My (28f) husband (28m) and I have been together since high school. We are each other’s firsts and onlys & have a very deep & special bond. He is a very hard working, generous, helpful and good guy. Everyone that knows him always says what a selfless person he is.
My husband and I were moving states for his new job, but before we moved we needed to get rid of our entire bedroom set. He tried to sell it for weeks before our move and had no luck, so last minute he offered it for free in his work group chat. A female coworker of his claimed it, and he and his friends brought it over to her place the day before we moved.
Two weeks after we moved states, I caught my husband texting his former female coworker (19f) (the same coworker that accepted our bedroom furniture). I say caught because when I asked him who he was texting, he initially freaked out and lied to me saying she was a male friend. We had a huge argument & I ended up getting her number from him because he continued to lie to me. I called the number and found out for myself that it was in fact a female and I felt horrible. I stormed off, leaving my husband alone & ended up texting the girl shortly after and asking her what her business was texting my husband, especially since they are no longer coworkers and we’ve moved. She responded saying she never tried to sleep with him, they are just coworkers, and if I have any questions she’s willing to answer them.
While alone, and before I got an explanation from him, I did a deep dive of phone records. There were no texts between them before our move. She initiated the texting by sending him a message the morning we left our previous home state. The texts were not consistent, more like sporadic but over a span of 14 days. She also FaceTimed him a few times during our commute to our new state. I was livid and confused that this has been happening behind my back and he never casually mentioned it once.
(Later that month I discovered through phone records that the same day I caught him lying he called her after for 38 min. before reaching out to me to explain the situation, to which he says “I knew at that point after lying to you that you wouldn’t believe anything I said & assumed the worst of me so I called her to tell her that now that you might reach out with questions and that she should answer your questions and tell you that nothing was going on. He claims that he thought I would only believe her at that point. He said the call was 38 min. long because she passed the phone to his other coworkers and they all chatted one by one. Her texts to me where she stated they are just coworkers were sent to me 10 min. after their phone call ended).
When we finally sat down to talk, he was still freaking out claiming he didn’t cheat on me, he knows what it looks like but they’re just friends. He said he didn’t initially tell me the truth because he was afraid I would blow up at him, accuse him of something he isn’t doing, and that he thought it was better to lie than have drama with me. He showed me the texts and they reflected the same sporadic timeline of the 14 days, where she did text him first saying “how is the drive going?”. The texts were platonic. They were talking about work, she was asking about his new job, how he’s liking his new city, etc. He says the FaceTime calls were because she didn’t know how to put the bedroom furniture together and he helped her with that but felt uncomfortable to share it with me because he thought I would be mad. I asked him to call her in front of me and before she knew I was listening to their call I didn’t like the way she answered his call. She said hello, he said are you busy are you at work, she said yes I’m at work, he said ok if you’re busy I can call back, and she said no what’s up. Her tone when saying “what’s up” sounded a little too “no I want to talk to you. Talk to me. I’m here” Idk. He ended up saying my wife is here with me and wants to talk to you. I asked her a plethora of questions to see if it corroborated with the story he told me because I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything between these two. At that point his lying had hurt our trust that I didn’t know what to believe. She answered all of my questions and cooperated but her tone was very weird. She tried to say my husband gave her our bedroom set for free because of the fact that it was going to her (which I knew was false, he only gave it for free because he spent weeks trying to sell it and no one would buy it). She also said they’ve FaceTimed because she needed help putting the bed together but said he made the call at a “dark truck stop”. Idk, there were just some things about her tone that seemed like she was trying to make his intentions look ill, or plant seeds of doubt within me. She posted on her social media the next day a meme of two people laying in bed that said “men be like “we’re just friends””.
Since then, my husband has been very remorseful about lying and breaking our trust. He blocked her, changed his number, and we both now share phone passwords with each other to rebuild our trust. He says he truly was only friends with her and found it weird that she kept their text conversation going when it died over and over, and that he eventually was going to stop texting back but I caught him and made him panic. Did I catch someone trying to sabotage my marriage?
TL;DR Husband (28m) lied to me (28f) about texting a female coworker. He says it was because he panicked and didn’t want to fight about it, but the lie and just keeping me in the dark about the communication broke our trust. I think the girl took advantage of this situation and tried to plant seeds of doubt in my mind when I confronted her, even though her story matched my husband’s. I’m not sure if I caught someone trying to sabotage my marriage or if there’s a deeper reason my husband lied to me. My mom’s take on this is that the girl is younger and probably developed a crush on my husband and thought she’d try her luck.