Hi op,
ive been in a similar situation. It was sexting / nudes to an ex girlfriend, as I also found out from seeing screenshots of messages on his phone.
She doesn’t live in this country so there were suggestions of dates made to meet up but apparently this didn’t go ahead. (He was here on all the dates that I could see suggested, and he insists he would never have gone ahead with it). He did admit to a kiss at a friends wedding.
I found out a few years after it had been going on.
the main reason we are still together is that I have to take some responsibility and I can see how it happened. Due to various reasons, including having 3 kids under 5, we hadn’t had sex for years. A lot of years. Only had sex once to conceive youngest. We were sleep deprived and miserable and working long hours. I didn’t want sex. So we didn’t have sex. He tried to address it with me, I didn’t listen.
This horrid woman came along and gave him attention and it stroked his ego. I absolutely see how it happened.
I found out last year.
im still reeling from it. And he told an awful lot of lies when I confronted him and only admitted to things when I had evidence.
He is a great dad. And generally a good person. And we get on well.
But I still have days when I am consumed by rage about the whole thing. And part of the relationship is irreparably damaged.
However, when I found out, it all blew up and a short while later he had a breakdown. I’ve seen posters on here say that before about cheating husbands when they get found out and always roll my eyes and don’t believe it for a minute. But this was awful. I could sense it building for a while. It wasn’t immediately after the big blow up, it was a while later, when things were calm. But he obviously knew it was always bubbling under the surface for me. He started to develop a bit of a stutter. He would also answer questions that weren’t in response to what id said. It was because he was so nervous he would try to preempt what I would say when I walked through the door, but be so flustered he would say what he had been rehearsing. For example something about dinner whereas I had walked in and said something completely different. His eyes got very puffy and he developed a lot of skin conditions and a big rash on his face which is still there and flares up badly some days. He has aged about 10 years in the past year.
i feel very sorry for for him. For both of us. It was all such a waste.
I don’t want to be with anyone else. I’m kind of done with men. I can’t imagine ever dating again. My life would be lonely and harder without him. He is a wonderful dad. We get on well and have fun and I can depend on him for a lot (not everything, evidently), therefore I stayed.
Nobody on here can tell you what to do.
for me though, what would make the difference is: were you guy happy? If so, and he still went looking for more, that’s worse than if there were major issues and he used it as some sort of escape. But I guess it depends on whether he is telling the truth about how far it went
xx