SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I reread your posts and in your first one you said he did lie to you after Dday 2. But then in another post you said "I learned a lot in our full disclosure but he hadn’t actually lied to me." This is contradictory.

I'm not saying this to be combative; in fact, I've stayed off your most recent threads because it's clear that my style of giving advice probably doesn't work for you. I only responded this time because you specifically asked a question about why most people aren't convinced you have the full truth.

The very short and simple answer is that his story isn't believable, based on what we know from our collective experience and what we know of serial cheaters with compulsive tendencies.

My trauma brain is all over the place. To clarify…DDay 1 full disclosure, never denied…full transparency and one year of "Solid" presence and reassurance. Then the bomb dropped and I discovered porn, excessive, and just that morning I had asked him if he had watched porn and he said no…to my face…..but once I found it he admitted he had been watching porn multiple times a week for 2 months. That’s the lying…..it was a shock….he admitted once caught :(

Of all the members who have been around long enough to be able to make a credible claim on this, Sisoon is the only one I can think of that reports that his WS was immediately, completely, and consistently honest. Others can chime in if they know of other unicorns.

It’s not that it’s impossible. Just highly improbable. You have a known liar with motive to conceal. For them to NOT be lying would require an epiphany, a radical and immediate change of character. That’s just not run of the mill human behavior.

I can understand how it’s distressing to hear people double down on the "he must still be lying" take, especially if you feel like you’ve had some genuinely honest communication with him throughout this awful process.

I don’t have a unicorn, but I do have a spouse who by all indications did a 99.9% about face after DDay2. There was one instance of trickle truth that he volunteered about a year later, and it wasn’t something he had overtly lied to me about; it was just a detail that he knew I would want to know and that had not come up in our conversations about the details of his affair. But other than that I have had no indication in almost five years that he has lied to me or hidden things.

We also had a twenty year relationship prior to his affair in which we both valued honesty. I never knew him to be a liar, explicitly or by omission, about big or small things.

In the six months of his affair, though, that changed. He "only" lied by omission until DDay1, when I found phone records that suggested an affair. I asked him about it directly and calmly, expecting the honesty he had always shown. Instead, I got a month of lying and gaslighting that wrecked me, psychologically. At the end of that month I found hard proof, confronted him with it, and he did an about-face, but the damage he did with his lies still impacts our relationship today. I feel reasonably sure that my husband’s behavior in his affair was an anomaly across the expanse of a 25-year relationship, but it took me a long while to get to that sense, and I won’t ever have the same confidence in his honesty, past or present, that I did before he cheated.

So, what others are saying is true. Even if you’re dealing with someone who is typically honest, Infidelity brings out the liar, especially when addiction and compulsive behavior are involved and the stakes are high.

But generalities like "they’re always lying," or "there’s always more" aren’t necessarily helpful in individual circumstances where you’re trying to figure out if the person in front of you is committed to honesty or not. I’ve spent much of the last 4.5 years trying to assess my husband’s honesty. The big first step was to stop believing his words. Instead I listened to them carefully and put them through a consistency test, a gut test, and a common sense test. And I watched his behavior a LOT. I also listened to all the stories of lying wayward spouses on here. It was panic-inducing at times, but it was good for me to absorb.

I do occasionally feel that the collective wisdom on this site is unhelpfully cynical, but usually there’s a solid kernel of advice at the core. In this case, I think people are mostly encouraging healthy caution. Many of us look back on our Ddays and wish we had had a little more healthy skepticism about our partner’s honesty. I certainly do.

ETA: I went back my and refreshed my
memory of your situation a little bit. I think what people are seeing is a man with sexual compulsivity who travels/has traveled often for work. That combination often goes hand in hand with a longer history of compartmentalized infidelity. If you don’t want to go back into it that’s fine, but how did you find out about your husband’s "summer of prostitutes?"

[This message edited by Grieving at 7:01 PM, Sunday, March 23rd]

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response grieving. I have also been in a long-term marriage 25 years and 99% of it was happy and loving.

My husband had some sort of midlife crisis/Covid crisis/trauma confrontation, who the heck knows what started all this I found confirmation of an appointment on his phone when I was picking it up to turn the lights off we have everything on our phones . I walked outside with his phone and saw that he had an encrypted email account and saw that there were three times he had seen prostitutes when I confronted him I remained very calm and looked at him straight in the eye. He fell to his knees and admitted everything. He told me what I already knew about the three prostitutes. He has agreed to a polygraph multiple times, although I have not enforced that. We had a pretty good year after this a lot of work a lot of tears, but we pulled together. It was only a year later when he started to act distant that I once again found on this iPad porn. I had asked him that morning if he had been watching porn and he said no as far as I know, this was the first time he lied to me. It really didn’t matter. It was a little too late. I told him if he went back to this lifestyle we were separating I was leaving. I held true to my boundary and we are now separated. He is in a 12 step and individual therapy and is 100% remorseful and addressing his issues. He knows that he has had a secret life. He knows he carries trauma from childhood and he is working through that with both his therapist and in two different 12 steps. I honestly do not believe he is still lying to me. I honestly do not believe there was infidelity before that summer. I am pretty intuitive. I knew something was off that summer. I knew he was in a depression and was distancing himself. I felt it I have never felt that before. DD two was a shock.😢

Many of us could probably stand to work on saying stuff like "Odds are there is more" vs "There's ALWAYS something more."

Outside analysis also doesn't have the X factor of your own experience with paying attention to your own gut instincts and having far more detailed factual information.

I myself had the epiphany that I was kicking myself around unnecessarily. I used to say stuff like "I didn't see it," and "If I knew then what I know now." Well, turns out the process of going through all that and learning how to navigate new internal and external waters was really what imparted all that new perspective and skill, unpleasant as it was.

When others here say personal,off-putting things, they *may* be earnestly trying to "save" you from experiencing what they did, or even trim down what they think is the time it will take for you to arrive in a similar place. But no one can save you, you have to do that yourself. And you will ultimately do it in your own time and way, and that is exactly as it should be.

All the best,

-M

Sataya,

No one here is glad about being right that there's more or brags about it. It feels like more of a moral obligation to do so.

Posters who found out years later or who rugswept, can only wish someone would have told them not to accept the superficial story they were told

Satya, I looked back through your posts, and it seems like at times you have wrestled with doubts about whether you know everything and whether the summer of prostitutes was actually the first betrayal.

I may be off base, but I wonder if people speculating that there’s more bothers you because it resonates with your own fears/doubts.

I also get the sense that you’re on the fence about taking him back or moving ahead with separation or divorce. Is that fair to say?

For me, part of the reconciliation process has meant staring at and fully absorbing my fears that my husband’s affair might not be an aberration. Maybe he cheated on me before in our marriage, and I had just never found out. That’s the dreadful chasm of possibility that opens up in front of you when you realize your spouse is capable of hiding terrible things from you and then bald faced lying and gaslighting to try to cover their tracks.

Had I chosen to divorce, I don’t think I would have been wracked by this uncertainty as much. I may have come to terms more quickly with not knowing. But I chose to reconcile, and so I’ve had to deal with that uncertainty differently, and in much greater length and depth.

What I’ve come to realize is that the lying my husband did raised a question at the very core of our relationship that may not ever be 100% settled. I did a LOT of thinking back over our (then) 22 years together, investigating all my memories and asking him endless repeated questions. There was a time early in our marriage when he hid something from me, but voluntarily told me about later. There was the year we were long distance due to work. There was the stressful, sleepless haze of our kids’ early childhood, and a year when I was down for the count recovering from a devastating back injury. I never had reason to suspect cheating in those times, but looking back, it could have gone on without me being aware.

Over time I’ve come to feel ok with where I’m at on this, but it took a lot of work and honesty with myself. I needed to dig into and question the past until I got to a place where my common sense and gut came to the conclusion that the bulk of the evidence pointed at his betrayal being a one-time midlife crisis-y thing, not a pathological pattern of cheating and hiding and lying. I also needed to see his commitment to honesty and transparency in our relationship over the past 4+ years since DDay. I needed time to tell that he recognized and changed the part of himself that allowed him to cheat and lie. And this is something I still watch for.

What all this amounts to is me feeling about 92% certain that he’s told me the truth in and about the past, and 98% certain that he’s fully committed to honesty and to our relationship in the present. That averages out to about 95% trust level, which I can live with, and which is probably healthier than the naive, 100% trust I had in him pre-affair.

I know this is super long, and maybe not even relevant. Mainly I wanted to say that if you’re still considering reconciliation at this point, you’re probably going to have to get deep into the nitty gritty of assessing the past and present honesty of your spouse. In my experience, it’s an unavoidable part of the path toward true reconciliation.

[This message edited by Grieving at 8:51 PM, Wednesday, March 26th]

GRIEVING

Since DDAY 2023 there have definitely been moments of doubt- how could there not be? But as my nervous system has calmed and I've taken control I believe I know what I need to know but have asked for a full therapeutic disclosure for the second Dday--and he said we will do that. In addition, he agreed to a lie detector test and has admitted as part of his 12 step program that "lying by ommission" was a major issue for him.

He is in a 12 step although his therapist, who works with and refers clients to CSAT , do not believe he is a SA. Still he has been attending SAnon and ACA. He resonates deeply with the second and the trauma he experienced in his childhood.

He is moving to his own apt 4/3 with a year lease and we have an appt with a mediator tomorrow in fact to draw up the separation agreement. That is as far as I intend to go as far as divorce. I believe in healing, I believe he has "surrendered" as he says and is finally doing the work. With my therapist I will work on boundaries during seperation but its possible the goal may still be reconciliation but not even considering any steps forward for atleast 6 months...so Im watching and in the meantime Im living my life with a lot of support and doing what I like to do.

So....could there be more? SURE! Will I ever know .......?? but for now I'm believing him while protecting myself and giving him the opportunity to "show me"