Am I overreacting?

[Kolbilynn33]

Help! Am I overreacting? I found out my husband had became friends with a female coworker. He was texting her daily. A lot about work stuff as she was new. Either way they became friends and we having no work related texts as well! He never went anyplace with her only texting but I am so mad. He didn’t hide it from me but he didn’t tell me until I asked who he was texting 2 weeks later! He did stop texting her when I said I don’t like the amount of texts but I am so mad. He swears they were just friends. I never got to see any of the messages. I asked him to remove her contact and he removed the messages as well. He told me he would text her and tell her they cannot text like this anymore. He then deleted the message but I was the one who told him to get her off his phone. But, i did get to see her response back to him. It said “I told you to be honest with her from the beginning have a good weekend”. That’s all it said. I am so mad. Should I be mad? Should I be happy he stopped talking to her and move on? We have been together for 17 years. This has never happened before. So lost!

I hate the cool wives thing. It usually means I don't think my DH is shagging every woman he meets.

Me too. Generally when I speak to my partner he is off out to visit a friend (maybe female) or has spoken to a random female friend or has seen a random female friend. He has a LOT of friends and about 50% of them are female. A couple are even exes. Should I worry that a short, slightly balding middle aged man is seeing a Marilyn Munroe lookalike (which is who one of his friends is!) - nah. That's not because I'm a cool wife (currently partner) but because I trust him and no one else would want him anyway, like most of these men in these threads.

I also spend a huge part of my life getting up and close to incredibly hot young men as part of my job. Does it bother him? Nah, because he trusts me.

Oddly enough the cool wives are cool because they have the confidence to trust their partners and don't waste time overrreacting every little text message.

Ok...
You are not unreasonable to think he shouldn't text 10 times a day to ANY woman (attractive or not)
You are unreasonable to think:

• he has cheated by texting 2 weeks and then telling you himself (as far as I understand he told you, you didn't catch him)
• being so mad about this
• considering throwing away your relationship over this
• believing that men and women cannot be friends.

My best friend is a male, has been for the past 15 years, he has always been in a relationship, I was single for about 9 years of our friendship. Never ever we considered anything but friendship. His wife and my partner trust us 100%. We have been living in different countries for quite a few years now and he has been staying at my place (even when I was single) whenever he visited me (with his wife's consent of course). But... we do not text 10 times a day, never did, if we had something important to discuss, maybe we did, but that would be 1 day out of 5-6 months. We go months without contact now that we live in different countries, before that we could go weeks without contact too.
All the same as I have with my other best friend who is female :)

Cool wife? You mean a healthy relationship where there is trust and respect and not paranoia and control!!!

OP do you emotionally abuse your DP in other ways too? If I was friends with your DP I'd tell him to get out before you get even worse, had an ex like you OP I'm still recovering from that 6 years later

@ Leighhalfpennysthigh

Hmmm I am literally always called the cool wife. And we’re actually married. I wouldn’t ever be okay with what OPs husband did. Let me break it down because y’all don’t seem to realize it’s not about a husband having female friends. I have all male friends. My husband has female friends. However, if he met a new friend that he was calling hot, deleting text messages, and flat out not telling me about the new friend. I would think something was off. My mind wouldn’t even jump to cheating, We’ve been married a long time I trust him with my full heart but it would KNOW for a fact that he was hiding something. Why hide the relationship if it was innocent? If she really needs to know what he said since he deleted the evidence and doesn’t trust that it was innocent due to the many red flags then I guess she can just access the phone records and read the texts herself.
In a near 20 year marriage, there is bound to be mistakes on either side eventually. It’s how you handle your mistakes that matters. If she’s wrong, her trust for him will grow and they will move on from it. And she probably will be MUCH more accommodating which will be great for them both. If she’s right and he didn’t tell her the truth even when confronted, trust might be broken beyond repair. Either way she should probably know for a fact so they can move on.

@ mikulkin

I believe that she caught him and then he deleted the messages

Aunaturalmama

What are you on about? He didn't hide anything, he just told her when she asked. I don't tell dp about every person I text, including a few group chats I have which ping all the time!

OP also clearly said she thought people having friends with members of the opposite sex was asking for trouble, so this is about her dh having a female friend.

Finally he only deleted the messages when she asked him to erase this woman from his phone
He has made no attempt to hide her from the OP, introducing her as a business contact and taking op to events where she will be.

@Aunaturalmama oh please. I was also married for 20 odd years before this relationship and even then I didn't keep tabs on who my husband was talking to and texting half the time. Cos I wasn't a controlling arsehole.

I don't think yabu, if this was my husband I'd be fuming. It's unnecessary to be texting another female that much. He needs to think how he would feel if it was the other way around and you were texting another man. It could be completely innocent and I hope it is. Its a horrible feeling when you are concerned about other woman. Be open and honest with him but speak to him calmly and without getting angry (as hard as it might be) and really explain how you feel. I would also ask him what she meant by "i told you to be honest".

You got a weird reaction to this. I don't think you're being unreasonably at all. I'm also a firm believer is trusting your instincts and it sounds like this had yours alarming. Your DH is a grown man yet he's attempting to get your attention by being inappropriate with another woman. If it were me, my next steps would be individual and couples counselling. He needs both. The deleting of messages is a huge red flag for me. The root of this behaviour needs sorting out or it'll inevitably happen again.

She’s not keeping tabs on who he talks to though- which is why she didn’t know about it for some time. She saw him being weird with his phone over an extended period of time and asked him about it.
Do you not communicate with your partners when you feel uneasy? Do they make you feel like a crazy person for having valid feelings?

I didn't keep tabs on who my husband was talking to and texting half the time.

Leighhalfpennysthigh, this implies you then did keep tabs on him the other half of the time .

I don't think the OP is out of order. When you know someone intimately you know when something is a bit off. I trusted my husband 100%. He is a big drinker and would spend 3-4 nights every week in the pub. No issue. One night he used a phrase when talking to me on the phone that immediately got my spidey senses tingling. It was nothing more than something he said, in a way he wouldn't usually say it. And I KNEW something was going on. A week later he admitted to kissing someone in the pub that night. Up to that point I had no reason to doubt him.

People who have affairs usually have people at home who trust them. Until they do something that makes you question. I hate this shit of "you either trust him or you don't". I trusted my husband. Without question. It didn't stop him kissing someone else, though, did it? In fact, the fact that I trusted him so unquestioningly maybe gave him a bit of a confidence to kiss someone and think he'd get away with it because he knew I was unlikely to question him!

@TellMeWhoTheVilliansAre ha ha, yes it does doesn't it. The truth is I never paid any attention unless he spoke to me about it. Same with my new partner. I knew they both had/have large social circles and as mine was much smaller (by choice and because I was often travelling and couldn't maintain a large group of friends as easily). It gives me a headache trying to work out who each of my partners friends are and how he knows them. He was single for a long ti,w before meeting me and formed a lot of close friendships with both sexes in that time.

With my husband it was mostly people we'd known at university who he kept in touch with but I couldn't be arsed because they were mostly those annoying pisshead blokes that jump around on the dance floor.