Hi all!
Apologies in advance for the long dilemma.
I’ve been married to my husband for nearly 10
years now and we have three children aged 8,5 and 1.
I initially started picking up on small lies early on in the marriage and a few disrespectful things, such as making a comment (‘damn’) under his friend’s ex’s photo which another friend had found and posted.
There was a turning point about a year into the marriage when I noticed a notification on his phone saying ‘sorry X (my husband’s initial), Y (a girl) wasn’t there (referring to the party my husband wasn’t at)’. The rest of the messages consisted of his friend telling the friend who sent the message to be quiet because it could get a ‘wife’s man into trouble’. My husband was the only one married at the time and Y was the best friend of one of his friend’s fiancé.
When I asked my husband, he said he used to tease his friend about hooking up with ‘Y’ and told him he wished she was at the party. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt so we moved on from it. It still seemed weird though and I asked Y’s friend if she knew anything. She said she didn’t know of anything happening between them.
There was another turning point about 2 years ago. We were talking about porn and I asked if he had seen any since we were married. He replied ‘no hard porn’ but if there’s been anything on TV as part of a show he may have continued to watch.
The answer seems a bit strange and I feel bad but I searched his phone because something didn’t seem right. There were a handful of things including a few news articles with celebs posing semi nude and the JLaw images which had been leaked by apple. He apologised when I confronted them and said he sometimes looked at news pop ups. Most of these searches were in the first 1-2 years we were married. He’s now changed the settings and no longer has pop ups from the daily star etc now.
I also saw he searched ‘Why don’t you want to have sex?’in Arabic when we first got married. He has a few Arab friends and claimed they used to tease one of them about how often girls would throw themselves at him and literally ask him to have sex, so he wanted to search this and post it in his friends group as banter. I’m not sure if that’s BS. I’ve never seen evidence he’s been part of any dating sites/apps since we married.
Around the same time, he stopped talking to this friend and also left the what’s app group so couldn’t see if that message was ever sent.
Fast forwarding to recent days, I suspect he still lies pointlessly about things he doesn’t have to lie about, but much less often than before. However, when he does it still bothers me. E.g. claiming he didn't search for something that’s on his internet history about having a ‘controlling wife’ (when I’ve used his phone - we have full access to each other’s phones). I recently switched on our virgin media and it was left on one of the adult channels - but he denied this was him and maybe the remote was pressed by accident one of us/whilst the kids were playing etc.
Do you think the above sounds fishy enough to call time, especially with 3 young children? Not sure what to do but the trust has gradually been eroded.