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Relationships

A few things DH has done in our marriage and i’m finding it hard to get over them.

37 replies

Knobseverywhere · 03/08/2018 00:50

I find this so hard to describe without biasing it one way or another, but will try to make it objective.

DH (45) and I (35) have been together for ten years and married for seven. Three children. He is extremely outgoing and very demonstrative and is constantly making a show (in private and public) of loving the hell out of the DC and I. So much so that everyone around me is always saying “you’re so lucky, he loves you so much!”

This means it’s hard to get anyone else’s view on it in RL as every is so blinded by how outwardly loving and demonstrative he is.

Before we got married there were a couple of instances where I felt he crossed a line, but because I didn’t dig and wasn’t suspicious and actually felt like I could leave if I wanted, I let it go: one time he disappeared for a night and when he returned at 5am, he lied to me about going to a strip club and having lap dances. He said he was somewhere else but I found a receipt while washing his trousers with the date and the time the next day. I found it all a bit sordid and generally weird that he would pay for something like that, but put it down to his work culture (finance and the necessity of client entertainment at the time,) and he excused the lie by saying he thought I would react badly.

And then there was one other time in the years before we married where he disappeared abroad for 72 hours and got back in touch completely wrecked with no memory of what had happened to him. Obviously I had been very worried and found it really unreliable of him and asked him never to do it again. His phone battery had apparently gone dead but he was still in a state that I’d never seen him in before when he emerged and apparently had no memory. To this day his friends take the piss out of me for asking him to never disappear like that again, so if they are with him when his phone battery dies they all text me and tell me that he is “terrified” i will go ape shit that I can’t contact him and so they are letting me know he is okay. I find it to be quite patronising behaviour on all of their parts, especially in this idea that I am some sort of controlling, terrifying person who does not want him to lose battery on his phone when actually the one time i made a fuss was when I was really worried.

The rest of the relationship pre-marriage was quite uneventful in terms of things like that. Only those two times where my suspicions were raised.

Post marriage there have been a few instances which have eroded at me:
He showed me a text conversation with a female client which crossed a line where she was basically drunk and begging him to come over to have sex while he was on a work trip. While he didn’t go over, his refusal was more along the lines that he was “tired” rather than he was married with a family. Their text chat continued over several days of constant back and forth, with him reassuring her that she was very attractive and she shouldn’t be upset. He sent her a few pictures of his “family” in that conversation, supposedly as a deterrent, but they were just pics of the DC and none of me. For some reason he thought that showing me this three day non -stop text marathon was the right thing to do and proof that he was a decent chap.

I think I just felt surprised. This is just something that I wouldn’t do and haven’t done before (nor had someone coming on to me like that post marriage) so I hadn’t really thought about what the appropriate reaction should be. Time passed and then bringing it up again seemed too late and he was irritated I hadn’t got over it and he did the whole “I won’t show you then next time something like this happens” as if he deserved some prize for being transparent.

Last year he got really drunk on a spontaneous night out with friends and then disproportionately angry with me for asking what time he’d be home. It seems to fit nicely in his mind that I seek to control him or am a “ball and chain” at home, especially when he knows he is doing something I wouldn’t want or something that upsets or impacts me (like getting wrecked on a weeknight when he has responsibilities towards the kids in the morning and I have work.)

That night he came back so drunk at 6am and I demanded to see his phone. There were two numbers on the call register for a “Sophie” at 3am and another woman’s name at 4am. He said they were women he’d met in a club and they had typed their numbers into his phone and called themselves from his phone so they had his number. Apparently they were going to tell him about another party they could all go to afterwards.

For me this was a big turning point in my trust because - regardless of what happened - even the minimised version that he probably gave me, was not what I expected or wanted from a marriage partner. I was pregnant at the time so quite vulnerable and did not do very much about it except get cross and upset for a year. We have not had sex for over a year either because I think my trust is just so eroded.

Many of you will say that these instances I’ve mentioned are “just the tip” of the iceberg, but the irony is, they are the actual iceberg. I am saying that because those 4-5 times are some of the only times, he likes to remind me, where he has gone out alone without me. The rest of the time he’s been home with the kids and I. So I’m pretty sure there has been no affair, and perhaps - although who knows - no actual infidelity.

When we talk about the issue as a whole, he of course denies that anything bad or counter to our marriage happened any of those times and he becomes exasperated with my constant referring back to events which, he says, were so insignificant and not what I have built them up to be in my mind.

He says that it is completely mad of me to feel I have lost trust and to withhold sex and be angry because of four instances which occurred when he got drunk over our otherwise long and happy ten year marriage.

To me, he does have a point with that. Objectively I see I have very little to accuse him of. It seems that on the rare occasions he gets drunk he behaves in a way which I don’t like and which upsets me and sets us back. I’m not really sure what to do with that feeling and whether to throw an otherwise successful marriage away over it. We have a very normal, enjoyable life together with the DC and when I manage to temporarily forget these very few instances where I feel I’ve seen someone who I didn’t know, I feel happy with him.

And so I feel I am rather stuck in my own prison now.

I wondered whether if this had happened in your marriage you would be reacting the same way as me? Or have left? Or just forgotten about it and put it all down to drunkenness, youth or misjudgment?

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calmandbright · 03/08/2018 01:01

His behaviour doesn’t inspire trust does it? I wouldn’t like it (and my god I’m the most laid back person ever to be in a relationship with) and therefore wouldn’t have stuck around. Making out to his friends that you are controlling would be enough to see me out, let alone the other weirdness with girls’ numbers etc. He sounds like a bloody rat to me.