**Edit:**
Timeline of events: Dating 17 years ago, Married 14 years ago, Emergency Custody Order (mental health commitment) 6-7 years ago. TRT started 2-2.5 years ago, wife pregnant early in 2023, friendship with woman in late 2023, lied about it for three or four months. Wife started personal therapy a year ago, we tried marriage counseling 4 months ago, it lasted a month and she told me to cancel it, then got mad when I cancelled it.
I’ve not tried to downplay my part. Lying is always wrong, and lies by omission are lies, without a doubt. Relative to the ECO, TDO, custody hearing: Wife had an episode spanning several days, I petitioned for the ECO, it was granted, then she was held on a TDO for inpatient treatment for four days. When she was released, with a diagnosis of bipolar, she stayed gone for a week or so, living with her sister-in-law. In that time, she managed to get an emergency hearing with the local judge for custody of our children; after hearing her side of it and her outrageous claims, the judge ruled in my favor, granting me sole custody with my wife being allowed supervised visits at my discretion; I asked her who she’d be comfortable supervising the visits and she chose her mother. I never once denied her a chance to visit and imposed no restrictions or limits on the time or duration of those visits. After hearing my wife for 30-40 minutes, the only questions the judge had were for me were whether or not I suspected drug use. My wife testified in court that she was going to earn 700K a year selling cars, quit her job where she’d recently received a very long-awaited promotion, and she was going to write a book and start an orphanage. She made a series of horrible financial decisions that put us thousands in debt that I allowed because I thought it would make her happy.
I have gone through her phone maybe five total times in 17 years, and two or three of those were incidental to something popping up and me just scrolling a little ways up through a conversation. The number of times I have went “digging” is maybe three times. I went through the counselor messages because I wanted to better understand my wife’s thoughts so I could figure out how she wants to be loved. I suggested marriage counseling and she wanted to go. She got mad one night and told me to cancel the next day’s session. It was already a tight schedule, so I canceled and rescheduled for the following week. She went off on me and told me I didn’t care about our marriage. She says things, then when I point out what she said she’ll literally tell me “I didn’t mean it like that, if I did I’ve have said it like *this*” with a slightly different emphasis. When I question what she means by something or express that I don’t understand what she’s wanting, she gets defensive, shuts down, and tells me it’s not her job to communicate her feelings in a way I understand.
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Maybe I’m controlling, but I don’t think so. Up until recently, I’ve made more money than my wife. She picked and purchased our first home while I was overseas without me even seeing it; I thought that showed great trust in her judgement. She’s picked every vehicle we’ve bought, with the exception of three motorcycles I’ve owned, with almost no input form me. She has girls nights when she wants (which have dwindled after children and with new job responsibilities.) I left the military for her, I decreased my hours at work when she complained that I worked too much overtime, I even DD for her when she wants to go to the friends houses where she vents about our marital problems because I don’t want her to feel stifled or controlled. She keeps friends who are gay and have openly admitted to having a crush on her, and has even went on private overnight beach trips with them. Usually I go with them, but once or twice they’ve went a day early. She went to Vegas on a work trip last year. She has her own credit cards, buys whatever she wants, and I’m halfway through building a house with my own hands that she helped me design.
If it seems I’ve minimized, then I apologize. I’ve tried to be straightforward in my answers in the comments. Painting my wife in a bad light to get people to agree with me does me no favors and certainly wouldn’t save this marriage. Maybe I had an emotional affair. By my definition, it wasn’t. I’ve never held the position that men and women can’t be friends unless they’re attracted to each other, but most people disagree. As for hiding the communication, I planned to bring it up, I just kept kicking the can down the road until it was a much bigger problem than it had to be. I should’ve been a man and either not responded to said woman or just told my wife about it. My wife can’t point to a single inappropriate message in any of the messages, her biggest complaint was the “frequency.” Which was several conversations a week. And I stress, I do not sit on my phone at home, so it’s not like I was ignoring my wife to invest time in another woman. Bu they, if the consensus is that’s an emotional affair, then certainly I’ll accept that the lying and the communication itself were equally bad; I’m no saint and don’t pretend to be. Still, I wish my wife had been up front in saying she wasn’t okay with it instead of befriending this woman and her husband and children for another year then just deciding that we were too close, and I think my willingness to stop as soon as she told me how she really felt should be worth something.
My wife and I have two children. A 7-year-old daughter and a 13-month-old son. We both work a lot and she is a good mother and would describe me as a good father. My wife found that I had become friends with a female that I’d trained and mentored without informing her; my phone stays unlocked and our communications were not covert or hidden and were almost exclusively email (work and personal)/Facebook/text; I just didn’t volunteer that I was talking to this woman. We go to a mutual gym, so I’d see her sometimes, in a public setting, and occasionally we’d get caught up in shop talk and I may linger over for a time, but never at times that my children were out of school/daycare or my wife was off work. My wife, after finding out, tried to befriend this woman and her husband and invited them to our children’s birthdays, etc.
Ultimately, my wife began to think that the woman was interested in me romantically and wanted me to cut contact with her, which I resisted. During these conversations, I’d ask my wife if she thought I would cheat on her or leave her for this woman, and she said no, but that it could eventually happen and that she just wanted me to be transparent and guarded. Finally, in one explosive episode, my wife told me that I’d probably had sex with this woman. I asked her if she felt that way and she said yes; I immediately stopped talking to this woman. She texted me once or twice with random stuff, and then finally asked if I was purposefully ignoring her. I left her on read, and my wife replied a day later to her on her own phone that she had never been comfortable with the whole thing and that she would prefer her not to reach out to me again. The other woman simply said she understood and would respect that decision, and that was the end of that. During this time, my wife and I began relationship counseling that I picked out, and she has been seeing (via phone) a regular therapist for almost a year now. On top of this, around the same time, my wife discovered that I’d started taking prescription TRT without telling her. I decided to start it because I felt my wife would use it to discredit my feelings on things, so I figured I’d wait a year and tell her so I could point out that she hadn’t noticed previously. So two acts of deception on my part that I’m not super proud of.
Before this year’s events, our other major source of conflict came when my daughter was 9 months old. My wife was manic for four days, nearly fought her mother and best friend, and was ultimately involuntarily committed to an inpatient mental health hospital for several days, then discharged with outpatient services and a diagnosis of bipolar. During that period, she said horrible things, made awful financial decisions, and acted in a way that led every friend and family member who knew her to question her sanity. I obtained an ECO for her after being instructed to by her physician and then she was evaluated by independent evaluators and held for four days. When she got out, she was still fairly erratic and left me, threatening to take the children. She convinced a judge to have an emergency hearing and after listening to my wife rant and rant, the judge awarded me sole custody with supervised visitation at my discretion. After a few weeks of living with her sister, my wife decided to come home. For a few months after that, any time I challenged her or set a boundary, it would lead to an explosive argument and she was tell me she couldn’t do this anymore and she’d leave. She’d stay gone a night, then come back. The last time she did that, I told her if she ever left again that she wouldn’t be welcome back. I mention this period because I’ve recently realized that it led to me avoiding conflict with my wife out of fear of her leaving. My wife went from writing me unsolicited letters about how great I was to her and how spoiled she was to telling people I held her on a bed and she had to fight me off, that I punched a refrigerator, and was the most controlling person alive in the span of two days. I’m 250lbs and literally teach other men how to physically restrain other grown men for a living and my wife weighs 105lbs; I also have pictures of the refrigerator with a noticeable lack of dents.
None of that really matters, but I mention it to say that I feel like she never really came home to me after this. She never apologized for any of her actions during that period, which didn’t matter but would have shown some regret for how it all played out, but more importantly she never forgave me or tried to understand why I obtained the ECO. Prior to the ECO, my wife and I didn’t air marital laundry out to people outside the relationship, aside from one mutual friend couple when we were both present. After the ECO, my wife routinely told her friends about our arguments but downplayed significantly her contributions. When asked why she felt the need to do so, she said it was because before the ECO no one knew how she really felt and that she wanted to make sure she had people on her side if it ever happened again. I only learned this when I was using her phone, and a message popped up from a friend, which led to me reading the whole thread, which I’m not proud of. In that thread, we’d had an argument the night before and my wife threw a picture frame, breaking it and cutting her hand on the glass; she’d also poked me and slapped me and screamed in my face, calling me condescending, emotionless, and a number of other things. This was while she was pregnant with baby number two and when I asked why she had wanted a baby but was now talking about leaving, she replied that she didn’t need me in her life to raise a baby. She spent like 5 paragraphs talking about how horribly I talked to her in the argument, and a single sentence mentioning cutting herself on the picture frame she broke in anger. Also, I should mention that I thought we were finally in a good place relationship-wise so I agreed to have another child with her, but then everything went downhill after she got pregnant. As recently as a few weeks ago I learned she was talking about our relationship problems with a number of my friends wives from work, and when I asked her why she felt the need to do that she reiterated her reasoning from the ECO, which leads me to believe she never really forgave me for it.
Last bit of information: she’s also had a male therapist for a year and in an effort to understand why she’s acting the way she’s acting recently, I went through her messages. In a thread with her therapist, I found a message where he told her he would advise following through with leaving to show me that she’s serious about it if my ‘behavior’ continues. I feel it’s inappropriate to give relationship advice as an individual therapist, but it reinforces the idea that she has painted a horrible picture of me. I’ve offered to sit down and discuss adjusting work hours so she doesn’t feel like I work too much and I had committed to relationship counseling with her, both prior to her getting an apartment. She told me last night that she believes this will show her what I’m willing to sacrifice to keep her in my life and that it will ‘make me stronger.’ My wife has now gotten an apartment and said she plans to move out for three months, and she’s supposed to leave tomorrow.
I know I violated some trust. I know I’ve tolerated abuse from her in the past, I’ve been yelled at and screamed at so loud neighbors could hear from outside the house, I’ve been assaulted by her, etc. Most of that was when we were younger, and I understand we both came from broken homes, so we have to kind of reparent each other, but I can’t see how a three-month separation can fix anything. I feel like after the ECO I couldn’t set any boundaries with her because she’d leave. I feel like this will solidify in my mind that the relationship will never be equal and that she’s only doing it to assert control over me.
I don’t know if I’ve explained all of this properly, but I’m really just wondering if anyone thinks there’s a chance that three months of separation can be a good thing and if it’s reasonable for a person to do something hurtful to their spouse with the intent of correcting behavior or testing their love.