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FunWife

I am at a loss over his emotional infidelity

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Background; we have been married for 14 years and swinging for 4 years.

 

I feel so stupid asking, but I am at my wit’s end. My husband started having emotional affairs with women online three years ago. He meets them on message boards and some dating sites. I caught him three years ago, and he swore up and down he would stop. He said nothing was as important as our family and he loved me and only me. I believed him and we started to work on our marriage and to heal. We went as far as putting swinging on hold to get things worked out. I have been suspicious since I first caught him, but he is able to explain away my concerns and tells me I am looking for reasons to doubt him.

 

He swears he is no longer hiding anything from me, but my inner voice will not stop telling me he is lying. Is it possible to go from messaging, cybering and sexting multiple women to leaving it all behind in one day? He messaged with one woman for over two years and now swears he ended it with her immediately, but I have no proof of who she was, and no way to verify what he tells me. I was only able to read one e-mail between the two of them and he professed his love for her, but stated he could not leave due to the kids. I was also able to get into one of his message board accounts and read private messages between them. It was not strictly flirting and talking sex, the emotions pointed to more than friends. Our swinging was always based on us keeping the emotional bond for only the two of us.

 

We have sex 2-3 each week and we don’t argue all that often. I try to be a good wife and give him what wants and needs. What am I doing wrong? I believe he continues to hide her from me, but I do not know how to find the proof since it is all online. The kicker is he is always willing to talk and be open, except when it comes to questions about her. He stonewalls me. What do I do?

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Background; we have been married for 14 years and swinging for 4 years.

 

I feel so stupid asking, but I am at my wit’s end. My husband started having emotional affairs with women online three years ago. He meets them on message boards and some dating sites. I caught him three years ago, and he swore up and down he would stop. He said nothing was as important as our family and he loved me and only me. I believed him and we started to work on our marriage and to heal. We as far as putting swinging on hold to get things worked out. I have been suspicious since I first caught him, but he is able to explain away my concerns and tells me I am looking for reasons to doubt him.

 

I'm glad you've put swinging on hold. If you hadn't, that would be the first thing I'd say to do. Out of curiosity, when was the last time you swapped or went to a swing event? One other question I have: What made you two swing in the first place? It's always great to get that feeling of being wanted by someone besides your spouse, but taking that a step further isn't quite what's supposed to happen.

 

He swears he is no longer hiding anything from me, but my inner voice will not stop telling me he is lying. Is it possible to go from messaging, cybering and sexting multiple women to leaving it all behind in one day? He messaged with one woman for over two years and now swears he ended it with her immediately, but I have no proof of who she was, and no way to verify what he tells me. I was only able to read one e-mail between the two of them and he professed his love for her, but stated he could not leave due to the kids. I was also able to get into one of his message board accounts and read private messages between them. It was not strictly flirting and talking sex, the emotions pointed to more than friends. Our swinging was always based on us keeping the emotional bond for only the two of us.

 

Does he know that you know about this email? Do you think that they've ever met IRL?

 

We have sex 2-3 each week and we don’t argue all that often. I try to be a good wife and give him what wants and needs. What am I doing wrong? I believe he continues to hide her from me, but I do not know how to find the proof since it is all online. The kicker is he is always willing to talk and be open, except when it comes to questions about her. He stonewalls me. What do I do?

 

Is he willing to share *all* his email address and password with you?

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Once, many years ago now, my wife cheated on me. It was a one night stand. She regretted it immediately and told me about it the next time I saw her. It took me several years before I could fully trust her again.

 

Your situation is orders of magnitude worst than mine was. It is therefore not at all unreasonable for you to have these feelings. At the same time, other than this quiet natural lack of trust, your post doesn't suggest that you have any actual evidence for your fears. Indeed, it sounds like the very lack of possible evidence is fueling your fears. It is actually possible that your husband is telling you the truth. It is also possible he is lying. As a stranger on the internet, it is completely impossible for me to know.

 

I humbly suggest that what you really need now is counseling... both couples counseling and personal counseling. You need to rebuild your relationship with your husband and he needs to work to regain your trust. A good way to do that, IMO, is by working with a trained, impartial, outside adviser who can help you both get through this.

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. . . I try to be a good wife and give him what wants and needs. What am I doing wrong?
What are you doing wrong? Answer: Giving him everything he wants.

 

It wears a person down to be suspicious all of the time. I know.

 

I am a person who avoids confrontation. But I had to confront my first wife on this and she had to confront me. Ugly, but we both eventially came to an understand of what it was really all about. And the differences had nothing to do with sexual appetites.

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I was going to pass on saying anything here because I knew the advise to you would be great, which it is. SW PA mentioned something but I think it came across more in passing than hitting home.

 

What are you doing wrong? Giving him everything he wants. I'm speaking from a husbands point of view with a wife like you who gives me everything. She is an enabler. My life is like paradise. Life without consequences is life without boundaries.

 

He is clamming up when you want to talk about her? I know it's tough to open up a dialog when one has less than no desire to talk about it.

 

If you were my wife and I was doing this, I would need you to force me to open up and talk. You would need to make me understand that anything I reveal would not affect your love for me but you need to know where you stand.

 

Then, take Lionheart's advise and see a counselor. My 2 cents.

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Background; we have been married for 14 years and swinging for 4 years.

 

I feel so stupid asking, but I am at my wit’s end. My husband started having emotional affairs with women online three years ago. He meets them on message boards and some dating sites. I caught him three years ago, and he swore up and down he would stop. He said nothing was as important as our family and he loved me and only me. I believed him and we started to work on our marriage and to heal. We as far as putting swinging on hold to get things worked out. I have been suspicious since I first caught him, but he is able to explain away my concerns and tells me I am looking for reasons to doubt him.

 

He swears he is no longer hiding anything from me, but my inner voice will not stop telling me he is lying. Is it possible to go from messaging, cybering and sexting multiple women to leaving it all behind in one day? He messaged with one woman for over two years and now swears he ended it with her immediately, but I have no proof of who she was, and no way to verify what he tells me. I was only able to read one e-mail between the two of them and he professed his love for her, but stated he could not leave due to the kids. I was also able to get into one of his message board accounts and read private messages between them. It was not strictly flirting and talking sex, the emotions pointed to more than friends. Our swinging was always based on us keeping the emotional bond for only the two of us.

 

We have sex 2-3 each week and we don’t argue all that often. I try to be a good wife and give him what wants and needs. What am I doing wrong? I believe he continues to hide her from me, but I do not know how to find the proof since it is all online. The kicker is he is always willing to talk and be open, except when it comes to questions about her. He stonewalls me. What do I do?

 

Sounds like anything but fun. Both of you have invested much of your lives in your marriage. The next step would be to seek counseling. Both of you have to be willing to explore what has happened.

 

Solid relationships require trust, wide open communication and emotional intimacy. It seems that all three were once present, all three are now at risk, eroded or gone entirely.

 

At a guess, the 'other woman' is meeting a need more than a want. The latter are controllable, the former less so. You are no less a 'good wife' for trying to give him what he wants and needs. What is tearing you up is that someone else seems to be meeting a need that neither you nor your husband understand.

 

The question is not what the need is, but rather where it comes from. To find the source, there is a very hard and often painful process of introspection. The 'stonewalling' may reflect genuine fear at what lies beneath. Yet whatever is so hard to look at and acknowledge, he will have to deal with it. In the process, so will you. This is why counseling is so important: not so much to guide the process of looking within, but rather to buffer what eventually flows out.

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Out of curiosity, when was the last time you swapped or went to a swing event? One other question I have: What made you two swing in the first place? It's always great to get that feeling of being wanted by someone besides your spouse, but taking that a step further isn't quite what's supposed to happen. Does he know that you know about this email? Do you think that they've ever met IRL? Is he willing to share *all* his email address and password with you?

We went about 8 months ago, due to him pressuring me. We started swinging after discussing our fantasies and wanting to explore new sexual things. He knows I read the e-mail, but I don't know if they met IRL. I don't know where she lives. All I have to go on is his word and he says it stayed online. He says he opened all e-mails to me and gave me all passwords, but I have no way of knowing if he is hiding any from me.

 

Indeed, it sounds like the very lack of possible evidence is fueling your fears. It is actually possible that your husband is telling you the truth. It is also possible he is lying. As a stranger on the internet, it is completely impossible for me to know.

You are, of course, right. If my mind and imagination are making this what it is not, I am destroying my marriage all by myself.

 

I have an IRL friend suggesting I put a keylogger on his computer without him knowing, and then I will have my answer. I will then know if it is me making doubt out of nothing, or if he is up to no good. If feels underhanded to me, and I feel like it goes against what I want in my marriage, honesty and openness. However, she says if I tell him I am doing it or ask to do it he can simply change his actions and work around the keylogger by using other devices. I am torn on what to do.

 

I long for the openness and trust we had back when we began swinging, before he brought this into our marriage. I do not understand why he needed to find sex and intimacy on the internet when I was so willing to find it with us in new and fun ways. Would any of you look into a keylogger if you felt it was the only way to get an answer? He will not talk to me about her. He says it is in the past and I need to drop it. I need to know the man I look at each day is the man I married, love and trust.

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I have an IRL friend suggesting I put a keylogger on his computer without him knowing, and then I will have my answer. I will then know if it is me making doubt out of nothing, or if he is up to no good. If feels underhanded to me, and I feel like it goes against what I want in my marriage, honesty and openness. However, she says if I tell him I am doing it or ask to do it he can simply change his actions and work around the keylogger by using other devices. I am torn on what to do.

 

Respectfully, I don't think it would help. Ask yourself, in your present frame of mind, how would you take finding nothing? Would you see it as proof of your husbands innocence or simply suspect him of having found a way around it? The truth is it is almost impossible to prove a negative. As my philosophy teacher once said: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

The proof you need will not be found with a keystroke monitor. It will be found in the actions your husband takes to rebuild your trust in him. And it will be found in your willingness to let him rebuild that trust. Which brings me back to my earlier advice of finding an impartial third party to help you both work through that together.

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Respectfully, I don't think it would help. Ask yourself, in your present frame of mind, how would you take finding nothing? Would you see it as proof of your husbands innocence or simply suspect him of having found a way around it? The truth is it is almost impossible to prove a negative. As my philosophy teacher once said: an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

The proof you need will not be found with a keystroke monitor. It will be found in the actions your husband takes to rebuild your trust in him. And it will be found in your willingness to let him rebuild that trust. Which brings me back to my earlier advice of finding an impartial third party to help you both work through that together.

I could and would believe it if I found nothing with the keylogger. I am looking for truth in his actions, however he he is unwilling to open up to me regarding her. He will answer all other questions, but he will not answer one thing that has to do with her. I could overlook a little online fun, but the emotional part is not so easy. I am taking a few days to make my decision and I consider your advice, thank you.

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As Lionheart says if you install a keylogger and find nothing it does not mean he is not still communicating in some fashion. On the other hand if you find he is communicating with other women then you will know he has been lying. But therein lies the rub. What if you find out he has been lying? What are you prepared to do? If you confront him with the keylogger evidence what will be his reaction? Are you prepared for it? You also need to check with a lawyer to find out if you can monitor your spouse's keystrokes in your state. Under Federal law if you are the owner of the computer (for example, if it is community property) then you probably have the right to monitor it. However, your state law may prohibit it.

 

Unless you can say: "If I catch him, I am divorcing him" then I don't think the keylogger will serve you very well. It doesn't sound like that is what you want ,so I think counseling as a couple and individually is your best bet.

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Welcome to the forum, FunWife. I've been watching your thread and decided I'd speak up because I'm going to go against the flow of everyone else. A lot of people like to say that emotional cheating is primarily a woman thing. But men are human beings and they also have emotions and feelings. Why can't men also feel that they aren't getting their emotional needs met? Since you said that he is having emotional affairs, it would make me wonder if he feels that there is an emotional component missing in his relationship with you. We all can be pretty clueless about how another person feels if we ourselves feel everything is fine and dandy concerning that person. We can become oblivious. For example, I was pretty oblivious that Mr. Sun felt sexually neglected early in our marriage. We had recently had our first child. I was still recovering. I returned to work. He was working and going to school. There was very little time and energy (not to mention feeling in the mood for sex) going on. I thought everything was fine until I found out that he had been cheating on me for 2 1/2 years. Imagine being clueless for 2 1/2 years and then another 6 months afterwards. I know all about broken trust and heartache. For me, there were three important questions that I had to answer in order to move on:

 

1. Did I still love him?

 

2. Did he still love me?

 

3. Did both of us want to work on rebuilding our relationship together?

 

After that, it was a matter of forgiving (not forgetting, mind you) and taking baby steps. And I won't lie to you...it took years to trust him and sometimes trusting him was really a leap of faith.

 

Only you can answer those questions above and determine how much you want to take him by his word and try to start rebuilding trust.

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I wanted to come back and update since you all took the time to reply and help me. I ended up sitting down and talking to him very candidly, and told him I needed to have the truth in order to move past his indiscretions. He said I had everything and he would no longer talk to me about it. My gut would not stop screaming at me that he was continuing to lie.

 

I put a keylogger on the family computer, not his work computer, and within two days I had everything I needed. He met her on a web forum and she was close to our area. They never stopped seeing one another, and it is possible he is the father of one of her children. I do good to get out of bed most days, and if it weren't for my children, I do not think I would. When I confronted him, he said he did not want me to know who she was as he did not want me to know how close she lived to us. He now admits to having a prepaid cell phone to talk to her and the keylogger led me to all his secret accounts and e-mails.

 

He moved out over the weekend and I called her husband, and made arrangements to get him the proof I have of the affair.

 

Thank you for your advice and time.

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Wow! I am so sorry that you had to go through this.

 

Unfortunately, your hunch was correct in the first place. I was just reading an article today (I can't remember which magazine) about why men cheat. Remarkably, sex has very little to do with it, the article said. Maybe your husband is so unhappy in his own life, he's trying to find it somewhere else, except within himself.

 

So, you have two choices -- either divorce or seek counseling. Choose wisely and we support you in whatever you want to do.

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Having been in virtually the same situation as you, my heart goes out to you. The difference is I caught my ex wife with the keylogger and cellphone records. I'm so very sorry you're going through this, but the board supports you, and we are all here for you.

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Funwife, my heart goes out to you. I don't think there is any pain like finding that the person you love most would rather be with someone else. For me, it was the feeling "What's wrong with me? I didn't do anything wrong, so it has to mean I'm not good enough?" I felt like no one would ever love me again. It took me years and a good friend to realize that wasn't the case. I know nothing we can say can ease the pain. All I can say is that you won't always feel this way, as much as it seems like it now.

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