Feel like I'm going crazy with suspicion

[Paranoiacentral]

God I feel sick that I'm even writing this. I've name changed as im a regular poster with a memorable name!
Right, sorry I'm shaking , but I've had to work myself up to even post this let alone deal with might or might not be happening.
I'm suspicious about my husband, this kills me to say, he's a good man, a great man, an equal, a fabulously kind, generous, respectful man and a wonderful father. There is no back story, no history of cheating, no violence, no problems. So far, so sickeningly perfect.
BUT, I just can't shake off the feeling that something is going on. Let me give you the sum total of my suspicions so far;
Refuses to answer any calls from a certain work colleague (let's call her Lucy) in front of me. To the point that on two seperate occasions over the past month she has called whilst I have been in the car with him and he has actually answered with the following lines 'before you say anything Lucy let me just say I am in the car with Paranoiacentral'
Last week she called en route to the airport and he answers with 'sorry i couldn't talk before Lucy i was packing the car up with paranoia and the children, who are all here with me now'.....

He came home with a whacking great diamond ring 6 weeks ago, completely out of the blue. I feel horrible using this accusingly but it's so unlike him.

Now this one really will make me seem crazy.....on a few occasions recently he seems to get teary eyed when we are cuddling/kissing, he'll he onto me so tightly and say 'I love you so much' but then makes a gulping sound right after. Like I said crazy, but new for him. And the gulping is odd, like he's lying or afraid.
That's the sum total of my fears, not much I know, but the big concern, my main fear is the 'feeling' I don't know if it's instinct or what but something is different, something has changed and j can't put my finger on what it is. But it's starting to make me act differently in front of him, it's corrosive and its eating away at me. On holiday I couldn't stand to be around him, though I think I hid it well.
Oh god, I don't know what to do and I need your advice.

Id believe him. Glad for a happy ending :)

he's told you what you wanted to hear
Which could well be true. The OP, who knows him better than anyone here, feels it was sincere and honest.

I'm glad you got it sorted OP

Really pleased you have spoken to him and now feel so much better about it all.

Tbh, i found it hard to believe he was having an affair by what you were saying. Im really glad its all sorted out :)

Oh bless you.
He actually said exactly what all of us expected him to say.
The script. Word for word.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it either. I hope I'm wrong. Time will tell

"Swearing on the children's lives?" I might have believed it in your position, had it not been for that bit. In my experience, it tends to mean someone is lying through their teeth.

Well, on the face of it OP, all these things can be interpreted one way or the other. You say he replied immediately, which you took to be a good thing, but most cheaters have their lies and alibis ready to go. Cheating is stressful, they don't want to be caught on the back foot. You didn't mention that she was 'droney' before, and really, he could have cut her off at any point in a conversation with 'wife is in the car, can't talk', so blurting it out immediately on answering the call doesn't sound good. Neither does the fact that they only have a two week texting history.

But it could all be absolutely genuine too, and honestly, if your gut feeling has been soothed by his response, it's probably fine.

It's all very subjective and I would stop reading, if I were you, OP. For example, the being on speaker phone is something I've heard and said similar to - albeit with colleagues in my office rather than spouse in the car - and sounded normal to me. On the other hand, if my husband swore on our kids' lives instead of replying with "what the actual fuck are you on about" - I'd know something was wrong. You know him and you sensed something was off. Only you know if stil is, or not.

Rest of us are projecting.

OP, I'm really sorry to raise doubts but I just don't find the reasons your H has given to explain his behaviour completely plausible. And in your last post you mentioned other behaviour (distracted, nervous, anxious, on the phone more/replying to emails all hours) that you hadn't mentioned previously which add fuel to my doubt. If you feel relieved, then go with it but I would still be checking. I would Google signs of a cheating spouse because they are very predictable. But like some previous posters stated, we are all just inferring from what you have written and could have it totally wrong - which I hope.

cheater's script if OP is still reading

The one thing you didn't explain was why he, in your opening email, you described him, getting all choked up, teary eyed and gulping when he hugged you!. guilty as hell!.

Swearing on the kids lives, pathetic!

Ask yourself this one question, has he in all your time together ever done that before. If he hasn't, you have your answer.

There's a lot of unnecessarily crowing cynicism going on here. And yet I'm naturally very inclined towards listening to gut feelings.

let's try and bear in mind that the OP has had TWO gut feelings here. The initial sensation that something was wrong and then the feeling that he was genuinely upset by her pain and keen to reassure her when she questioned him.

OP, I think you need to trust your gut both times. Firstly, your suspicions were based on small things, a gift (which is a nice thing!) And those phone calls. In my experience (and that's not going to be all-encompassing) a man buying a gift like that may well be trying to atone for something but we don't know that for sure. And importantly we wouldn't even know for what.

What troubles me more is that there's no real connection between his reasoning about not wanting to bore you with work stuff and saying to Lucy 'my wife is in the car'. That doesn't quite fit. He'd be more likely to say, 'Hi Lucy, can we talk later or you can email me if it's important, anything urgent?' your presence in the car would not be the thing that's important to convey to the caller, rather it would simply be to not fill the car with work.

So, if I'm being really honest, I think the most likely reading of what is here is anything from absolutely nothing's been going on, to something went on and is now over and he feels guilty about it. This does not read to me as someone who is embroiled in an ongoing affair. We see enough of those on here. I also think that from his reaction to you, the ring and the emotional state of him, he has realised that he really loves you and wants to be with you. It is up to you whether you think there was more to this at some point, but as you say, very very hard to discover without speaking to her and even then. Also, think about what you'd want to know. If he had a drunken snog with her at some work do, 'then talked on the phone a bit to 'sort out what happened'. And now are just getting on with their lives and he felt shit about it, would you want to know? Or is that his mishap to deal with?

I would be kind to yourself and listen to your instincts over the next few months but in a relaxed way. I'm not getting any siren sounds, just the distant sense maybe there was an accident a while ago and now the road is cleared.

I've been watching this thread but not posted until now.

I'm glad you talked to him about it, and I'm glad that you trust what he has said. You know him. Your gut instinct to trust him after that conversation is just as relelvant and important as your gut instinct before.

I love the way that people are all "Trust your intuition" when that intuition says that cheating is happening. And then, when the intuition is that it isn't, those same people are all "For god's sake, don't trust your intuition".

It sometimes feels like mn has been invaded by a lot of robots programmed to intone "wankbadger...the script...copy documents...sti clinic...". But you can tell they aren't robots because of the desperately human longing they exude for the partner to actually be cheating because that fits in with the psychodrama going on in their own heads about - presumably - their own ex-DPs.

I agree, it's almost as if some posters can't comprehend that he's probably not cheating and that they want him to be cheating.

From what OP has said I still think he's cheating.
It's called experience.
Some on here have been here a long time.

I can honestly say that posts like this, 98% of them believe their cheating partners and guess what???

Yes, they come back to say they wish they had listened to the very experienced wise women on here. Because, of course, he was cheating.

It's obvious.
OP is relating the script - word for word.

I hope to goodness we are all wrong and this man is a stand up guy who is just misunderstood and who hasn't cheated (after all, he swore on his childrens lives - yawn...)
But... I very much doubt it.

OP I hope this all works out for you and everything gets back to normal for you quickly.
We will still be here if you need any further advice.
Good luck.

gateauxauxfruits spot on.

I find it incredibly insulting to be accused of wanting him to turn out to be a cheat. Discovering an affair is one of the worst feelings in the world - I don't want anyone ever to go through that.
I also don't want anyone to ignore things that don't quite add up. It doesnt help, long term.

I have never been cheated on in my marriage. I linked to the Cheating Script because many, many women have found it useful in not getting the piss taken out of them by duplicitous men. OP can read and see if any points apply to her husband. What she does with that information is up to her.

If no points apply (although going off what she said, unfortunately some do) then Happy Days.

So wished I'd listened to my gut feeling and not for one moment listened to a word he said. After 20 years of being together.

In the denouement, these middle aged people wanted to elope, such were their "teenage again" feelings.

At one point, before it was all revealed, he even asked me my views on the poem "To my coy Mistress", because he didn't do poetry and was having a bit of an argument online. At this point I was making the dinner. He then went back to his study and fed her my views! Yes, I hacked his emails post affair and it was all on there.

I personally think that this isn't quite the same as the more obvious cheating scripts we see on here sometimes. In those cases I would expect background noise of distancing in the relationship, criticism of the OP that seems to come from nowhere, and a lifestyle that allows free unaccounted for time.

What OP has described doesn't set those sort of alarm bells ringing. She wasn't given the usual shit of, 'Oh, Lucy, yeah I think she has a crush on me, it's embarrassing, I didn't want to upset you' or bizarrely angry defensiveness that I would associate with the script. This seems different. I'm not saying nothing's gone on, who can say, but one thing seems clear, he is going through a stage of being very keen to reassure his wife and any emotion he's shown has been about his real love for her (the gift, the gulping).

Personally, I would say even if the most suspicious part of me were activated, I would say whatever it is is over. I'd be interested in what other elements of the relationship have been like lately if OP still wasn't satisfied, but she includes in her original post that the usual affair stuff isn't present, nor is there a history of cheating or suspicion of cheating.

I'm sorry for your awful treatment, elendon, and there's absolutely no doubt that when people have affairs they are capable of truly shocking stuff. But I don't think there's enough here to call anything. I just think OP should be alive to things and also maybe talk to him quite frankly about things like what he was feeling when he bought the ring. It's possible if she talks more to him at this point, it may become clearer what his headstate is, and her own instincts will further convince her of who he is and what's going on.

So he's not having dinner with Lucy then?