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.

@beanii not sure if you’ve seen OPs latest updates but she’s spoken to her husband about it all now

I didn't backtrack or pretend anything.

And it turns out that I was right and OP should have taken my advice, so...

Yes she is. Thank you

Seems to me like it’s become more important to be ‘right’ than support the OP.
Hope you’re OK @TipsyJoker, I know that this is nowhere near over for you as you both work on the aftermath.
None of this has been exactly pleasant and the mixture of schadenfreude and glee now popping up like mushrooms shows what a lot of posters think was most important and sadly it doesn’t sound like it was you.
I hope it all turns out well for you, you’ve been on the edge of an abyss lately and must be mentally exhausted.

I am. I’m still devastated because now my husband is deeply saddened and it’s clearly affected our relationship. I’ve apologised profusely and taken 100% responsibility, booked in for therapy and have assured my husband I’ll do whatever it takes to make things right. I can’t do any more than that. I hope we can work it out and get back to being a happy family again. Thank you for your kind words. It helps a lot. Especially when there’s some on here that are pretty awful.

@TipsyJoker you’re welcome, the whole thing has been it’s great that you accept that you have issues you want to deal with, absolutely right that you fully accept your 100% of your issues, however you are only ever responsible for your 50% of your relationship.
He needs to look deep inside too and ask himself if there is anything he has done historically or recently to provoke this response from you. He also needs to be looking at how he can support you and make you feel secure.
Please be careful not to shoulder all the responsibility for what has happened, he has his 100% of his 50% part in the relationship (if you get me) to deal with himself. Far too easy for him to feel sorry for himself as a victim and blame you for all of it. (Apologies if this is not what he is doing)
This is a couple issue, not just both of your individual issues.
Don’t add guilt to your part in any of it, his attitude to you plus deleting stuff and seeming to be behaving differently etc didn’t help you or any of it at all.
Take care of yourself.

@TipsyJoker I meant to say ‘the whole thing has been horrible for you’ at the beginning but too much got deleted as I edited. 🙄

@TipsyJoker please don’t blame yourself wholly. It takes two people to be in a relationship to get to this point. His behaviour was strange when you described it. He also didn’t ask you what was going on. Perhaps it’s the pressure of your H being off sick hasn’t helped either. Get the most out of the therapy, the best ones give you homework to reconnect.

I’m glad things weren’t as awful as you’d been expecting, OP, and although the situation right now is upsetting and unsettled, it seems the two of you are on the same page and wanting to work towards putting things back together again. As others have mentioned, this wasn’t entirely your fault - his behaviour definitely instigated this. Things to discuss and work on, in time.

However, I’m not commenting here to advise on your relationship, as I believe plenty of posters here have given great advice on this thread already, plus you come across as a lovely, level-headed, family-focused woman who will do whatever is needed to ensure your family is as good as it can be, but I just wanted to apologise on behalf of those few commenters who felt it was right to attack and judge and add fuel to the fire of your already painful situation. Disgusting behaviour, it’s sad that there’s such a lack of empathy, or maybe just a few too many hurt people who feel the need to pass on their hurt to innocent bystanders. Anyway, I just wanted to say you don’t need to justify yourself to them. You’re awesome and you’ve handled all of this (both your relationship concerns and the bitchiness of this thread) in a way most people would struggle with. Keep your head up. You’ve got this.

That’s so kind of you. Thank you for taking the time to comment. I appreciate it

Hi @TipsyJoker ,

Please don't be too hard on yourself.

I've followed this thread from the beginning with a mix of horror and fascination (to my shame).

Reading your messages, it's clear you have a good heart. From what you've shared about your relationship, having a young baby etc, I can absolutely empathise with how you could end up writing that first message, looking for advice as you did.

Nobody could blame you wanting an outside opinion, in fact that was exactly the right thing to do. And nobody could blame you for coming to MN to find it.

But I do think there's plenty of blame to place on some of the PPs who have been so quick to stoke up the drama, so eager to pronounce your DH guilty. Even many of the PPs who said "talk to him" have done so from an assumption of guilt, which surely can only have made things more difficult for you.

I honestly do wonder what motivates some of the contributors to Relationships, how many are genuinely trying to help (I hope the majority), and how many are simply board keyboard warriors with an axe to grind, doing it for entertainment.

So don't blame yourself for going down the rabbit hole.

Be kind to yourself. You only want the best for yourself and your family, and you're doing the best you can.

Put love, honesty and care at the centre of your family (from all members), and you'll get through this, and you and your family will be happier and stronger for it. You might even laugh about it one day!

You'll be alright!

The blame isn't all yours. I would have probably acted like your husband. He should have asked you weeks ago what you were upset/offhand about. The key is communication and not hiding your feelings. That's easy to say, so hard to do. No point in blaming each other, try to both do better in future.

Thank you. I came here because I didn’t want to talk about it to any family or friends because I don't discuss our private life. I feel like doing that is wrong because it colours people’s opinions of your partner and that can be really bad. I wanted to make sure I was getting other views anonymously. That’s why I came here. I love my husband and I didn’t want to talk to a friend and have them think poorly of him. I’m so glad now because he is innocent and doesn’t deserve to have people’s opinions of him tarnished. Thanks for your comment.x

Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, most mumsnetters will jump to the man being guilty no matter what which isn’t always the case as shown here. It’s not really a neutral place unfortunately.

Well, I’m new here and this was my only post so it’s been an eye opener. I will think twice about posting in future tbh. Hopefully, I won’t need to though.

I think the part of the problem with this kind of post is that a poster has come on talking about the behavior of their partners that was similar to yours and the outcome was that they were cheating 😔 it’s such a nerve knotting position to be in. You did get some good advice and support on this post, so try take the positives and very happy for you that all is ok 😊

Thank you. You’ve been great throughout x

Best of luck OP 🩷

I think most OPs who start threads in Relationships or AIBU are extremely brave. And it's a shame the way some people attack the OP when they must know in most cases the OP is feeling really unhappy and desperate to start a thread in the first place

You've been really honest and communicative in your thread. And very patient with the negative posts and posters.

I’m so pleased to hear that it’s all turned out to be innocent.

Don’t kick yourself too much as he was definitely giving you reasons to be suspicious.

Can you go to couples therapy?

I absolutely don’t want to put doubt in your mind but you seemed so sure before. You said he’d lie about it so are you sure that he’s not still lying. You said you knew from his reaction that he wasn’t lying but he might have suspected you to ask him about this so he could have prepared an answer to deflect back. It doesn’t really make sense that you looked and nothing was there and now there magically is an innocent message 🤷🏻‍♀️. If there’s only one from ages ago why was it showing near that top?

I suppose I’m still suspicious from everything you’ve said. It sounds like he’s manipulated you into feeling guilty. I am definitely tainted by my past experiences and hopefully yours is one of the good guys.

I really hope I’m wrong though and that he’s been fully honest and you can patch things up.

Best of luck.

It's self-aware to be accountable and I applaud you for that, but don't race with quiiiiiiiite so much speed to take ''100%'' of the blame. Why is he so secretive with his phone? He still messaged her, even if she's in a group. Who are all these people he's messaging?

Sometimes I think that getting the outcome we longed for in these situations prevents us feeling the pain we need to go through to heal our abandonment wound.

We long for an explanation that means we won't have to go through so much pain. And it turns out, on this occasion, you've got that. You've discovered that you won't have to go through all that pain.

But as you're going to therapy, I would challenge you to think about what you would have felt if he had been playing around and to dig into that a bit. How would it have made you feel, how would you have dealt with it, and really specifically, what would have given you comfort.

<3

Def something to think about. Thanks

No one who cheats will admit to having an affair unless presented with irrefutable evidence that they've been caught out. And even then most will contribute to lie. If you confront him now, he'll know your calling his bluff because he knows that if you had evidence you wouldn't be asking him to fess up.

You might be better to approach it from trying to open dialogue on the basis of what's going wrong with your marriage angle. Try to make it a constructive conversation about fixing/improving things. That might even coax a confession out of him if he thinks you know and you're offering forgiveness/an olive branch.

What are you talking about?
OP has established that her DH is innocent.

Best wishes for the future OP x

It's strange how his behaviour changed after you checked her LinkedIn profile though. Coincidence?

I'm glad things are all good for you, however, I've seen people gaslit before and to the point they were convinced to seek therapy, for what the cheating wife diagnosed as Othello syndrome.

I'm not one to think the worst, but his behaviour was extremely suspicious and he had enough time to set things up to look innocent.

Good luck OP. Therapy is a good place to talk.