H & I have been together 17 years (married 12). We were first (and only) loves and always promised each other if we ever got to the point of almost having an A we would tell each other first. Just before our 3rd anniversary he went out of town for two weeks on business and about a week after he came home he sat me down and told me he met someone on his trip, didn't sleep with her, but keeps thinking about her so he did keep his promise to tell me first (even though logically I KNOW he had to have done something with her for it to get to the point where he would tell me about it). Long story short, he lied about having NC with her, eventually told me he loved her, wasn't sure if he ever truly loved me, only married me because he felt it was expected of him, etc. (Afterwards he said he said those things just to hurt me so I would give up on him so he could go be with her). We seperated for several months, he moved her down to live with him, and literally like 2 weeks later realized he truly loved me, dumped her, and came crawling back begging my forgiveness. Since then (this is almost 10 yrs ago) he has done a very good job of helping me to heal, showing me he's remorseful and that he truly loves me. I've been in and out of IC for years trying to deal with the trama of the A and try REALLY hard to trust him.
Until recently. All SEEMS normal in our lives, but a few months ago he accidentally forwarded me an email joke from an email account he had that I was not aware of. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt so I told him it was absolutely NOT ok with me for him to have secret email accounts and he said it was just for fantasy football. Well of course I had a hard time trusting that so I snooped on his computer the next day and he had deactivated the account so I couldn't see what was on it. If it was just for football why did he close it? I also found out that he has been chatting on a very regular basis with an ex-coworker (female, married). I knew they were friends and occassionally went to lunch over the years and never worried about it. But now he's been IMing regularly with her and I found a TON of emails from her. I can't see the IM history so not sure what they said there but all the emails were mostly from her to him and seemed innocent enough, but the sheer volume of them made me wonder. I also found out she sent him a text msg to his phone at 11:45pm one night trying to get him to go to a party with her. So I confronted him about all this. He still maintains the email acct was only for football and is still active and he'll show me. (What he doesn't know is that it's only active because I reactivated it in hopes of figuring out what it was for)!! And when I told him I could here him IMing someone he told me it was this ex-coworker but he hasn't IMed her in a long time (which I KNOW for a fact is a lie because I've seen emails alluding to it). So I basically went off on him, told him if he was doing nothing wrong, why would he lie to my face? He said he didn't tell me about the ex-coworker because even though their relationship is innocent he knew I would freak out because of our past history. Yeah, right. He said he lied to keep me from being hurt and I told him if he had just told me up front about this I wouldn't have had a problem with it but the fact that he felt he needed to sneak around and lie about it makes me think there's something more to it. He did say he would stop talking to her and be totally honest with me from now on. He said I can feel free to check his stuff anytime since he has nothing to hide and even offered to take a lie detector.

ANYWAYS, yes I'm dealing with shady stuff recently that throws my ability to trust into question but I was thinking about it and realized even if I were to D him and marry someone else I don't think I will EVER be able to fully trust anyone again. I feel like the damage of the A changed me as a person and I can TRY to trust, but will probably never fully do so. Is this normal or do you all think maybe I need more therapy to deal with issues?

Thanks,
Cindy

Put a keylogger on his computer and stop asking. Just find out on your own what he is doing. Don't ASK, but TELL. Asking a dishonest person for honesty is a waste of time; you will get nowhere except worn down. Go to www.spectorpro.com and install either eblaster or spectorpro. Eblaster will email you the reports, with spectorpro you have to retreive them from the target computer every day.


You should never trust an untrustworthy person, you don't need therapy to change that. It is a normal, healthy reaction. It would insane to trust an untrustworthy person. It is not lack of trust that ruins marriages, but lack of care for the other person. Your H has not cared for you in this marriage.