SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am solidly in R with Mr Psych, and things are going well. Lately, however, I've been thinking of just how close I came to NOT discovering his affairs, and wonder where my life would be today had I not.

I am in a different place than I was pre-DDay1, and much of the change has been in a positive and healthy direction. It took a hell of a lot of pain and anger to get here, but with this new vision of my marriage I also got on a healthy track of losing weight, changing my diet, and working on being fit and strong. I'm back to taking care of myself, liking the person I'm becoming- physically, mentally, professionally, personally. Had this not happened (meaning had I not discovered my husband's secret life) I might still be sitting on the sofa after work each night with a glass of red wine and a bag of pretzels watching "The Voice".

Point is, this only happened because I intuitively picked up on little things that took me to the answers I needed. He didn't disclose, and even when I started to ask the hard questions, he lied for months. Lied and lied and denied and lied some more. I think I now have the full story, or at least as much as I need to know right now. He says I know the worst of it, maybe not a day by day, blow by blow (no pun intended), but the facts of his lying, manipulation, extent of his infidelity, and the nature of his relationship with these women.

But still, there's that question of "what if". What if I hadn't found the pieces of evidence that finally got him to spill a truth, which then lead to further truths after more sleuthing? I have no evidence that he's broken NC or is doing anything that remotely smells of betrayal of me. Yet. . . . yet I wonder if I'll miss one of the little signs again. The tiny bits of evidence that may seem insignificant, but can turn out to be momentous. Like a discarded sales receipt found at the bottom of a paper bag (yep, that's how I discovered OW2 when it lead me to her facebook page and pic of her with Mr Psych).

I know how hard he worked to keep his secret life a secret from me. Everything today tells me he's not living a secret life. He is working in IC, group therapy, calls me, tries to be as transparent as possible. Little unaccounted for time, etc. But the thoughts still haunt me. What if. . . . what if. Can anyone relate? Did you discover your partner's affairs, and have the sense that it would have continued indefinitely had you not found out? Mr Psych admits it is doubtful that he would have stopped on his own. He needed to get caught and experience the full effects for it to break through to him.

Yeah, I know for a fact if I hadn't caught on my WW would have probably kept ramping it up until I did. Like she was on a crash course or something.

It takes a body slam back to reality for some of them.

I do wonder if there's a difference in long term "success" of not re-offending for those who chose to disclose on their own, versus those who were "caught" as mine was.

I do feel the consequences for Mr Psych were a wake up call/body slam from which he'll never recover. It made an impact. He's on the road toward redemption, mainly in his own mind. So long as I see him working toward being a "better person", I can feel some comfort. YET . . . there it is again. It scares me to think how it was the "little things" that brought it all down. So little that they could have easily been overlooked, and easily overlooked in the future.

Yeah, real statistics would be awesome. <sigh>

Can anyone relate?

Not sure about the statistics, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say that every single member of this forum can relate. Life is full of "what ifs..."

What if my fWW hadn't left her phone on the kitchen counter while she was in the shower that Sunday afternoon back in April (Easter Sunday). What if I hadn't had the courage to pick up that phone and do something I'd never done before and searched through it actually looking for something incriminating. But I knew. I knew before I picked up that phone and read what I read.

What if she'd never told me?

What if she'd continued with ONS guy or other men?

What if she does it again?

What if I decide I can't do this anymore?

What if something had never woken us up from our "marriage coma?"

I've reached a point where I'm done with the "what ifs" and more concerned about the "what nows." It seems that you are, too.

So what is it? Why are you suddenly wondering about the "what ifs?"

Sometimes I like to wonder about this too. I had already secretly decided before I found out about the A that I was leaving once my son graduated from high school this past June. What if some unnatural force hadn't pulled me out of bed and lead me to his phone where I discovered their texts? I think WH would have continued on doing what he was doing - it had already been 7 years, so no reason to stop unless he was forced. I imagine me leaving could have been a huge wake up call for him and he might have broken it off if he realized he really wanted me to stay. I don't know. There are times when I wish I had never found out and had just left and started over rather than trying to R knowing what I know. I wonder if all the pain of knowing and all the hard work is worth it. I guess only time will tell. For the time being, I'm trying to focus on the here and now.

My W essentially broke down physically and emotionally from the demands ow made on her. If ow had ramped her demands up more slowly, I think she would have had my W in her paws for a lot longer - and I had basically given up, so I was perhaps done with confronting my W, so that potential cause for ending the A may have disappeared. IOW, if ow were a little smarter and less self-centered the A might very possibly still be going on.

OTOH, if W had never met ow, she probably would never have had an A.

I can't deal with ifs. I can deal only with the events that actually happen, and not with all of them. I don't think anyone can deal with ifs.

You are right, not much use in dwelling on the past. But these are the small voices that still fun around in my head, still keep me diligent, not allow me to completely let down my guard.

I did find a picture of a woman on his ipad in the past month, but deleted it without checking the date. It was a woman with a forked (split) tongue. Two different pictures of her sticking out her tongue. I felt the old panic set in as I looked at it, trying to decide if she was someone new, someone old, a photo graph he'd taken, one he'd downloaded. It was in his photo or picture folder (I'm not an apple user or ipad user) and when I confronted him about it, he said he knew nothing. I wish I'd not been so impulsive and deleted the pics. Is there a "trashcan" on those things? I couldn't find one to recover the pics.

So this is likely part of what's got my hamster wheel going. I think the "what if" here is related to just how small the signs can be, and how easily they can be missed. Maybe I'm afraid if I let down my guard too much, something will slip by that I should see. I don't like feeling "diligent" about checking for signs of something amiss. I want to live my life in peace. I want to rediscover a sense of normalcy that transcends living with a partner who cheated on me.

mluv69, I'm sorry you are questioning yourself in this way. I hope your hard work toward R pays off and you find a point when you feel it was, in fact, worth the pain and work. Is your WS doing his work of fixing himself?

If my 7 year old grandson had not called me to our desktop to help him get to a certain site then I would of never found out. Somehow he got on WS email where I saw the CL communication which lead to weeks of lies and with the threat of a poly 25 years of infidelity came out. TT took months. 8 months out and still wonder that maybe it would of been better to not know. WS says he's glad he was caught because it was a double life he couldn't stop. It's like his misery (if he's being honest) ended and mine began. Our family will never be the same as our 5 adult children know and want nothing to do with him at this point. So for their sake I currently wish I had not found out.

[This message edited by Alexia77 at 3:44 PM, January 21st (Thursday)]

I too have worried and wondered ad nauseum about the "what ifs". There is no right answer. I have talked to my WH about it, asking about what if I hadn't found out, how long would it have lasted. He maintains that he "was ending it" and that he only "needed a few more weeks". I called big time BS on that one-but that is for him to confront.

I do believe, the WSs who are truly remorseful and are working hard at R wanted, on some level, wanted to get caught. Mistakes are made, phones are left unattended, leading to us finding out. We knew, on another level, that things were not good. Eye contact isn't held, no loving words, etc. I felt that things were off. He started kissing me when he came home with very tight lips-weird-I knew then that something wasn't right.

Funny, he thought he was doing everything to hide it-deleting emails, keeping emails very "professional" in nature, deleting texts, phone messages. But he never changed his password to his phone and left it on the kitchen counter each night. I, waking up in the middle of the night with what I now know to be panic attacks, would sneak down and check. There was never any hard evidence but what I saw made me very uneasy. To the point where I confronted him, even without evidence. And, well...dday happened.

Today, he admits that, yes, on some level he needed to get caught-not to hurt me-but because he was so out of control.

I divorced, am doing fantastic on my own, am dating someone new I am very interested in, and am generally happy. BUT, this stupid question does pop up into my mind all the time. What if I hadn't found out.

The affair was the kick in the ass I needed to change my life and take it back. She never would have told me and I know that. In fact it would have kept going on super long term.

I am thankful I found out for sure.

I guess I sometimes think about this myself. I think about how if I had not forced a confession out of him how he would definitely still be cheating on me and gas lighting me about it. Even with me forcing a confession out of WH, he admits that he fully intended to go right back to cheating on me once the heat died down and things went back to normal.

For me, I was suspicious of WH's from the very beginning of his first A after we got married. The one he had while we were dating, I missed since we did not live together and I was a busy single parent with a very demanding job. Had we been under the same roof, I would have picked up on it though. Anyway, I was suspicious from the get go. He was the biggest clue I had and he completely gave himself away. He was very sneaky though and was well versed in the ways of cheating so that he did not leave a single trace. He was old school so all of his A's were face to face only and only one was with someone other than a co-worker (my sister).

When I finally confronted my WH, I didn't have a single shred of proof, but I knew without any shadow of a doubt that he had cheated on me our entire marriage and was currently cheating on me with a co-worker at that time. When I confronted him, I told him he had an opportunity to be honest with me about his cheating, but if he tried to continue to lie to me about it and deny it, I was done and would divorce him. As expected, his immediate response was to open his mouth and deny he had ever cheated. I called him a liar, told him it was over, and then went to walk back into the house. He tried to convinced me that I was being paranoid, jealous, and making wild unfounded accusations. I laughed at him and told him he wasn't getting away with that nonsense this time and that he blew his chance. That's when he told me to hold on and that he was going to be "honest" with me. He admitted to parts of the truth by admitting that he cheated, but tried to minimize it all while trying all he could to hide his current A. That began a year long odyssey with TT with him only admitting to things he got caught in a lie about.

I have absolutely no doubt that my WH would have continued cheating on me had I not forced him into confessing. I also have absolutely no doubt that had I settled for what little WH did in the first year after D-day, it would have only been a matter of time before he cheated again. WH fully took it for granted that he could treat me as badly as he wanted and I would always stay married to him. Since he got away with 18 years worth of cheating the first time, he figured he could get away with 18 more years of cheating before I caught him again and that by that time, I would be too old to leave him. All he thought he had to do was wait me and my demands out and I would eventually drop them and everything would go back to normal. It didn't quite work out the way that he planned.

He said it shocked the crap out of him when I called him on all of his shit and made it very clear that I didn't have any problem with divorcing him. He knew then that barely going through the motions wasn't going to be enough to get me to take him back. In IC, getting diagnosed as narcissistic was also a shock. So was realizing that he had become everything he hated in his own biological father and adopted father.

Of course, I am the first person to realize the huge risk that comes with giving my WH any kind of chance to R with me. He's a serial cheater who had cheated on me for our entire marriage, who also cheated on all but one of his previous relationships, who had a 7 year A with my sister so that there is nothing sacred to him, and who fully intended on cheating on me again as soon as he felt he could get away with it. With a diagnosed personality disorder, he had a profound and extreme level of selfishness he had to overcome that no medication can cure. The risk of him re-offending is extremely high. It's on him to bring that risk level down, but the risk is still there.

I'm okay with that risk though. All of life has risk. To get away with cheating on me again, he would have to get lucky each and every time in order to not get caught. In order to catch him, all I have to do is get lucky once. The odds are in my favor. Plus, I have confidence in myself and my ability to handle it if he does decide to cheat on me again. I will go on with my life and have it be fulfilling without him. Him on the other hand, not so much. I can't see anyone putting up with that toxic dysfunction for as long as I did. So I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. My gut was spot on throughout our entire marriage and I will never let him gaslight me into not trusting it ever again.

There were several odd things that had occurred in the few months before DDay, but I never suspected them individually as being anything more than my own overactive imagination, because, you know, my husband would never do anything like that. I could come up with plausible explanations for the few that could have been worrisome, so I put them aside. And literally, too - I found a t-shirt and receipt (for two t-shirts - a man's and a woman's) from Niagara Falls, but assumed he'd gone to see the Falls with his cousins when he'd visited them that weekend in October. Spent about a minute wondering if I should be worried, decided I shouldn't, but I tucked the shirt, the receipt, and the bag away in a corner of my closet.

Here's a what if that I've spent a bit of time thinking about: what if I'd done some investigating the day I found that t-shirt? It was a couple weeks before he went to see OW1 in December. Could I have brought about an earlier DDay that would have prevented that trip? I'll never know, but there are times when I am angry with myself for being so...trusting - so gullible and foolish and certain. And sad; that part makes me so very sad.

In the three weeks before DDay, I noticed several things that caused me to step back and wonder just WTF was going on. I still never suspected anything of the magnitude of what eventually came to light; nonetheless, I was no longer passive - I began questioning (not him - just keeping in the forefront of my thoughts, the things that didn't quite make sense). He was tagged in someone's post on Facebook, and that, along with two comments from my husband, is what gave me this anxious feeling that something was not quite right.

I've asked him what he thinks would have happened if I hadn't found out - if I hadn't confronted him. He says he was on a cake-eating, self-destructive path, and he has said many times that I saved him - that DDay saved him from falling all the way down. Like Mr. Psych, he says he doesn't think he could have stopped himself. And that is a what if that I cannot even begin to fathom.

I think we ask these questions because it is part of processing the trauma. You know? It's just what we need to do.

Furious1 - why do you stay? Your story sounds so much like mine and I am 2 weeks past D-Day #3 (with proof - let's just say it really isn't #3)... I have a daughter who will start high school in the fall. I am almost 46 and I wonder if there is any reason to stay. I KNOW I deserve better and actually am seeing IC and a lawyer this time. He claims he needs IC but has made no move to do so. I know, given time, he will do it again.

Me - 46

WH - 48

1 daughter

D-Day#1 - Easter 2012

D-Day#2 - Easter 2015

D-Day#3 - Jan 4, 2016 (same AP as D-Day #2)

My husband was on a crash course when i found out. He was amping up considerably

I have told him a few times my fear isn't that he'll cheat again. I'd be sad, sure, but I'd be done. I'm not worried about that sadness or my ability to be on my own. What I DO fear is living a lie again. Having him choose and control my reality I was horrifying. The idea if spending another year in lies where most around me know the truth is scary to me. I want to know my own reality.

Even so,I choose to stay and work on r,knowing that's a potential risk. In part because I know I'd survive that too. Also in part because I refuse to live my life afraid of people. Even if they betray me, I can't live not trusting anyone. Itd hurt, but I'd hurt myself more isolating like that. And also, I know km stronger now to not let my husband make me doubt myself like the first time around. I trust my own voice over those around me now.

Whatnow15, I stayed at first because I was co-dependent. I stay now because my WH is not the same as he was prior to D-day or during that first year after D-day. I know that people can change if they want to. For proof of that, all I have to do is look in the mirror and see just how much I changed from when all of this began.

He has more than stepped up since then. I only know those ugly truths about him because he has dealt with his issues and can admit to the ugliest parts of himself. My WH has done the work and even now, he continues to do the work because he is committed to the lifelong work of being a better person. IMO, he now has what it takes to be able to contribute to a healthy relationship between the two of us. Personally, I could not and would not hang around through a second D-day though. If he were to do it again, it would be over.

The what if moments suck. I know my WS would have kept up his double.life I'd not caught. He denies ofcourse says he was stopping but had just had sex w his girlfriend 3 days ago after not having sex with her for 2 weeks , then he had a new pack of condoms for his side chick and was emailing the side chick the day I found out asking how her day was. Oh and also texting escorts asking them to meet tomorrow. Yeah whatever. My question why pay for it when you are getting it free? I don't know. My mind can't comprehend that of a cheater. I would be so engulfed in guilt and disgust for myself throwing up everywhere and after 1 time never do it again and just pray no one finds out. But nooooo he did it 2 years planning to meet at hotels telling me he is on business trips etc it was planned, calculated, he knew what he was doing. So this was no .istake. this was intentional malicious behavior.

.I thnk about it all the time. What if he didn't update his iphone and accidently start sending his messages to my ipad?? I think it would have progressed to PA had I not found out. I'm sure it would still be going on. I was also planning to ask for a divorce when my son graduated. I found out the summer before his senior year....his EA woke me up too.

Maybe I'm afraid if I let down my guard too much, something will slip by that I should see.

I feel the same exact way. I believe it's because he showed no guilt and he was so good at lying to me. It's scary to trust the person that hurt you so badly. He took the most vulnerable parts of me and the best parts of our marriage (trust & safety) and used those things against me for his personal gain. I feel like I valued those things and he didn't.

[This message edited by Scubachick at 10:20 PM, January 21st (Thursday)]

This is, I think, what makes it so hard to let go and trust (within reason) again. If his AP hadn't texted him at 6 am while we were on a long-awaited vacation, if his phone hadn't been charging by my bed - I had no clue. I knew he wasn't happy, but he insisted it had nothing to do with me - just a "typical" mid-life male crisis. I trusted him so completely. And they were already in the midst of planning their next getaway, so who knows how long it would have gone on? I can monitor the big things - obviously he won't be taking any so-called solitary vacations again. I can keep tabs on his Facebook page, his email, his phone. But he deceived me so easily that it terrifies me that he could do it again. I don't THINK he would. But I never thought he'd cheat either.

For some reason my "What if" question is, What if I had put it all together sooner? Or what if I had posted pictures of us on dates and our anniversary vacation together? Because then maybe OW would have panicked sooner. I hadn't been posting much and he thought we shouldn't post pictures on vacation so people wouldn't know our children were at home without us.

But I believe it was always a matter of *when* I found out. My WH was never comfortable leading a double life and was exhibiting a lot of stress. He entered IC, stopped sleeping, was drinking way too much every night, etc. I could tell he was a mess.

Meanwhile, realizing that we were off, I began focusing on myself and also on bonding with him. I even smelled his armpits because I read a book that said it would help recement our bond. He reports that by the last two weeks before DD, he was thinking how fun it was to be married to me again. How kind! But anyway, I believe OW could sense this from us going away together and more pictures of us doing happy things cropping up on FB. I believe she FaceTimed on a weekend knowing i could likely see it. Poor thing actually thought she had a chance when I found out.

If I had found out sooner, before the armpit sniffing, who knows. Maybe we would not have been reconnected enough to see how our marriage was worth it. So I'm not going to second guess how it happened.

Of course, would he have ever confessed that it was a PA if I hadn't kept digging? I'd like to think that eventually he would have. The supposed EA was enough of a wake up call that I immediately booked MC. I'd like to think that eventually he would have chosen honesty. The day after I found out about the PA part of it, he confessed that he had a house around the block under contract because he thought our marriage would be over if I found out. (He had tried to visit OW's country a couple of months prior, and I was like, What? You want to travel 24 hours for a weekend? So I kept pointing to him not going on that trip as something I was so happy about when we were in false R, thinking he had chosen not to have a PA.) When he realized we still had a chance because I knew it was a PA and didn't murder him, he got out of that contract and committed himself to the marriage. So who knows.

I don't know that I can trust my husband to make good choices. I do think I can tell when he's hiding something. I may not know what, but at least he has enough of a conscience that it weighs on him and he acts strangely.

[This message edited by swmnbc at 12:25 PM, January 22nd (Friday)]