, but the last posts of note were from 4 years after his d-day and were about his misery due to the shortcomings of reconciliation. I think his line-of-thought was that if he soldiers on then the sex thing won’t matter so much and/or she might eventually be honest to him. Neither happening…
You remind me a bit about that poster…
Well… maybe I should rather say I fear you might go the same way as this poster…
I will give your wife one thing: I will give her story a higher chance of being true. Versus the 1/10000 above I think there might be something closer to a 1/20 that she didn’t see OM during those three days, and a 1/10 that the affair did not have a heavy sexual tone (as in phone-sex, text-sex, revealing photos and such).
The question IMHO is this:
Do YOU believe her?
We tend to forget that at stages in reconciliation we – the BS – need to let go of some grievances. Three years from now you can’t be looking at your wife wondering still if she did meet OM during those 3 days. You either KNOW she did, or you believe she didn’t. So if YOU believe her story – fine. You can possibly move on. If you don’t… well… don’t hang on for four more years here thinking you are stuck somewhere you don’t want to be.
I find her refusal to do a poly rather damning.
You have been given a lot of other options though.
You can get texts and other info off phones retrieved.
Did she use social media? Most platforms have ways of recovering deleted content.
What was the pattern of the phone-logs the three days she was away?
Where did she stay, whom did she meet, what did she do?
She could be sharing all of this with you and offering whatever was needed – IF she had nothing to hide.