14 years of living a lie

Current situation: in counseling trying to see if this marriage can be salvaged.

The history:

I have to apologize up front for the length of this post. 14 years of pain I’m purging.

Hello. I just discovered the most hurtful thing I have ever experienced. My wife of 14 years has NEVER been faithful to me. Her AP has been a part of her life since her first marriage. This is her and my second marriage. She has admitted that they were communicating and intimate while we dated, during our engagement, and less than a month after our wedding day.

About 3 month after the wedding I saw a sexually suggestive text on her phone. I asked her about it and she explained it away. Sometime after that I became aware of Facebook messages that were leading up to a rendezvous. I confronted her about it and she said she would break off all communication. A couple weeks later I find an email from her to him saying that she got in trouble and to email her for now. Eventually they started communicating with work email only. I know this because she left her work laptop open and got an email. We typically alert each other when work emails come through when the other is away from the computer.

Over the next five years or so, we went back and forth with her saying she was breaking off communication and then me finding evidence of ongoing communication. But I didn’t have the "smoking gun". We were on the same cell phone plan at the time and I was going through the logs. I am an analyst y profession so you can imagine how obsessive I was with these data sets. Pivots, charts, trends, etc.

Around 2014 I started to see communication with other men as well. Eventually I checked out and just stopped trying at all. I lived as a shell of myself. The most hurtful thing was my oldest daughter telling me that during one of her most trying times that I had "checked out".

Now fast forward to the fall of 2023. We have been empty nesting for three years. Moved out of the family house and downsized to a nice apartment in a very trendy neighborhood. This is where all hell breaks loose.

I just happened to be messing with my Google Home Hub while at work. I only go in the office once a week on Tuesdays. I have never checked this device previously. I am a smart home aficionado and have always had smart devices and cameras. I check the camera at work this day and see a man in my apartment.

I didn’t say anything that day. I held it. I saw how casual she was and figured this wasn’t the only time this had happened. So now I changed all my camera settings and was ready to get my smoking gun. Oh I should mention that this man wasn’t the AP.

My building has smartphone and number code access to all communal doors and apartments. What the wife didn’t know was when you give someone access the communal doors take a picture when that code is used. This will come into play later.

A week after seeing the dude in my apartment on the Nest camera my wife left the Mac open and I took the opportunity to open iMessage. There I saw my smoking gun. It was a conversation with a friend of hers where she said that she was still having sex with the AP and that he had been in her life longer than both her marriages.

I woke her up (it was around 2am) and showed her the text. I tried to leave but she kept hanging on to me and physically impeding me. The next day she gave me a stupid attempt to gaslight me. I responded calmly that either she admits everything right now or I’m gone.

Well she started to tell all. OMG it was a lot! She tried to trickle feed me at first but then the faucet of guilt started pouring. From November 2023 to June 2024 five different men had been in my apartment and my bed. This is not including the AP. The AP had been in my building. My building has rooms you can rent for guests. By the time we got finished with "what she could remember" …..let’s just say that from 2019-2025 she may have had more sex with the AP than with me. Well that’s hyperbole but it paints a picture of how often and pervasive this relationship was. We could verify quite a bit using those entry code photos mentioned earlier. As part of her giving up info we did a data download from Facebook and instagram. Found quite a bit in there including how often she talked trash about me to her friends. Oddly I didn’t see trash talking the AP but to some other dude she hooked up with that she went to college with.

Currently she is in therapy, I am in therapy, and we are in couples therapy. She has deleted all social media. She has opened up all her devices. She’s dealing with some childhood trauma (that I did know about). But she knows that these are decisions she made. The remorse appears to be genuine but I’ve been gaslit for so long and so well that maybe it’s not????

I feel ashamed, stupid, disrespected, and emasculated. It’s like these last 14 years didn’t really happen. Every good memory I have is bookended with infidelity. I told her I would be around until the end of this lease (12 months). She is begging me to just watch and give her a chance to prove be she’s really working on herself and the marriage. Part of me is here because of the 14 years of work I put in. Part of me may be here just using the 12 months to get myself financially prepared for the inevitable divorce. But maybe I’m still just being gaslit.

Thanks for letting me get this all out. I plan to go through the forums and see how others are dealing with this. Hopefully I can find some hope.

23 comments posted: Thursday, September 12th, 2024