Long post warning!!
I’m posting because I honestly don’t know whether I’m being unreasonable, or whether I’ve just reached the point where I can’t carry this anymore.
I’ve been married to my husband for 15 years and we have a 9-year-old daughter.
About five years ago, I found Instagram messages between my husband and another woman. I didn't confront him directly at the time, but I made a comment/hint about men and women messaging each other on Instagram. The next time I looked, the messages had been deleted.
When I questioned him, he said he had deleted them because he realised they might look suspicious. He completely denies that there was anything inappropriate going on.
My problem is that I can't get past the fact that, if there was genuinely nothing in them, why delete them? I know that doesn't necessarily mean he was having an affair or doing anything wrong, but once the messages were deleted, I could never know what had actually been said.
There is another part of this which makes it particularly painful.
Around the same period, my husband told me that I had become unattractive. I had put on quite a lot of weight at the time, and that comment really affected me. When I then found the messages with another woman, it inevitably made me wonder whether there was a connection between the two things.
Since then, he has become much more protective of his phone and, whenever I raise the Instagram situation, he gets annoyed and doesn't really want to talk about it. He continues to say he did nothing wrong and that I'm dwelling on something that happened five years ago.
But I can't get over it.
I don't necessarily think he had an affair. I don't even know what was in the messages. What I do know is that my trust was damaged, and I don't feel like it was ever properly repaired.
I feel as though I have spent five years trying to convince myself that I should be over it, but I'm not. Our relationship has never felt the same to me since.
I'm now wondering whether the marriage is actually dead and I'm just too scared to admit it.
We have a child, we've been together for a long time, and obviously I don't want to destroy our family over something I can't even prove happened. At the same time, I don't want to spend the next 10 or 20 years feeling suspicious, disconnected and unhappy.
Part of me thinks I should just accept his explanation and move on. Another part of me thinks that the fact that he deleted the messages, became more secretive with his phone and then dismissed my feelings is exactly why I have never been able to move on.
I also can't help wondering whether being told I was unattractive at the same time has affected how I see myself and how secure I feel in the marriage.
So, Mumsnet, what would you do?
Would you try couples counselling and genuinely try to rebuild the marriage, even after five years?
Or does the fact that I still feel this way after all this time tell me that the relationship has already run its course?
I don't want people to tell me categorically that he definitely cheated, because none of us know that. I think what I'm struggling with is whether a marriage can survive when trust has been broken but you never actually find out what happened — and the other person isn't willing to really talk about it.