Well, this is where I disagree with you Mrs9405. There is really no place for privacy in marriage. When you are married, you become one and you share one life. How does one person have privacy from themself?

I'll paraphrase how one wise MB poster put it to me on my first thread here:

Privacy in marriage is closing the door while using the toilet. Secrecy is saying "This is my private stuff. Don't touch it without my permission."

Total, radical openness and honesty is the only way to build true intimacy and guard your marriage from infidelity.

No, you should not be able to trust him. Blind trust is an unrealistic expecation in marriage - AS YOU HAVE LEARNED THE HARD WAY. What snooping says about your marriage is that you care enough to dig down and find out what is wrong because you want to save your marriage. Snooping can protect you and your marriage.

Pretending to blindly trust someone who is not transparent is a foolish path that enables spouses to carry on a secret second life necessary to have affairs. If ones life is transparent that would be very hard to do.

Again, it is not LACK OF TRUST that ruins marriages, but a lack of BOUNDARIES.


Mrs9045, radical honesty based on total transparency is the foundation of any good marriage. You have a right to know each and every word and action of your H because you share a life with him. [and vice versa] No one has the right to SECRECY in a marriage.

And that is what your H wants: secrecy. If he is going to withhold the truth from you about your own life then you have an obligation to find out what that is.




The problem lies with your misunderstanding of the issue. I used to feel the same as you, but once I thought it through rationally I did not. There is no problem with snooping that cannot be explained away by understanding that one has unrealistic, unreasonable expectations about marriage in general.

Well, that's a good way of putting it, I suppose. I guess I'm still making sense of all of this. Although I found out about it almost a year ago, in a lot of ways, I feel like we just sort of put it on the back burner and decided not to deal with it. And it's only been in the last few weeks that I've felt like maybe now is the time to deal with it.

I believe that the affair is over. Maybe that's naive, and maybe I'm wrong, but I do believe that it's over. So now it's just a matter of figuring out how we go forward together, or if we even can.

Mrs9045, I strongly suspect you have been gaslighted by your wayward husband into believing that SECRECY is good for marriages, so that he can hide things from you. Let me assure you that people do not hide things unless there is something to hide.

Your H speaks the language of a wayward who has very much to hide. You don't help your marriage by going along with his trickery.

And how do you know? I strongly have my doubts but would like to hear what FACTS and EVIDENCE have led you to this belief.

I guess I think it's over because when he left his email open the other night and I searched it, I didn't find any emails between him and the other woman, or even any emails between him and any friends discussing the other woman. (None of his friends new about it when it happened, but he did speak to some of them after I found out and left.)

I guess my inclination is to still give him the benefit of the doubt. He says that it is over and that he has had no contact with her since I put an end to it. And while he lied to me before, I guess the distinction I make is that his lies were lies of omission.

I don't believe he's a bad person. I don't believe he is capable of being maliciously or intentionally cruel. I do believe that he was in denial about the damage his affair would do to our marriage, but I don't think that he was trying to hurt me. Now, though, he knows that to continue would be hurtful to me. And I don't think he wants to, or would, do that.

But then, as I'm writing all of this, I realize that's what every wife wants to believe about her husband. That I believe he is different, he is better, seems pretty naive.

But I don't really know how to hold on to my marriage without believing that somewhere, lost in the fog of his own depression and misjudgment, he is still that man I married.

What does "gaslighted" mean?

Also, to clarify, he never really spoke about secrecy or privacy to me before I found out about this. These were the feelings and thoughts I had. And it's not because I ever kept anything from him that he should know. But I believed that as two consenting adults, we should respect each other and trust each other enough to give each other the benefit of the doubt, to take each other's words at face value. I wouldn't want him snooping through my email or listening to my phone conversations, and it's not because I'm hiding anything, but because I feel that I should be allowed to have private conversations with people and to express myself freely in those conversations (especially when I'm complaining about him and our marriage) without fear that he'll hear or read it and confront me about it.

Mrs9045, I don't know what else to tell you. You seem to embrace very unrealistic, emotional notions of marriage that have not served you well in the past and likely will not serve you well in the future. Affording blind trust to an untrustworthy person is not wise by any standard, but it is your marriage and your life.

Take care.

I guess this is the part I'm having trouble with:



Is it possible to ever trust your spouse again? If you know you have been betrayed once, can you ever trust him? And if you can't, what's the point of being married to each other? So far, MelodyLane, you're the only person I've encountered who seems to have truly survived this sort of betrayal and is now happily married, so I guess you're the only person I can think to ask. After everything you've been through, do you trust your spouse? And why? And how long did it take?

Mrs, I don't BLINDLY trust my spouse. I trust him BECAUSE he is TRANSPARENT and I know what he is doing. If he had secrets, then he would not be worhty of my trust, because people don't hide unless they have something to hide.

I have learned that blind trust is not wise with anyone. I DO trust my spouse again, but not blindly and ONLY because he has EARNED it and I can VERIFY IT. Trust is not an entitlement. My policy is TRUST BUT VERIFY.

After trust has been destroyed in a marriage, it must be EARNED. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt who is not trustworthy is silly and is only an invitation to be harmed again.

And there are numerous people on this forum and elsewhere who have survived affairs and have good marriages.

I get the sense that you believe that affording undeserved TRUST to your H is the ticket to happiness, but let me assure you it is not. It is not LACK OF TRUST that destroys marriages, but a lack of BOUNDARIES.

TRUST will not make your marriage happy and safe, but rather GOOD BOUNDARIES WILL. The notion that a good marriage is based on trust is nonsense if the trust is not warranted. The trust is only warranted IF the person is trustworthy and there are good boundaries in place.

Can I ask you another question?

Why did you decide to stay in your marriage? Certainly you considered leaving; what made you stay?

I made the decision to get a divorce and asked him to leave. He asked for the chance to prove himself to me and did a great job. If he had not done that, I would not have been interested.

The one thing that helped me trust him the very most was snooping on him. I could verify INDEPENDENTLY that he was being trustworthy. Otherwise I would have only had the word of a liar to go on.

Yes.




Yes, but it is no longer a naive trust. It is an earned trust based on his behaving in a trustworthy manner.





I don't see one. Although many people do choose to be married to someone they don't trust. That's not the kind of marriage I could live with.







There are many, many happily recovering or recovered marriages here. PrincessMeggy, MichelleG, Mimi, Lildoggie, drgnfly, lousygolfer, Mortarman, and I know there are several others that aren't coming to mind right this minute.

It IS possible.

But not as long as there is an OW.




The answers to those questions are very dependent on the person, what all they lived through, and what extraordinary actions the FWS takes to PROVE themselves trustworthy.

For me and tst, it has happened relatively quickly, for two reasons: 1) We had a great marriage pre-affair with no real baggage, and 2) tst went WAY above and beyond in his efforts to PROVE himself trustworthy. However, I do still have moments of panic, fear, anxiety. His response during those times are what continue to keep my trust in him growing.

BUT, if he ever began to behave in an untrustworthy manner, my trust would be revoked.

I would expect him to do the same if I was behaving in an untrsutworthy manner.

Well, I've taken your advice. My husband went out to pick up dinner, so I installed the spyware on his computer. Of course, I had to restart the computer, and he'd had a bunch of windows opened, so I have my cover story (brief power outage) all ready for why his computer has no windows open, because that's probably something he would notice. I feel weird for coming up with a cover story to tell him. I've never lied to him before, and it seems, well, a little ironic that I would become a liar in order to find out if he's lying.

But we'll see what happens. Keep your fingers crossed for me that nothing happens, that the spyware proves exactly what he's been saying -- that there is no contact with her or anyone else.

Well, since you are going to the trouble dont blow it. Make sure any electronic clocks in the house are restarted. dvd player, microwave, coffee pot etc. -If you know how I would go to the main circuit breaker in your house and turn it off then on again!

Can you tell I was a Betrayed Spouse who did my share of counter espionage?

If thats the case, wouldn't the computer be turned off? if it were me, I would just leave it off and let him fire it up.

Good thinking. Just turned it off. Jeez, I feel like I should be wearing a trenchcoat and some seriously oversized sunglasses.

Thanks.

Wow. You're good.

But he knows I would compulsively go around the house and reset everything immediately. The only thing I wouldn't touch would be his computer.

When he gets home, "Wow, it was weird, we had one of those, like, second-long power outtages again. It took forever for the router to reboot again, and I had to reset all the clocks" -- here I roll my eyes to show what a pain that was -- "but everything's working now. Oh, well, you probably need to restart your computer. I had to restart mine. Hey, thanks for picking up dinner tonight. Let's eat; I'm starving! Which Netflix do you want to watch?"

He might have shocked the hell out of me, but in some ways, he's always very predictable.

Yep, came home, bought it without a thought (don't think he was really listening, since I used my boring routine housewife voice).

Thanks for the tips.