Hi. NC for this. I am too ashamed to speak to RL friends about this.
DH and I are have been separated for the past 8 months. No one cheated during the marriage but he wanted the separation because he said I had changed and withdrawn from him in the previous year and wasn't the woman he fell in love with, which was true. That said, I was very shocked that he walked our rather than trying to work on it or talk to me about it. It felt at the time like he threw our (very good) marriage away without a second thought. We have 3 young DCs that love their Dad so much which made it even worse.
He was very stubborn and refused to talk to me or work on it, even insisted on NC when he collected the kids. I was devastated. I spent months crying, lost a lot of weight and did not know what to do. He said he wanted a divorce and was adamant on this.
I was in a mess, and in my effort to cheer myself up I joined match.com and went on three dates in a week and had drunken sex with one of them. Not proud of it, but I felt really low and rejected. I then had sex with an old boyfriend a few months later during a very low time. All through it though, I was missing DH and feeling devastated and would have done anything for him to come home. My behavior was just to try and make myself feel better and never once in my marriage did I ever even think about cheating or flirting. My DH was my world. He really was.
At Christmas, I phoned DH and begged him to please meet up and talk about it and he finally agreed. When we saw each other he crumbled and said right away that he still loved me and wanted to be with me but that my behavior in the past year had made him feel it was hopeless for us to get back what we had. We talked about it properly and I agreed to make the changes he wanted.
Since then he's called or seen me every day, we've spent lots of time together away from DCs and we are dating and feel "in love" again like we did at first. Things have been going very good with us. Lots of honest talks, great progress in counselling, and he has been treating me really well and apologising for leaving and saying he was "a fool" Yesterday he sent presents and a card to me out of nowhere to thank me for trying again after his foolish behavior.
I came clean with him about the match.com dates and told him I slept with someone else. I didn't tell him about the old boyfriend because I thought he would be too upset. This is the first time I have ever been less than truthful with my DH. He told me he had also joined dating sites but that he had given up on it because the women were all fake.
The thing is, I was at his house last night and he was in the shower and I was using his computer and please don't ask me why but I decided to check his internet history.
I found out that in the first months of our separation he was very VERY active on adults style dating websites. Not match.com - the sick, sex kind. He was exchanging emails with women all over the country and was even googling how to get to their address and looking at flights to go and see them and was even looking up local escorts. He was also Googling how to meet women, buying sprays to attracts women and reading articles on how to get women into bed.
This is all a lot worse than he had made it out to be and it seemed like this was all he was doing all night every night for months. It went on all night every night!
We share bank accounts so I am pretty sure he never met up with any of these women but am not 100% sure, and also not sure he did not see an escort. He was viewing their profiles.
I confronted him last night and he begged me to forgive him. He told me he had done it because he was very lonely, sad, missing me and it meant nothing. He said that after we met up at Christmas that he disconnected all the accounts and had not visited any sex sites since then (I checked the history and this seemed to be true).
The thing is thought that because the suspicion was in my mind, I kept on digging today. I think I found his profile on a very dirty website and recognise him from location and the photos (which is just of his penis but he has a distinctive one) and it said he had been active TODAY so if it IS HIM then he is on this account at work because I am still at his house. I also found his profile on another sex site and the content of it made me almost vomit "I am looking for a dirty little slut to f**k" etc.
DH and I were always very sexual, so this aspect doesn't surprise me but the fact that he left me and was actively looking for sex / dates and women instead of trying to work on our marriage for so long makes me feel sick.
I know I had sex with an old BF, but that sort of happened when we were out one night and it wasn't me who instigated. Also, on my match.com dates all I did was cry to the poor bloke about how much I loved and missed DH and I was only on it for two weeks or something.
Is this a case of "we both did wrong and put the past behind you" or is it a case of my DH perhaps being a lying, cheating bastard? I am not sure if this might just be how men react to heartbreak or whether he is just a complete bastard.
Should I send him fake messages to his profiles to check on him?
Should I confront him and make him open his personal email and let me read it, or is this going too far?
I really, really love my husband and want our marriage to work but we have never been through a trust issue before and I don't know what to do.
Before you ask, he did not leave me because of an OW so no one else was involved.