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So last night I was having a chat with WH and it was all meant to be good. Like how good/normal I have been feeling lately, how I’m starting to feel excited for our future blah blah.

I asked him a question (can’t even remember what exactly) but it lead to further discussion about how his A started. Originally he told me he was flirty at work drinks then nothing for a week and three invitied over for sex where the A took off. Now he has told me so many details (I asked a lot of questions) and his story matched up with everything I have found out.

But last night he just happened to add in he held hands with her that first night and then was super flirty all week at work with random touches etc. he also told me they were using messenger during the affair when originally it was only snap chat.

I just could not believe he would lie about what seems like a very trivial point when I know what fucking sex positions they used. Like why would he? What benefit would actually come from that.

I now feel like 7months of recovery are wasted on another dumb lie. It was the main point of mine that if I found out he lies when asked questions it would all be over.

So what now? Where do I go? D is really scary to me but I refuse to let his lying behaviour continue no matter how trivial he thinks it is.

So you started asking questions about something you’d asked questions about before. What was your purpose in asking the questions?

Were you looking for more facts? Trying to catch him in a lie? Just verifying that he will answer without reservation or evasion?

D is really scary to me but I refuse to let his lying behaviour continue no matter how trivial he thinks it is.

Well, if he told the truth this time, then he’s now being more honest? On an upward trajectory? No doubt he was probably still in minimize mode right after the affair. It’s hard to keep the lies straight.

There’s an infinite supply of detail to dredge into. Never ending. N E V E R. E N D I N G. Be wary about diving down the rathole.

Conversely, really ask yourself if fear of D is causing you to stay when you would otherwise go. If so, and really even if not, figure out the specifics of your fear and resolve them. You want to make sure you stay in the marriage because it was genuinely the better option, not because of concerns about the unknown.

Sending strength!

hand holding is worse than, well, anal sex (excuse my french) IMHO

he knew that. he’s no dummy

i’m sorry. it hurts a lot. big hugs. took me a looong time to get over that. another thing he will need to make up to you…

hand holding is worse than, well, anal sex (excuse my french) IMHO

Sorry for a quick distraction, but it blows my mind how different people’s perspectives are. This sounds to my ears like saying jaywalking is worse than murder. Truly amazes me.

But to OP, I agree with HOP. There will always be more details. If he is contradicting himself, clearly that is a problem, but even that might be a memory issue. I know learning knew details is triggering, even traumatic in itself. Having to sort thru run of the mill story telling differences (which are to be expected) vs lies and trickle truth is an unfair burden on the betrayed.

I knew you’d say that Ink. I realize it is TOTALLY different for different people. plus we aren’t a supposed to say it’s a guy/girl thing so can’t say that. But some do say that men know their wives will for give sex but not love and men may forgive love but not sex. But everyone is an INDIVIDUAL so clearly there are a million exceptions. Either way, point is it hurts. And also from what I know by WS didn’t have anal sex so what would I know about it anyway. In my case it’s just that my WS’s kissing was less painful than the hand holding.

my husband is also not a dummy. so his hand holding lasted SECONDS (really?) and he quickly dropped her hand when some people walked by (really?)

in reality i probably would have turned to dust if he had sex. but hand holding sounds "romantic" and i find that maddening.

they’re all too awful for words no matter what order you put the misdeeds in.

[This message edited by Stillconfused2022 at 4:41 AM, Thursday, April 11th]

A few yrs ago I read that our memory is very short. We can remember what food we ate yesterday, maybe, but unless the meal was outstanding we have no clue what we ate last week.

I think his recollections will come in bits and pieces. From what I understand about affairs is that the brain is so hopped up on hormones that not much gets in. At the beginning he was probably hyper focused on her to the exclusion of reality but even so his brain slid those behaviors into his memory bank. Since I have never cheated I have no idea if this is true but there are so many bs on her frustrated with trickle truths that I guess it is,

I knew you’d say that Ink.

It’s good to be known

No right or wrong, just our own perspectives.

My FWS told me a detailed false affair story about sexual activity, locations, etc, that WAS AWFUL to listen to. It was pretty bad, but it didn't quite make sense.

She did this in the MC office, and at home, and at her initial confession. When I protested that this story just didn't make sense, she swore she was telling the truth, and I just couldn't handle it.

6 months later, she told the real story. It made sense. It was worse than the initial story, but less traumatic to listen to (as if that makes any sense).

Why? Why describe fucking someone to your spouse, answering their questions, describe the meetups, etc, but torture them with false ones?

Because my wife could not bear to actually tell the real story. She could bear to tell the heartbreaking lie, but not the heartbreaking truth.

My XWH did the Cheater's Handbook 101, "I didn't want to hurt you more."

What consequences have you put in place? What are your deal breakers? Do you think you can deal with this?

For me, I set a hard boundary of no inappropriate contact with another person. I should have added lying and porn, but didn't st the b time.

What do you really want?

Standinghere...

My FWS told me a detailed false affair story about sexual activity, locations, etc, that WAS AWFUL to listen to. It was pretty bad, but it didn't quite make sense.

She did this in the MC office, and at home, and at her initial confession. When I protested that this story just didn't make sense, she swore she was telling the truth, and I just couldn't handle it.

6 months later, she told the real story. It made sense. It was worse than the initial story, but less traumatic to listen to (as if that makes any sense).

Why? Why describe fucking someone to your spouse, answering their questions, describe the meetups, etc, but torture them with false ones?

Because my wife could not bear to actually tell the real story. She could bear to tell the heartbreaking lie, but not the heartbreaking truth.

My FWS did a similar thing.

The original story was so heartbreaking that I was an emotional zombie.

Except it didn't match the evidence I had.

In my case, after several weeks of arguments and TT, when she finally told me the "true" story....I was like that's all!?!?

I later learned that she (like most waywards) was so mired in shame that she could not tell the truth...especially to herself.

She had sold this narrative to herself that there was maybe some "redeeming" qualities about the A and/or the AP...that there was "something" there.

Believing that is much easier than facing the fact that they set off a atomic bomb in the life of themselves, their BS, their children etc for some cheap thrill, or a day at a cheap restaurant or a seedy motel, from a person that was so far beneath them that they wouldn't have even noticed them in their single days.

Webbit...

Be careful to differentiate what is a lie from what is a faulty memory regarding minor details. As Houseofplane said, there will never be an end to the details if you keep pulling that thread.

Keep in mind that in a wayward's thinking NOTHING is solid, everything is fluid, fleeting and temporary. A detail that meant nothing to them at the time may pop back up, but if you ask a week later that detail is gone again

It has to be hard fo them to look in the mirror and see, stupidity, shame and guilt.

So much so that their subconscious had blurred the lines of truth, and lies, fact and fiction for the sake of avoiding a mental breakdown.

A wayward can live two different lives because the details don't matter in the life of the A, but it is much harder to BE TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE especially when one has to suffer the consequences for the stupidity of the other.

Be careful to differentiate what is a lie from what is a faulty memory regarding minor details. As Houseofplane said, there will never be an end to the details if you keep pulling that thread.

Keep in mind that in a wayward's thinking NOTHING is solid, everything is fluid, fleeting and temporary. A detail that meant nothing to them at the time may pop back up, but if you ask a week later that detail is gone again

This lines up with what I've experienced, too. The details come and go. My H was quite fearful that I was grilling him looking for inconsistencies so that I could nail him with a GOTCHA moment.

It helps if you remember that the brain is a chunk of electrified meat and, therefore, extremely unreliable.

Let me ask you- did your husband say they never held hands or never used messenger?

The reason I am asking is because I think it’s two different things. Saying something didn’t happen and then saying it did is one thing.

But digging deeper into the details and revealing them is just that. It may be new things that cause you pain. But the painful reality is that no bs will ever know every minute the ws was with the ap and all the contents of that. It’s impossible to recall everything in any situation.

For us, as the initial terror of confessing subsides and the affair conversations grew a little more calm, then I could form better thoughts around what I was disclosing. My husband had an 18 month affair, when we have talks about it, he sometimes will add details I didn’t have before, but just because they are coming up for him in the moment, not because he was hiding them.

It all sucks, for sure. But it is helpful to classify if you are just getting new details that were purposefully hidden or ones that seemed inconsequential to him and just come out in the course of going over things further or more closely.

I used ICQ for my affair, and that’s how it was discussed. But there were some initial messages in messenger. And also small things in work email that was probably some flimsy code. I didn’t hide the messenger thing but it wouldn’t have seemed important to be specific on which app I thought we were in when x happened. Some things get missed when you are discussing the affair over a three hour period but it was something that went in for months. Impossible to fill in all the blanks.

Oh- I am editing to add I guess this point has been raised. I sometimes read what others wrote after I respond. Sorry if this caused me to be Captain obvious.

[This message edited by hikingout at 6:16 PM, Thursday, April 11th]

Sometimes they just forget what lies they've told - especially if they're having to answer a lot of questions. In the initial lie they are usually protecting themselves from something. The hand-holding lie was probably to protect himself from revealing the immediate emotional attachment. Did he try to claim that it was just sex or that she meant nothing?

The messenger lie may have been to protect himself from further discovery. Maybe he wasn't sure that he had cleaned up the old messages or maybe he was trying to preserve it as means of future contact.

Sometimes they just forget what lies they've told....

That's the rub - after being betrayed, after accepting lies as truth, it's tremendously difficult to trust one's ability to distinguish lies from truth.

If you're still unsure, think in terms of why you might think he lied and why you might think he was truthful. If you need help, post your thoughts.

You can't R with a liar. You can't R with trickle-truth. To be a good candidate for R, your WS needs to come clean. Sometimes a WS will come up with a new memory, something they just didn't think of before; sometimes they trickle the truth out.

Which do you think your WS is doing?

Thank you everyone for replying. As usual it made me think about things in different ways as opposed to my tunnel vision that I often have.

After discussing this with WH again I now honestly believe he just didn’t give the hand holding a second thought. He knew I knew that night was where it all kicked off and didn’t really think the little details such as holding hand was important.
As for ‘messenger’ he adamantly says he did tell me. But it was used more for work gossip rather than for the affair, unlike Snapchat.

I tell you one thing though. He is not giving up. He never gets annoyed or angry. Just responds calmly and still answers everything I am asking. I hate feeling like a crazy person!

You are not a crazy person.

Discovery goes on for months. And there will be new details that come out each time the affair is discussed. The pain is in the details and your brain is constantly in flight for fight. It’s normal.

Due to circumstances I did not confront even when I was told by a very believable third party. Life moved on, we moved on, we both grew up and out of the blue one day I blindsided him and he could not come up with a lie fast enough and admitted it. I never asked who. I never brought it up again. The first time was terror because I had no way to support my small kids. The second time I had, and do have, enough knowledge about him that it was no longer necessary to get answers. He needs validation from childhood and I don’t. That makes all the difference.

I agree with others. You will never get the whole story. Decide, instead, whether you now feel safe in your marriage. If you don’t you both need help getting you there or getting you out.