The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Just Found Out seems appropriate but it has been two months of discovery, confrontation, etc. and I am at my wits' end. I have read some of the Healing Library and I appreciate the resources here. I have been married for almost 26 years and while my husband and I have had some issues, I had NO IDEA what he has been up to for at least 8 years. I am an introvert and he is super social but it worked for us. I trusted him (well, DUH! That's why he got away with it for so long) and I had no problem with him going out to trivia once a week with mutual friends. Which then expanded to watching football at the local bar because nobody else at home is a sports fan. We have two adult daughters-one with pretty severe mental illness issues who is not at home and one who struggles with anxiety and depression and still lives with us. I mention this to say that part of the reason I ignored things that seemed odd but weren't HUGE red flags was because I was busy trying to keep my kids alive. I am not taking any of the blame for H's behavior but I feel like a fool. I got very sick at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 (not Covid related) and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which has limited further my socializing. Anyway, my husband's brother opened a pub in 2021 that my husband took a second job at every other Saturday and when he wasn't working there, he was hanging out there. It became increasingly clear over the last year and a half that he had completely checked out of our marriage. He has been taking 1-2 trips/yr to football games in other states since 2008. He has always gone with a couple of guys from work and a mutual friend of ours. Again, I always trusted him so except for some concerns regarding his drinking on these trips, I was not worried.

So in January, he is pricing out cruises and trying to get me to commit to one. Which seems weird right considering for Christmas he left a card for me in the Christmas tree that was addressed "To My Friend". He didn't actually give it to me, I found it after we opened gifts with our kids and my mother. I was very upset but didn't trust myself to say anything. And then he got covid and was quarantined in his home office so I let it go for a few weeks. Now he is planning out a vacation for us for next fall which makes NO SENSE. I finally asked him what are we doing? Since he keeps trying to make plans for the future when he acts like he doesn't want to be married anymore as clearly indicated by the lovely Christmas card he left for me. And we have a long talk about how unhappy we have both been and he had decided that I didn't want to be married to him anymore and that's why he had been acting like he had. I was pretty sure he had been hooking up with women at the bar given the chilly reception I received the couple of times I went there with him. So I asked him if he had and he insisted he hadn't. I pushed again and he confessed that he had been to a massage parlor and gotten a hand job. I didn't see that one coming! But given that we had only had sex once since my diagnosis in 2020, I could not blame him. Things were so much better for about a two weeks but then one night he had to work late for a department move. I was still feeling pretty paranoid about the bar (rightfully so), so I finally logged into his computer at home. I had tried before but couldn't get past the pin he had on it. I also couldn't see who he was texting/calling on his cellphone since it is work issued and thumbprint protected. This time I was able to figure out his pin. I went into his Facebook because I realized a few months previously that I couldn't see his list of facebook friends which is pretty suspect. In his Messenger I found several messages with one of the bar flies (L) telling her how much he missed her and how it brightened his day when she came in. There was some return flirting on her part but no sexting or actual mentions of dates. I also went into some of the more recent chats with other women and found that he had asked another woman from the bar out last August (she said no). And that a woman from trivia he had asked her if she wanted him to send some pics of his sexy bod since he had been working out. (She responded with HUH? so he wasn't getting anywhere there.) So I confronted him about this and he said that he had tried to get things going with these other people but that nothing had happened. He also told me that the person L that he had been messaging the most would not give him her phone number.

We talked, I was upset but I was still willing to try to move past this since it had all been contained to the last two years. We were communicating about everything (I thought) and things really were better than they had been in years. But I still had my doubts that he was being honest about everything. And I had been on here so I kept telling him that I needed to know EVERYTHING if I was going to be able to try to move past it, which is what he keeps insisting is what he wants. And we went on like that for another week or so and I kept popping on to his messenger when he wasn't home. And I found stuff from BEFORE I got sick (2019) where he met some chick at the bar he goes to for trivia and sent her a message asking her if she wanted to go out with him the following weekend. She didn't respond on Facebook. So I confront him AGAIN and tell him AGAIN that I don't believe him when he says there is nothing else to find out. (I have heard that so many times at this point). And I have asked about his football trips several times and he insisted that nothing happened on them. Well this time, I said I was going to call our mutual friend and ask him since my H is clearly not being honest with me. And he panics and confesses that ONCE on a trip in 2017, he picked up this woman (J) in California and had sex with her. But it was only the one time. I later found out that our friend was so upset about being put in that position that he told my H if I ever asked he would tell me which is why my H confessed. He was banished to sleeping in his office at that point.

The next morning I was still very upset but I had to go into the office. When I got there I searched for J on Facebook and our mutual friend (K) is friends with her, I could see several times where both K and my H were with her at a tailgate when they were in California, and twice at baseball games here in Boston. The first game was 6 months after the football game hookup. J flew across the country to go to a Red Sox game with both my H and mutual friend. Posted a pic of all of them at Fenway tagging mutual friend (K) and saying "And the other guy I'm not supposed to tag". And then again two years later here in Bos and in CA in 2021 she is in pics with them. So I lose my sh*t again and tell him I want him out of the house when I get home. I send her a message through FB saying I want to know the exact nature of their relationship. She actually responds and says she is traveling and can we chat when she gets home the next day. H went to stay with mutual friend and I went into his email account. And I see that H emailed J that morning (before I saw the pics) saying I might reach out to her and that he only told me about them at the football game afterparty and NOT about them on her first trip to Boston. So apparently this woman has remained friends with mutual friend and H and J were no longer having an A. J had sent me her phone number and asked me to call her the next day but I messaged her at that point and said I had the info I needed.

Another round of I'm sorrys etc from my husband. And I let him come home but make no promises for going forward. And in the meantime I found in the notes app on his phone which backs up to his gmail a list of sex worker phone numbers from 2019. And a couple of them have the notation next to them (texted). And I confront him and this time he said that they wanted money up front which convinced him it was a scam. But he did confess to 4 trips to massage parlors with happy endings, not the original 1 or 3.

Fast forward, I started digging in his google history and found a disturbing amount of porn and bedpages searches. He confessed to being on a couple of dating apps but said nothing came of them. Then last weekend when I told him AGAIN that I need the whole picture, he finally confessed to having sex with a local sex worker twice-once in 2019 and once this past October. He had a physical at the end of February and I made him do a full STI panel which fortunately came back negative and I made sure to view the results myself.

But I kept digging and found evidence of at LEAST two more prostitutes in 2016. At this point, I think he is either a sex addict or addicted to porn or both. I have told him repeatedly that I want a timeline of all of his activities. He has had the same therapist for 18 years but I am convinced he is a crappy one because he has never once asked my husband about his drinking or his emotionally abusive parents. So finally H starts the timeline yesterday. Only what he is putting in it is all of his google searches. I told him that is not what I meant and that he needs to include the sex workers, the "massages", J, the women at the bars and anything else he hasn't told me. This morning I read what he considered to be almost complete and he is still only revealing what I have found on my own. I really think he has a problem but I don't know what to do to make him face it.

I NEED him out of the house but the reality is I can't afford to not have his income. He claims he will continue to pay the mortgage but that isn't the only bill. And I took a lower paying job in academia so our kids could go to school for free-not that either did more than a semester. So my life is a mess. I'm 58 and good luck to a woman my age with a chronic health condition trying to find a better job. I know I don't have to make any decisions right now but I am so ANGRY and HURT. I KNOW that his behavior is not on me but
and the rational part of my brain wants him GONE. But I can't figure out how to make that work. And even WORSE! When I first found out about J on the football trip in 2016, and I asked him to leave, H told my younger daughter (the more stable one) that he cheated on me, that he hurt me very badly. I was not planning on telling her. She is 22. I didn't give her the details just said that it was a long time ago. Well this weekend when I found out about even MORE sex workers and made him leave, she happened to come down from her room And I spilled the whole story. Which is so inappropriate I know. So now I am here trying to process. I have only told one friend about this. Not the mutual friend. Who I definitely need to clear the air with. I don't know if he knows anything about the rest of this ugly story.

38 comments posted: Thursday, March 28th, 2024