He thinks I'm paranoid. Instincts tell me something's wrong. Is it?

[tande]

Been together with DH 20 yrs, married for 5 with 2 kids, DD 6, DS 3. DH became distant, moody and non communicative last year. I put this down to stress as there were lots of genuinely highly stressful things happening at work, family & financial. Then 2 things happened which freaked me out. Went for dinner with friends at Xmas and he seemed completely normal, chatty, joking. That was fine, but as soon as we left he snapped back into grumpy mode, shouted at me because I hadn't got the cash for the babysitter already. In January I invited myself along to a work drinks/dinner and he was really friendly and close with a girl he'd been working with a lot. When we walked from the pub to the restaurant, he walked ahead with her joking and chatting. They were so close as to be almost arm in arm. My instinct kicked in & red flags went up. When we got home I asked him what was going on. He said they were just friends. It made me realise how much he'd withdrawn from me but I hadn't really realised how bad it was.

So I sat him down & asked if he wanted to stay in the relationship. He said yes. We've been working on it and things are so much better. But there is still a lack of trust on my part as I don't understand why he withdrew if there was nothing else going on. He says he withdrew cos he wanted distance but he says there was no specific reason. Just I was being nasty to him. But I feel I was responding to him being critical & argumentative with me. We are intimate and close one minute, and then having a blazing row the next minute as I keep checking up on him. When first challenged, he said I was paranoid, delusional and i was jealous of her. I've been checking his email and texts and can't find any evidence (he knows I check). He's done everything I've asked of him, being more communicative, loving, coming home early, not being grumpy, being more involved with the children.

So now I feel like I should be happy but something still niggles. Here's just one weird example, we use the same passwords for everything but he has a different one for his phone. I asked why that number (it's a year) & he has no reason. He uses my year of birth for another pin number & said oh I can't use your birthday as I use that for something else.
If anyone can offer some perspective I'd be really grateful. I'm driving myself crazy.

Go with your instincts Tande, of course, there is a possibility that you are wrong but if I were you I wouldn't show him you still doubt him. You asked him about this girl, he denied it so you have no proof and you NEED to know.
You have to get sneaky so eventually if you give him enough rope he will hang himself. Get spyware on the computer he uses, logs every thing he does, what he writes and to who.
If you think he is seeing her/someone, where do you think they meet? hotels, meals out cost money, where does she live? has he withdrawn cash/ filled up with petrol near to her home check statements both bank and mobile.
If you really believe there is something going on and you can't live with the not knowing then look into hiring someone to prove it for you.

The thing is, if there is nothing going on that you can find, how long are you going to keep on searching? Because (bearing in mind I don't know you, your H, or your back story), if someone is not breaching monogamy but has a partner who is convinced that something has happened, that is just as corrosive to a relationship as infidelity is. You say that your H has stopped being horrid and has in fact been nice for quite some time. SO maybe he is a good bloke and is just tired of being spied on, because there must come a point when he feels that there is simply no way he can prove his innocence to you and therefore starts to resent your suspicions.

Oh .. this all so familiar

Trust your gut feeling Tande - I too was made to feel paranoid and my gut feeling was bang on!

My STBX said 'when did he have time to have an affair?' Turns out he managed through fly days off and fake training and fake conferences ..

He also changed the password on his phone and cleared down all browsing

The other thing he did was have the OW's name in his phone and email as 'John Smith' (a work colleague) so at a glance there was nothing to suspect.

So sorry you are going through this! x

thanks for all your comments. I am so confused about it all. And thinking I'm getting myself in a state about nothing. SGB - that is exactly what I'm worried about that if he is innocent then what can he do? He can't prove it, he can only say it and show by his actions he is a good husband - which is what he is doing.

I honestly don't think anything is going on now. But maybe there was some emotional attachment last year. I will never find out because there won't be any evidence.

He did say maybe I could discretely ask his colleague if he thought his behaviour with people in the office was appropriate. The colleague is someone I instinctively trust. I felt sorry for DH because I have made him doubt himself.

by the way in answer to your earlier comment CHARBON, i thought the phone code was her year of birth but it doesn't match, it's about a year or two out

Tande After the 'when do I have time to have an affair' comment I backed off and thought that yes I must be paranoid .. I even agreed to him going off to a 3 days conference as he had established he wasn't having an affair (turned out to be a 3 day mini break with the OW)

I found proof of the affair just over a month later..

I still wonder if he left it (a card to the OW) deliberately so I would find it and he didn't have to tell me or if he had become careless because he thought he'd gotten away with it

This is a risky strategy and is based on the premise that prior to this dreadful time you experienced last year, your relationship was happy and rewarding, but have you considered taking a bit more of a risk and showing your vulnerabilties about the fidelity in your relationship?

You see, this is what seems to be missing - some honesty. It's normal in the life of a relationship to meet people with whom we make a connection and with whom if things were different, we could have a romantic relationship. You probably sensed when you saw him and his colleague together that they were mutually attracted and had a connection and of course everyone else would have been able to see that too. Yet your husband appears to be denying that this was ever the case and that's the sticking point for me, above everything else.

If there had been nothing going on and it had never crossed his mind that this had strayed into emotional affair territory at the very minimum, if he valued your security and peace of mind and wanted to make things better, he would admit at the very least that with hindsight he had become too close to his colleague. If the situations were reversed, you would do the same wouldn't you?

I take the view that people always know when they are in danger territory, but they make little bargains along the way to delude themselves that they are not e.g. it's not physical, I still love my wife, it's fine to be good friends with a woman. What's unusual is to delude oneself so comprehensively with hindsight.

So could you speak to him along these lines? Do you trust him to be honest with you? Would he feel safe admitting some of this to you?

I'd give up on the snooping to be honest. It's fairly pointless if he knows you're doing it and it's a diversionary activity in a way. It's stopping you from confronting what all this means about your partner and what you now want from your own life.

Your current relationship sounds like lots of highs and lows and you might have been manipulated into thinking that the lows are of your making because of your paranoia and jealousy. If after an honest discussion and a commitment to stop snooping, these lows remain I think you will have more clarity. When people have affairs, they undergo a split-self and this often produces extremes in their interactions with others.

Charbon you're exactly right, it's honesty that's missing. I have done what you said, I said that I feel vulnerable and insecure because I don't understand his behaviour and am therefore not confident that he loves me. So when I keep looking for things, it's because I am trying to understand what was going on to make sense of it & then be able to move forward.

I said that I still have a couple of questions and maybe the best would be to schedule a time to talk about it so he doesn't feel that he's going to come home and suddenly get twenty questions about something. He said ok but hasn't mentioned it since so I guess I will have to broach that.

I tried to encourage him to be honest with me back in February, I said if anything has happened, now is the time to say & let's deal with it. Please don't hold back because if I find things out later on that will be it. He looked sincere and said I haven't lied to you, I haven't done anything wrong.

You are right, it does seem strange that he feels there was no connection with her other than friendship. I'd also asked him very specifically had they exchanged emails at any point in the past that were not work related, even if nothing personal, e.g. gossip, music etc. He categorically denied it, and yet I have the emails from last year. They are harmless enough, he could easily have said yes just the usual office banter stuff.

Now though, he seems to be being honest. He shows me emails, if i ask to see his phone he hands it to me.

About the highs and lows - yes he always says I'm causing the rows. He always says, just when I thought we were making good progress you start off again. I just feel that he should be saying, I'm sorry you still feel that way, what can I do to reassure you? Not, oh no here we go again.

oh and Charbon I think your suggestion is a good one so I am going to say I'll stop snooping and asking you what you are up to & trust you to be open and honest. Then see how we go.