The OTHER Day I Discovered My Wife Was Cheating
This is part 4 in a continuing series about the story of finding out my wife was cheating on me. If you want to see how the story started, you can read part 1, part 2, and part 3.
In the next few weeks, things seemed to be doing better. We were spending more time together, and we discussed the affair a little bit, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. We both started individual therapy, as well as our weekly couple therapy. I stopped doing any remodeling on the house to focus on my wellness, family, and marriage. Three weeks after I confronted her about the affair, on the day before Mother’s Day, I had to use her phone to install an app for our health plan. Something inside me still didn’t feel satisfied about how she defended Donald that day in our kitchen (see section Defending Donald for more background).
I was still curious and not getting answers about their relationship, so I snooped and looked at their text message history, which dated back to …March 1 of that year? And only two messages total?
Donald: “I forgot my badge, can you let me in?”
My Wife: “Yes”
I knew this wasn’t right. They were good friends. So, I prepared for the lies that I assumed were going to come when I asked her about this. Keep in mind, on the night I first confronted her about the affair, she told me to look through her phone whenever I wanted, to build trust. After that night I didn’t, because I didn’t want that type of marriage. But I did on that particular Saturday.
My wife was playing with the kids in their room, and I didn’t know how much time I had. Our house was small. Her text message history with other friends went back much farther into the previous year. Okay, so she never wiped her text messages clean. So, I logged on to our phone plan’s website and looked at the text message history and there it was.
It was like a punch in the gut. Again.
Evidence and My Solution
I saw previous messages to his number that were no longer on her phone. Including late at night, and after midnight when she was on her work trip with him. The TLDR is that I noticed a change in her after that trip, but had no suspicion or even idea that cheating or anything remotely close had taken place. I talked more about the significance of that trip in part 1, but here’s a snippet from that piece:
A couple months before, she went on a work trip a couple hours out of town for the week and stayed at a hotel with her entire office. Before the trip, she was really mean and cold to me … When she got back from her trip at the end of February, I saw a libido in her I hadn’t seen since she read through the Fifty Shades of Grey books … Now she wanted sex. And she wanted a lot of it. And it was great sex, as it had always been. I noticed the instant change and would joke around and ask, “What happened on your trip?”
I wasn’t even angry. I was devastated, defeated, and felt like garbage. I had been deceived again. There was obviously more than she let on and the truth and openness about our marriage didn’t lie between us. It lay between her and Donald. All that we had talked about in the past few weeks and worked on was under false pretenses. I felt worthless.
I don’t know how much later, but at some point that day, before I confronted her, I went into the bathroom and looked up how much Tylenol somebody needs to take to kill themselves. I didn’t want to go through this fight again. I didn’t trust in the fight anymore. I didn’t want to break up my family and I didn’t want a marriage where my wife wasn’t honest with me. I felt trapped by my best friend.
It was about 30 seconds of looking at this “solution,” before I snapped out of it and realized that I needed to fight through this. I needed to defeat Donald and win my wife back. This was a pivotal day for me and our marriage. It was the last time I felt this sense of depression and wanting to remove myself from this planet to ease the burden that I put on other people, namely, my wife, who I obviously (to me) held back from happiness.
Confronting Her
I confronted her that night after the kids went down and it was more lies just like the first time I confronted her.
Her: “It’s a new phone so I don’t have old texts.”
Me: “The texts log from bills were after you got your new phone.”
Her: “I went through and deleted all my old texts at a certain point.”
Me: “Ok, then how come you have texts from other friends from months before that?”
It was at this point when she knew she couldn’t get out of this lie. She told me he kissed her in the elevator at the hotel and he sent a text apologizing for it and she said not to worry about it. She deleted the text because it meant nothing and she didn’t want me to find it and make a big deal out of a one second kiss that meant nothing.
I was livid. Here I was, just a few days after my vasectomy that I had because she didn’t want any more kids. I was considering a larger family and was open to adoption for a third, but she said her body couldn’t do a third pregnancy and she didn’t want another kid, period. So, I got the vasectomy because I believed her that the Good Friday kiss just caught her off-guard and she really had no feelings for Donald. Although I guess if I really believed her, I wouldn’t have checked her phone that day. Maybe it was more that I wanted to believe her.
Now I realized that she willingly went out with him on Good Friday knowing he had already made moves on her. And that she lied to me the past few weeks and watched me get a vasectomy to plan for our family knowing she wasn’t being honest. And maybe wasn’t even planning on keeping our family.
What “Happened”
According to her story, they were out at the bar with a group. I know this is true from photos she showed me after she got back. The whole group walked back together, but somewhere along the way, she and Donald got ahead of the rest of the group and got in the elevator together. He leaned in to kiss her and she kissed him back and said, “I can’t do this,” and they each got off the elevator on their own floor.
A few things stood out to me, besides the fact that my wife was now a person I couldn’t trust at all. She said, “I can’t do this,” not, “I don’t want to do this.” She was not happy that I dissected those words and got mad at me for doing so. That should have told me something.
Second was that she couldn’t remember who got off the elevator first. Now, I’ve never cheated or been kissed by a coworker, but I would imagine if that happened in an elevator and you were shocked by it, you would remember if you left him in the elevator and walked to your room or if you were alone in the elevator wondering what just happened.
I didn’t believe her about the details, because I had no reason to, and they didn’t add up. Also, the text messages were about two hours after she got back to the hotel (I learned that an iPhone tracks this and you can view when you visited certain locations) and, according to her words, went right to sleep in her own room. She said the messages were just an apology from Donald to her, and her responding saying it’s ok. I still believe she was in his room and the messages said something quite different, but I’ll never know. Being at peace with not knowing took years to get to.
Then I remembered that she left her jacket in her room and had to pay to have it shipped back to our house. She never leaves things behind in a hotel. She wakes up early and does multiple sweeps. But she might have left it in Donald’s room if she was in that room cheating on me and not thinking straight after. She insisted that her story is what happened and that she left the jacket in her closet. I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t even look at her.
As I’m writing this almost a year later, this brings up anger about her deceit that day. I told her to call her mom again (to help with the kids) and that I was leaving. Note: It has been longer than a year now, but this sentence was taken from a journal entry a year later and I wanted to leave it to capture the feeling.
No Help
She called her mom. I went out to the living room while she was on the phone and she came out pissed off. She said, “Do you want to be with me or not?!” I told her to look at the photos of us on the wall, because that’s who I want to be with. I said I didn’t know the person standing before me right now. I wanted the person in the photo of us in Europe, the Pacific Northwest (United States), and holding our boys in our family photos back again.
Her mom refused to come and told us to work it out. I was somewhat forced to stay that night, and this became the night our recovery went from talking about the affair and her being apologetic, to her saying she refused to talk about the affair or Donald one second longer. It turned into me apologizing to her for her being upset. She went on to say I ruined her Mother’s Day because of this discovery and fighting. I also had to apologize for that.
Ruining Mother’s Day became the main issue in our next counseling session, not the new discovery. We talked about her resentment toward me and for months after, we barely spoke of her affair or lies and only about what I had done wrong as a husband. I was willing to work through this first, knowing we’d eventually have to work out the affair. I was blind to how I was being manipulated, gaslit, called names, and emotionally abused from this point forward so that she could cover up everything else I was months away from discovering.