I’ve been with my partner for 12 years and we have a 9 year old. Our relationship has been far from perfect for a long time. I feel taken for granted as, despite us both working full time, he doesn’t do any housework/cooking. On top of this, he doesn’t really show me any affection and my libido has dwindled over the years. He only seems to make sexual advances when he’s extremely drunk and this makes me feel like that is the only time he finds me attractive.
i have tried to make the effort, and I’ve been very open about the fact that I need more intimacy and closeness in our day to day lives. Nothing has changed.
This morning I came downstairs to find that he’d left his phone and his glasses on the floor of the bathroom. (He had been out drinking last night). While we have had our difficulties in the relationship, I’ve never felt a lack of trust for him. In all the years we’ve been together I have never looked at his phone. For some reason, I unlocked his phone and a sex chat website was on screen.
Once I’d seen this, curiosity got the better of me and I saw that he’d been in other sex chat sites as well as porn hub. If it had just been porn hub I would have shrugged it off but something about him connecting with women on line to pleasure himself made me feel betrayed. I did a little more digging and found that he has a profile on iDate and also Wild neighbours. These are additional sites to the ones he was on last night.
I was able to see messages between him and multiple women. He is giving them his mobile number and email address and trying to continue conversation off the site. He mentions that he has a girlfriend and states that he doesn’t have a profile picture because he doesn’t want me to find out. The evidence I’ve seen shows that he’s had these profiles for a few weeks and has been active on them. It has been mostly in the early hours of the morning but one of the conversations was started at 8pm one evening. He was round at a friend’s house at the time.
I also dug through his messages and found a message thread with someone I know. There were messages from him that had been unsent or deleted and the last message to her was “I need to talk to you can you call me”. I don’t know what to make of this… I couldn’t find any evidence of a phone call from her but I don’t know if this can be deleted.
I walked into the kitchen earlier and he had his hands down his trousers. I noticed that he was looking at his phone and I saw that it looked like a message app of some kind and there was a thumbnail with looked like a topless woman. I gestured to where his hand was and said “you alright there?” He said he was just ‘readjusting’. I asked what he was looking at as he turned the phone screen off and he said ‘nothing’. I said it looked like a topless woman and he laughed and said “a topless woman?! Haha’ and walked off.
I haven’t confronted him yet with any of what I’ve seen as I have a family member visiting today. I’ve spent the whole day feeling sick. I’ve cried a lot (privately) and now I just feel numb. I don’t think there’s any coming back from this. I don’t know what I want from this thread really… Am I overreacting by being so upset? I know that when I do speak to him about this he will say it’s because our sex life isn’t great and try to shift the blame to me. I already feel under appreciated and unattractive. Now I feel betrayed as well.