Who Is She????!!!!!

[TipsyJoker]

Hey lovelies,

I just wanted to ask some advice. I saw on my husbands messenger that he’s been messaging some woman I’ve never seen or heard of before. I didn’t read the messages so I don’t know the content of them. I just saw her in his messages. I checked Facebook and it seems like they’re not friends. So I did a little bit of digging. They have no seeming connection to each other. No friends in common. They don’t work together or even in the same field. She lives about 400 miles away. He’s never mentioned her to me. They don’t have any obvious common likes on fb. She’s also married with 2 kids.

I was a bit suspicious because he is ALWAYS on his phone. He takes it everywhere with him, even into the bathroom. So I peeked over when he was on messenger and saw her in his messages. I haven’t snooped but it’s been eating away at me ever since and it’s been months. I know he’s not physically cheated. However, my gut has been screaming at me for months. Prior to this I had no reason to doubt him.

There’s no public trace of them communicating on Facebook. It just seems weird to me. It also seems he has set his profile so I can’t see when he posts in groups he’s in, etc. He has also set it so when he gets a message to his phone it just says message and doesn’t display a name.

I don’t want to outright ask him in case it’s nothing or in case it is something and it just makes him more sneaky and cover his tracks even more so.

Would it be wrong to check this one conversation with this women? I know it’s an invasion of privacy but I really can’t see any other way that I will find out the truth one way or the other. I think if I asked him and there was anything going on he’d just deny it because why wouldn’t he?

Any advice on what to do here? It’s affecting me and making me feel subconscious and angry. We haven’t been as intimate for a while, (not my choice) but I just put that down to life with a young baby and being tired a lot.
Thanks for reading.

Unfortunately you made the rookie error of not reading and taking photo evidence at the time, things always end up deleted so you get all you can while you can.

I couldn’t at the time. He was holding the phone when I saw it. I never snooped afterwards because I wasn’t comfortable with it.

Surely, if he's being on best behaviour since the Linkedin alert.
H knows he's been rumbled, He knows you know.
He's waiting to see if you challenge him, or let it go.
At this stage, as you say, the trust is gone.
I'd tell him You want to separate, when he asks why, you say, "You know why", & let him hang himself.

You will never get the absolute proof you are looking for.

You say you're angry but you don't seem to be. If you were angry you would have confronted him.

Only you know whether you can live your life wondering whether your husband is playing away. I know I couldn't.

Just because I haven’t confronted him yet doesn’t mean I’m not angry. Of course I am. I’m being taken for a mug.

Yes you are certainly being taken for a mug.

However you keep asking what you should do, complaining about the morals of the other woman, saying that you need absolute proof etc.

You know what you should do.

Well then you have your answer: you know he will lie and you believe he cannot be trusted.

So stop looking for proof and wondering what to do. You have your answer.

Now you have to decide if you want to keep living like this or whether you will take steps to end things.

It’s so easy for the people saying, “just leave him” when I have no real evidence, just a bunch of circumstantial evidence. I have children with this man. We’ve been together for over a decade. I thought he was the love of my life and that we were solid. I trusted him implicitly and believed we would be together for the rest of our lives. He had never before given me any cause to doubt his integrity. How do I look my children in the face and tell them I ended our marriage over an unsubstantiated hunch? Life isn’t quite so black and white. I’ve just found out that he’s deleted the messages today after building myself up to read them and expecting the worst. I’m still in shock and people are pushing me to end my marriage and change my. Children’s lives forever.

What I can’t understand is why? Why would he do this to our family? To me? We just had a baby. I’ve been there for him through thick and thin. We had an active sex life. I just can’t understand why he’d do something like this?

None of us are going to be able to answer your questions.

You say you don't know if there's anything to worry about so people encourage you to talk to him or look at his phone to find out.

You snoop a bit and then he deletes messages so you decide that he's a liar and your marriage is over. People say in that case, think about what you want to do.

Then you say how can you leave without evidence? Aka back to square one.

The ONLY solution here is to talk to your husband. It doesn't matter if he lies. Tell him you know he's lying and you are thinking of ending the marriage if he can't be honest. Talk to him. Just talk to him. It may take more than one conversation to figure it all out.

It really is. You're right.

Whatever was in that chat between them (is everyone just expecting the worst so far or did I miss something other than the hiding and deleting of messages and unknown content?), I agree, it doesn't look or sound good but surely this alone is a bit much to start push OP to end her marriage on that basis and the anecdotal stories of other people's ex-partners cheating on them in the past?

Could you try marriage counselling with your husband? Mainly on the basis of you not trusting your husband (prob rightly so) and in that way also getting you the closure that you need on those messages and to get some clarity on how to move forward with your marriage.

You need to just watch and wait imo. As you say you can't end your marriage over suspicions and if you ask him he will minimise and gaslight.

So just grit your teeth, act like all is well and then at somepoint he will let his guard down and be careless that is when you snoop and get evidence. Or, if you can't wait and know who she is message her and ask wtf is going on.

I think what you should do @TipsyJoker is seek counselling for yourself, if you can afford it. To help you make sense of all this. Take deep breaths. You don’t have to do anything immediately.

You’ll never know the answer to that, only that he’s selfish. People do things like this all of the time, whilst their partner is blissfully unaware thinking their relationship is fine, happy

Honestly there’s a lot of catastrophes on here with literally no real evidence. It might be bad, it still might be something easily explainable. Not worth stressing yourself to this extent until you actually know anything.

I think this makes sense. I think if I was to message her she would prob just lie too since she is also married. However, I could message her husband because I know who he is from her page. I’m not sure if I will get but it’s an option. I could explain my fears and have him see if the messages are still there her end.

Read some of the threads on here involving cheating husbands. It’s often not about what
they thought wrong with their wife, but it’s about what’s wrong with them.

They’re selfish childish men who have grown bored of married life /parenting and they want something “exciting” which unfortunately equates to illicit sexual relationships in some peoples mind.

And then there are men who have been cheating the entire time. My friend was married for 8 years with a 7 year child and found out in the 8th year her darling husband had been cheating on her from the very start of their relationship with colleagues in various Jobs which explains why he was always working!

If it wasn’t this woman it would be someone else -and there probably have been others - which is why I said she isn’t the problem as such. I used to do online dating and I was shocked at the amount of married man on there trying to deceive women that they were single too . So in many cases the OW is single and unaware, although I appreciate that’s not the case with this particular woman in question.

If you can maybe you should wait this out a bit and see if anything else comes out. In the meantime check your privacy settings on LinkedIn.

Agree with PP there is no peace pursuing something where you will get no answers. Just lies.
Of course, the OW is out of order but it’s your DH who is to blame for what he is doing.
It seems pretty clear he thinks he’s close to being caught and has gone into overdrive.
Do you want to spend your life with this man?
Even if he told the truth, would you ever trust him again?
He is putting you through hell and pretending all is well, which is so disrespectful. Also, he’s not that clever if he thinks you haven’t sussed what is happening.
It probably feels impossible, but in the long term I’d want this man, his appalling behaviour and his lies gone. What he’s done to you he will do to the OW.
Rinse and repeat.
You and your DC deserve better.

It just seems so out of character. I know it happens but I just can’t understand why anyone would do that to their family.

Sending some sort of message to her DH seems like a good option to me.
It should at least provoke some reaction which would be better than the situation you are in now of tearing yourself apart mentally.

Yeah it’s awful 😣 without sounding too bleak the world is sadly full of selfish and ruthless people who do all kinds of bad things including cheating .

We may not understand how their minds work exactly but it’s important to acknowledge the reality .

Some cheating men (or women) are obvious “players” but most are not, so it’s not surprising you feel it’s out of characters as they hide it well.

I have a mate who met her now husband at age 16, she is now late 30s and happily married with kids. Her husband is lovely and a doting father but i remember once she said “don’t trust a man 100% trust him only 98% - anyone can disappoint you” I think it’s very true.

Reading through your updates, it's a shame he's deleted the messages. Were they on fb messenger? As sometimes you can archive the messages (so they appear hidden, but they are not deleted).

I'm sorry to say, but from experience, he's likely to do this again. So next time your spidey senses tingle, don't delay. Snoop asap!

I am pretty sure my DH was up to something not long ago, as my gut was screaming at me. It was really basic, inane stuff, but given his history, it just didn't add up. Coincidentally, I'd also booked a session with a psychic medium & even she picked up on it! Like you, I didn't have concrete evidence. I had no proof, just an extremely strong hunch. I'm not gonna blow up my life, the kids life, just on a hunch.... just stay aware!

@TipsyJoker I absolutely agree with you that nobody turns their lives upside down with as little concrete evidence as this, no
matter how damning it ‘looks’.
Once I had entertained the thought that my husband might be cheating (totally, utterly out of character, seemed very happy at home, and why??? Just why??? Etc etc went through my head too, most of us who have been cheated on felt exactly like this just before the penny dropped) I went through his coat pockets when he was asleep on the sofa and found a receipt you couldn’t explain away, given the reason he’d given for his night away. I then gave myself 24 hours to let him go to work and kids to school so that I had the house to myself. I’m not in the least bit to ashamed to say I snooped the living blob out of everything I could. My whole life and future and that of my children could be at stake and if he was being devious enough to have an affair I needed the advantage that he didn’t know I knew. He’s in tech for a living so knows way more than me, nothing would have been carelessly left if he’d had a heads up. Some stuff now had passwords or pins I had no idea had been changed or added because I never snooped, felt the need to or tried to access them before. Some stuff was actually open because he didn’t think I was on to him, and whilst there was no evidence as obvious as the receipt, some searches on an iPad made no sense at all, unless you were looking stuff up to do with somebody else. Then I found a search for a foreign female Christian name (the spelling gave away which country) and a search for loads of songs with the more common spelling as a title. Didn’t take much working out at all to see what was going on. I confronted him once I had evidence, but didn’t tell him how or what I knew, I just told him I knew he took a woman to the hotel he was supposed to be staying in with some drinking mates. Not telling him anything else I knew meant I’d know if he was lying about stuff. Plus it scared the shit out of him because initially he didn’t know how I knew, who might have seen him or told me, or if she’d told me herself. If it hadn’t been such a shitshow I’d have quite enjoyed the squirming.
If you confront you most likely won’t get the truth. You might get denial, you will definitely get omission and almost certainly get minimisation, if he admits to anything at all, so I understand why you want to bide your time, excruciating as it is.
The thing I do not agree with you on at all is your use of the term “just flirting” like flirting is harmless. It isn’t.
It’s disrespectful and absolutely inappropriate behaviour for a married person. If he’s got form for flirting which he’s brushed off as ‘just flirting’ and he’s doing it when he’s out or when it’s hidden on his phone, that’s cheating to me and way over the boundary for a married person. Do not minimise this stuff, it’s called ‘micro cheating’ but the pain and anger it causes and what it can lead to is not ‘micro’ at all.
You need to know, OP, you need some evidence, or if you think you have enough evidence already, then talk to him. Living like this is hell.

@TipsyJoker, if you contact her H, use a platform that OW can’t intercept. For example, message/call him at his work.

I’m so sorry that happened to you. I totally agree with everything you’ve said. I will not make any rash decisions. It’s all to easy for people to say, “just leave/will you ever trust him again/confront him now” because I really don’t think those actions will produce very good results. I have to think of my children and not just my feelings. If we didn’t have children I would probably go nuclear and maybe at some point I still will, but not today. I have to process what’s happening and make smart decisions. It’s tough but I can handle it.