Never thought I'd get my own affair thread!

[LooksLikeItsMyTurn]

Found out last night that DP of six years cheated on me for the first year of our relationship.

No concrete proof of physical stuff, but lots and lots of very flirtatious and loaded messages. Also they arranged to meet up in secret at times when he told me he was elsewhere. She was an old ex girlfriend.

I'm not stupid. I know that they probably slept together. And I'm proceeding on the assumption that they did.

The beginning of our relationship was a bit weird. I met him within six months of his ex walking out on him so he was in a fragile place emotionally. He also had (still has!) a then two year old daughter.

So we took it really slowly. I'd never been with a man with children before, so I took his lead and let him set the pace. If it'd been up to me I'd have moved things along faster but was happy to give it proper time.

He was often distant. Treated me well, no drama or histrionics, but was never fully 'there' if you see what I mean?

I put it down to dealing with the break up of his family and dealing with being a single dad and taking time to heal. After a year or so, I started to get frustrated with this emotional distance and some things started not to fit right. Nothing I could put my finger on, but just general cageyness and the excuse of healing from his break up was starting to wear thin. Also I had an accidental pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage and he was very detached about it. Told me the day after it happened that he 'didn't love me the way I wanted him to'. Was quite callous actually.

For some reason I didn't do a runner at that point. And then not long after, things really improved. We moved in together, decided to try for a baby have been happy since and the rest is history.

I'm now pregnant with our second child.

I'm gutted and devastated. I don't know what to do. He's away with work this week so I'm on my own and freaking out. I feel like our whole relationship is based on a lie.

I confronted him straight away and he jumped on the defensive. Pulled out the classic script - minimising, denying, only admitting to what I definitely knew. Cunt.

He says it was only flirtation. 'She was always just a friend', it never went further, she asked him to be with her and he turned her down because he knew by then that I was 'the one'. Blah blah blah.

There are so many holes in that, I'm sure you can all see them for yourselves. Why wait until she propositioned him to call and end to the 'friendly flirtation' being one massive hole to start with.

My hunch is that she called things off and then he stuck with me by default.

This is longer than I intended. I just don't know what I should do next.

I am sorry but of course they were sleeping together, she was an ex, they had a sexual history.

I don't think he treats you very nice regardless of the above, he seems to be quite cruel at times when you've really needed support, in fact he told you he doesn't love you like you want - sorry but that would have been the end of it for me, it's either 100% or nothing.

I'd not trust him I'm afraid, he is still lying to you about what happened.

It's not unreasonable to ask him to unfriend her but will he agree to do so?

Him unfriending her is not going to have any affect on contact with her. In fact it's more likely to prompt it. If he wants to contact her he will and can, anonymously of course.

Why do you WANT him to unfriend her on social media? Is maybe more the point?

I feel like he should offer to or something. I don't know.

He's actually since deleted most of his social media in a fit of pique because I invaded his privacy.

Then he threatened to leave me because of my huge betrayal of trust by violating his privacy. But has since said he won't leave me.

It looks terrible written down doesn't it?

When i thought he was leaving me I was hysterical. I thought I'd lose my mind.

I mean, I snooped his messages for literally no reason other than I am pregnant and massively irrationally hormonal.

If his version of events is true, then he has every right to be furious with me.

If he did sleep with her and he's lying, then he's a cruel, cheating twat. I've got no way of knowing which it is.

Well hang on a minute. There's no real 'version of things' that differs that much. You found evidence of an inappropriately flirtatious relationship when you thought that you were in a committed relationship and you suspect from the tone of it that it was inappropriate. This triggered memories of how he treated you around the miscarriage and how hurt you were by that.

You would not be experiencing any of this, it's true if you hadn't snooped. But there's an opportunity to use this for good. Yes, looking at his stuff may seem like it came out of nowhere but actually, as you say, it may be linked to your pregnancy and a deep-seated memory of when you lost a child and he wasn't there for you. Then you see him follow his ex on instagram and....you snoop. It is a violation of trust but it comes from vulnerability that can be explained.

You will never know 'what went on' physically on certain dates back then but you can talk through with him how alone you felt back then and how hurt you were by him saying he didn't know if he loved you. You can ask him what happened between him and this woman and you can sit and listen to what he says and how he says it.

The petulant deleting of stuff (why? that's a pointless odd thing to do isn't it?) and demanding unfriending is probably not the point here. What you are looking for is reassurance, and that's just one example of it.

But isn't telling me he's leaving me a massively cuntish thing to do?

How can he really love me if he can so easily say such devastating things?

I would never say something like that to him just to scare or punish him. I feel like that's what hexes doing to me.

Or was he just lashing out because he felt cornered?

I don't know, Looks, I can't say.

It's going to be real speculation because I don't know enough details here.

For example, some people find an invasion of privacy hugely, devastatingly aggressive. For people with a childhood or background of feeling invaded or used, it can create all sort of emotional resonance leading to aggressive or dramatic lashing out in shock at the lack of respect for someone's own space. It can seem like a violation of trust for someone who had that space violated before by someone who was supposed to love them.

Another example, someone who is prone to flirtation and cheating online will become very aggressive at realising they have been spied on, to frighten the searcher into never repeating the action, and out of fear at how close they came to getting caught.

There's no way to analyse your DH's behaviour from a distance without either a lot more information or you asking him more stuff.

I don't really understand why he would delete other social networking stuff though.

First you say he threatened to leave you, then you say he told you he was leaving. one's a bit different. One is saying, I won't be in a relationship where this is the norm. The other says, I'm going. That is a harsher, more awful thing to row back from.

Are you able to talk about this with him? It sounds like communication is very fraught, understandably.

Are you looking for evidence of his lack of love for you, do you think?

Yes. I think that's exactly it.

Back during the OW time he openly told me he didn't love me yet but to give him time because he was healing from his break up.

Then he changed his tune and said he did love me and we moved in together, etc.

But I suppose I've never believed it. And I've always wondered how he went from not loving me for two-ish years to: 'Yes, okay, I love you now let's have a family.'

He says by way of explanation that it was a gradual transition and after a time he felt able to love and commit again.

But now I find out he had this thing on the go with this OW at the same time and I just don't know what to think now. I don't even have proof that anything physical happened between them. Just that it seems so unlikely that they wouldn't have.

Just a random thought and might be wrong

But when all this was happening - him being distant, saying he didn't love you, being horribly cold about the miscarriage... Did you ever have a go at him/have it out or was it just a case of pushing it all down inside and repressing your feelings while you acted cool/pretended you were okay etc.

Just wondering if now you are in a more settled/committed relationship you maybe feel a bit more empowered/confident to raise things and so this stored up anger at his behaviour then is finding its way out through this?

Not that I'm saying you aren't justified in feeling angry at (potentially) continuing lies and his current harshness etc too, but it might be that the feelings you're having about it are not simply about what's going on now. (This might also make it more difficult for him to 'get' how you are feeling - for him it's ancient history/dead ashes but for you it's more like stoking a fire that never went out, the anger from them coupled with the anger now)

But I might not have a fucking clue what I'm talking about.

I think, leaving the physical aside for a moment, what happened was that he left a long term relationship, didn't want to jump completely into a thing with one person, explored stuff with both of you without saying so to you, and eventually decided he wanted to be with you.

Beginnings are important.

You may need to explore this in counselling. Because when one partner jumps in hard and the other takes their time to commit, it is a confusion and humiliation for one, and this is only added to by the fact he was maybe considering or just enjoying the affections of someone else for a while too.

It explains how you felt though. And those feelings are justified and valid. Perhaps ask him how he would feel if he were to discover similar toned messages between you and someone else? Even now?

He may need to be forced into your point of view. But the biggest issue is you are sending yourself on hunts for evidence of what you have never been able to get pas feeling emotionally since your relationship was forged in those early days, a sense he didn't go 'all in' as fast as you would have liked. And it left you feeling unloved.

Kitten has a really good point above. At the start of relationships, we women often bend over backwards to be relaxed and accommodating and then carry that resentment round for years of what we put up with, when the men had no idea there was any 'putting up' really.

You're both very bang on the money. How is it possible for you both to sum up in a couple of posts what ive been struggling to pin down for years??

I did bring up his emotional coldness and distance at the time, but I never really had a go at him about it. It was more like 'okay I understand, I'll wait for you' kind of thing.

I've had real temper issues recently. Been very quick to anger over seemingly insignificant things. I think maybe it's the repressed anger I feel towards him from that time. I've never properly expressed it.

Or rather, I've never felt like he really truly understands just how he made me feel back then. He's apologised since but I always get the impression he doesn't really get it.

Men often don't understand us as we're more complex than them. They are quite simple really and tend to lack intuition like us.

Your DP could have reassured you, by not being defensive and simply saying that yes - they were close, but that's before he was fully committed to you and before he fell in love with you.

He was clear at the time how he felt, but ever since he said he loved you he has been committed and would never betray you.

My DH got defensive and angry like this once when I saw inappropriate comment to his Ex. He harped on about his privacy, but I think he was just ashamed of what he'd done TBH.

Sometimes when we get stronger in our own lives and look back on being treated badly by someone we realise we wouldn't put up with that now and we become resentful and angry. Other times the feeling comes first. Consider if there is any reason you would want to feel angry and resentful of him, in the present tense, and you are searching our concrete proof to justify it.

But you must, alongside expressing how you feel and how deeply you hurt him, also acknowledge that you were a different person then, and you did allow or support stuff that you wouldn't put up with now. And some of that was because you wanted to be with this man. Now you are with this man and having his child. Is that where you want to be? Can you find a way to learn from this about expressing your needs and your fears and letting him know how he needs to reassure and support you a this time? Rather than searching for some fact about a five year old date?

Sorry above I meant to say how deeply he hurt you