11 days later

[GlasgowMark]

In my head we had a strong marriage. When I went to work I would always kiss my life good bye, give her a hug and tell her I loved her, during the day we would have phone calls and when I got home I always gave her a kiss, a hug and told her I loved her.

Yeah for sure like all relationships we had ups and downs but we were always a team that could tackle the world. My wife got bad post natal depression and has had this for almost five years now and has been on anti depressants for nearly that whole time.

We would always chat about anything and everything for hours and hours, many times into the wee small hours. Anytime I thought she looked overwhelmed or stressed I would give her a massive hug and we would talk or in some cases let her rant and vent some steam.

I know my wife and I have had a hard time lately. Our little boy who is almost five recently got his official diagnosis for being autistic, we had our suspicions roughly when he was 18 months old. Even though we knew he was autistic the final diagnosis was hard to swallow.

For maybe the last 18 months my wife has had a bad relationship with alcohol and this has led to the police intervening twice now and a short brush with social services..

For quite some time I had tried to get my wife to attend alcohol meetings, seek medical help etc but it landed on deaf ears. I would drive home from work in absolute dread at the thought of what state she would be in when I got there. She became addicted to her phone and even trying to have a simple conversation with her was difficult unless I wanted to be answered back with grunts and half sentences.

Out Sex life had always been great up until quite recently.

My wife recently started a new job in a pub/restaurant and was loving it there as her last employer was emotionally abusive and to be honest a cruel bitter person.

Just after new year I got a message from a friend of mine telling me she saw my wife and the bouncer doing things.

That night I got home and checked my wife’s phone and my world instantly crumbled. She had been txting this guy on FB

Ask him to meet her at her work to F*K her, inviting him to our home to F*k her. Telling him how he excited her and she was sending him nude pics etc.

Then I realised about ten other guys on FB messenger sending her dirty txts and videos of them having a pull while saying they wanted her mouth and to shoot on her etc....I am sure you get the drift.

I immediately went upstairs and asked her who Danny was? I got the look of confuse not and no idea, what am I talking about. I told her I had just seen her phone messages and she then began to attack me to get her phone back. I called her parents and said I was taking our son to them for the night and she insisted on coming with us. We argued at her parents house and I showed the txts and videos to them. After about ten minutes I left and went home. I still had her phone and I made the mistake of reading all these txts. I wish I hadn’t as I can still see them in my head. I couldn’t believe she was writing these things while telling me she loved me and still making love to me. Txting me to pick her up from work at the end of her shift then txting the other guy sex things.

11 days have past and we are now back at our home.

We have had days of intense and massively deep conversations with much heartbreak and tears from us both.

I write this as I am watching her sleep, I want things to be fixed but there is that small voice in my head asking if she is worth the tears and pain? Can I ever believe anything she ever tells me in the future?

Does anyone have advice for this heartbroken Husband and dad?

Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling rants

That must have been really hard to read.
Is she still attending AA?
Up to you whether you get to a point where you can forgive and move on but it's hard to see how you could do this when she is still drinking.
I can't see how she can get sober if she's working in a pub and given what's happened there I assume she'll be finding a new job.
Have you considered marriage counselling?
Have you had an STI check?

I'm so sorry this has happened. I'm going through a different situation at the moment with my husband. I found out last week he slept with an escort and had been messaging others. He arranged marriage counselling which we had on Thursday, it did help. She told us to focus on the positive, have some space from my husband and give it time. I still don't know what I want but I think time is helping x

I would like to add that my wife was stressed financially because she lost her previous job and was financially stressed. She had joined a site to basically make money from guys that wanted to see her naked and use sex toys etc.

We have made progress towards our relationship and are moving forwards together but will I ever stop hearing that voice in the back of my head that doubts everything she ever says and does?

I'm so sorry this has happened OP. Whether you can get the relationship back really depends on whether YOU can ever get over this.

People cheat because they're unhappy, to boost their self esteem or just because they can. It's mostly irrelevant though because what matters is how YOU feel, and what YOU want going forward.

Take yourself and your DC out of the house for a few days to have a good think about what you want, how you can be happy (with or without her) and think of how you can make that happen.

Wishing you all the best for you and your DC.

She hasn’t drank since the night I found out these things. Everyday I am so proud of her accomplishments and I tell her that everyday. I have told her I will try my best to move on from what she has done and how she has made me feel but I can’t promise her everything is going to be okay. As soppy as it may sound I have loved her from our very first kiss and even now I know that I still love her and no matter what the outcome I always will. We have spent a lot of the time talking and hugging etc. And the way I see it, if we can move forward either an inch or a mile each day, we are at least moving forward..

OP what you do is completely up to you.

But that voice isn't going anywhere. You're always going to wonder what she's doing. If she's drinking, you're always going to stress about that. If she goes to work, who is she meeting?

Like grief, it will get smaller with time. But it's never going away. And that's something you're going to have to decide whether or not you can live with.

Personally, although you've given us much more detail and Reason for her behaviour than people typically do, so we can see how things have been going wrong for her, I think this is inexcusable.

She's risked your family in more ways than one. Having social services intervene with your child, having sex (protected?) with another man.

She's trash, OP. She's using mental health as a mask, but she's trash.

My advice is get out of there. Get your baby out of there. Tell her to get help and get yourself and your child settled into a life that she can't damage.

Good luck OP.

You sound like a lovely DH Op, I think ultimately it’s down to you if you will ever stop hearing the niggling voice in the back of your head. If your DW is trying to move forwards with your marriage then I hope you will have a chance

I’m so sorry you are in this situation, I cannot imagine what you are going through. It seems your life had totally turned upside down. You have a lot of thinking to do, personally I would be walking away. your son is very young and should be your priority. Good luck

She has said there wasn’t any sex, just kissing and his hand going down south. I spoke to the guy(I say guy as the amount of swearing I should use to describe him would deffo get me booted from here) and he said exactly the same things happened. If it had just been a drunken encounter I could get over that but it was the invitations to her work and OUR HOME that keeps bouncing through my head. Thinking when I get home is someone leaving through the back door etc.

A large part of me genuinely thinks what she says is true and that it wouldn’t have got to that stage but I will never know. I have told her that right now her words and promises mean very little to me right now as when she was txting me and saying she loved me right after she was txting her asking to be F**ked in OUR HOME.

I genuinely hope and pray that we or should I say I can move on and come out the other side of this, hopefully a stronger couple but the only thing I know for sure right now is I don’t know what the future holds. We have both said we want to make it work and stay together and she has certainly worked hard to show and prove this but my worry is it’s just a flash in the pan reaction from her and she will go back to her old ways of permanently living with her phone in her hand, in fairness she has pretty much stayed off it and always puts it down beside me and tells me to go through it anytime I want and to be honest I have looked through it, not proud of that part of me as I have never ever been a jealous person before.

Sorry if my messages are a bit fragmented and all over the place but I wasn’t sure how long a message could be on here. I think I wanted to have a cathartic vent as I know keeping this bottled up in my head won’t solve anything. Thanks for your reply’s and I hope I one day I can post that things are great........

I know it’s probably weird for the husband to post on here but I new if I had said this to any of my friends their first reaction would be to tell her goodbye. Very few people outside the family knew about her drinking problems etc and at work I am(was) always the happy go lucky guy, always laughing and random bouts or singing and the like but my work colleagues noticed things weren’t right the next day at work and I have had several of them ask me to my face of via messenger if I was ok and what was wrong. I would never tell them as I don’t want them thinking badly of my wife or to make things strange when or if they meet her etc.....

I find things harder when she is sleeping as that’s when THATVOICE in the back of my head uses a megaphone just to make sure I hear the questions and doubt that it raises. I dropped her at her work a few days back and just being in the car park and seeing the place made me very nervous, anxious and angry all at the same time. I have never had issues with anxiety during any part of my life and trust me, I have had some right dangerous jobs and situations where I have always been calm. I was always very proud that I was a very mentally strong person and things never bothered me or ever got me down.
I can honestly say I can count the amount of times I have cried during my 48 years on one hand but these last 11 days I genuinely think I have cried more than I even pee’d. At one stage during talking with my wife i was sitting crumpled on the floor, absolutely shattered and broke crying like a baby. I was devastated and in shock about the whole thing and how this women that i loved, my best friend could have ripped my heart out and danced all over it, doing what she did and not giving a f**k about the outcome and damage that what she was doing could actually cause our happy wee family. All I could think was the crap she put us all through with her drinking and how she was the most selfish and evil person I had ever know

I apologise for the massive spelling mistakes and grammatical errors but I was ranting and venting as I typed

Wow!!!
She’s behaved appallingly and I don’t think I could ever get over this. You’ll never trust her again. This is a rot now at the heart of your relationship and it will only get bigger over time.
BUT also, telling her parents and showing them the messages! People might disagree but I think that’s outrageous. You are adults. You could have explained to them what had been going on without showing them all of the gory details. I think that’s quite a sinister think to do to humiliate her. I’d never get over that (although I’d never behave as she has).
The marriage is over. Both be responsible adults now and make sensible arrangements for your child and finances.

OP I’ve no idea if you can quiet that voice but i guess it’s possible if that’s what you want and you give it time. Many on here will say don’t bother, and those are opinions borne of bitter experience, but only you know you and the full details of your marriage. On balance I think I would say keep trying for as long as she stays off the alcohol - but if that starts up again, you need to take action for the sake of your child as much as yourself. 💐

You are right I shouldn’t have shown her phone to her parents, at that moment it looked like my wife was having sex with a dozen men behind my back and I was furious at her. With a calm head and 20-20 hind sight I wish I hadn’t done this

Tigerdater

we are going day to day to see how things go. I genuinely want things fixed but I know there might be parts of my head that won’t ever get right with what she has done behind my back and the broken trust. Just hope it’s true when people say time is a great healer.

So today I was getting ready to drive my wife to work and I hadn’t been there in a few days. The thought of it filled me with absolute dread and terror. My right hand kept shaking uncontrollably and I could feel my stomachs knotting up and my chest feeling tighter. Quite often I found it hard to breath properly, we drove up there and she could tell I wasn’t ok. I told her I was feeling anxious but bloody hell that was an understatement on my behalf. We got there and I parked the car in such a way that I couldn’t even see the building. The building where she met this guy. I felt like I was returning to the scene of the crime. We had a kiss, said our goodbyes like we had done before all this happened and she tried to reassure me that everything was going to be ok and I hope she is right..went to Tesco for a few things but when I got there I had to dive into the toilet and throw up. Got what I needed and just got home as quickly as I could. When I was driving to her work and getting nearer it felt like I was walking closer to a massive fire and could feel it getting hotter and hotter. When I left her car park honestly I couldn’t make my poor car go any faster to get away from there, the thoughts of what happened there, the damage THAT place has caused my Perfect little family. I was angry that a building could get me so wound up and anxious and the thought of her being there again.

I have had chats with the guy she cheated on me with and he assures me he will never work there, drink there or go near my wife again. He is aware I am a big guy and would happily and literally rip his head off for his part in this. He knew she was married with a family but he didn’t give a toss about these things.

I know one day I will see him and honestly have no idea what I will actually do. In my younger days I was a punch first ask questions later kinda guy but I have tried so hard to change and I have succeeded but I know I am struggling to keep my calm and composure.

Today is the 11th day that she hasn’t drank and that fills me with nothing but happiness but also the 11th day since she destroyed nearly every ounce of faith and trust I have for her. Fingers crossed day twelve is a step forward day as being mentally and emotionally stuck in this Groundhog Day of resentment, bitterness and anger is not a good or healthy place to be for anyone. I know she is hurting too as she knows there are uncertain times ahead and she says she wants us to stay together and move on but it is so damn hard right now. I would love to give her an answer so she knows everything will get better or tell her nope it’s over, that way she won’t be walking on eggshells till we find out what will happen. I look at her and see the women that I love with all my heart but part of me sees the person that stabbed me in the back and thought nothing of me or our family because she was so f**king selfish.

If anyone has a special pill I can take to erase the last eleven days from my overworking brain then please let me know. I want my family back to a happier place and I want to be able to trust her again with everything and every aspect of our life’s and future...F**k me life can be hard some times......

Fuck that, fella.

The way to end the dread is by ending the relationship.

Sounds like her problem is much much bigger than alcoholism. Her behaviour sounds like she has a significant MH issues possibly a personality disorder.

Has this been investigated?

I am also struggling with escalation of drinking a level which required intervention by SS within 18 months? She must have been drinking much heavier and for much longer than that?

The main issue though is your DS. If she is his main carer - then he has been out at risk. I am even wondering if his diagnosis is accurate or if his development social skills and emotional health are the result of being “cared for” by an addict?

You need to see all of this from
your DS’s perspective. Sounds like he has been v severely emotionally neglected (maybe physically neglected?). Your DS needs significant restorative parental support right now following his experience and diagnosis. If her behaviour doesn’t prioritise and support this 100% then she needs to leave. Your DS cannot be exposed to any of this any longer.

am also struggling with escalation of drinking a level which required intervention by SS within 18 months? She must have been drinking much heavier and for much longer than that?

It doesn't need to take a long time.

Mate, it's not the building that caused the problem, it's your wife's behaviour. It's great that she's stopped drinking but very few people manage to kick the habit on their own. She needs a new job.

Why was she so desperate for money?

@Gutterton
She has suffered depression since the birth of our child. The police got involved one night because she was very drunk and emotional, she had just found out she had a miscarriage that day, she wanted to take our son Out for a walk on a summers night and I could clearly see that she wasn’t fit to walk. I told her no and from that it escalated with her trying to push past me and I had to physically restrain her against the wall until she calmed down. I let her go and she threw opened the front door and started shouting to the neighbours that I was hitting our son and can they call the police, I eventually got her up to bed and she fell asleep, some time later that night the police arrived and took a statement from myself, I explained that she was on medication for depression, had an alcohol problem and was obviously upset because of the news from her doctors. I took them upstairs and she was sleeping. I woke her up and the police interviewed her in private. They came back downstairs and the police and I spoke at great length and they said there wouldn’t be any charges brought against anyone but because my son was in the property they would have to report it so social services. We found out a few weeks later that they were taking no further actions.

I have never doubted that she is an amazing mother and probably never will, I know she is an amazing and loving person and it is because of me a huge part of me wants to fix things. Honestly my son is genuinely autistic and certainly not abused, of that I am sure.

@Desolate2nite
She was unemployed for a few month and ran up an overdraft and hadn’t told me how much and got stressed about finances

Your DS will have been emotionally neglected if his mother is an addict. It is not possible for her to be in two emotional spaces at once - she cannot be emotionally attuned to your sons needs whilst mentally disconnected through alcohol. Your latest post shows that she also put your DS at physical risk on that one occasion at least.

Her sexting multiple men, online sex business and affairs with men are not a symptom of PND. Where is your DS when this is happening?

Is she under the care of a MH team?

:( OP im so sorry.

11 days is still raw as can be. 11 months cant still be painful. The recovery from something like this can take years, and even then the pain and distrust lingers on. Can you suffer for the rest of your life?

You don't need to make any decisions now, or even next month.