My wife and I have been married for about 6 years now, and as far as I know we have had a pretty strong relationship. It has survived 2 deployments, and we have 2 beautiful children together, both of which look enough like me to not cause concern that they might not be mine.
However, my wife married me at 18 and hasn't really had a real relationship prior to me. (Other than a guy she was with at 15 who she ended up losing her virginity to, and lied to me about for years claiming to still be a virgin.) Anyway over the course of our marriage we have both strayed, getting caught talking to our respective ex's but never in a manner that caused too much concern that anything had actually went down. Recently I got out of the military and we moved back to our home state to be near family while we transitioned our lives to the civilian world.
She got a new job, and I went back to school full time to complete my degree, and up til this time I have always been the provider of the family. She would work part – time and mostly take care of our children, but her money was always her own and she was never really required to provide anything as far as bills or rent. Now that I am in school I don’t work, I do get paid through the military for being a student, but she has recently been forced to become the bread winner while I am in school. This has been difficult for her to adjust to, as she has been forced to SCALE back her spending habits – less trips to the mall, less nail salon visits, less allowance to keep her hair and makeup on point.
She works in sales, and as is to be expected she is around fellow employees who are very materialistically driven. They all drive nice cars, they’re young and single and so their lives revolve around partying and having fun.
We’ve been down here about a year now, and I have noticed her recent attachment to her phone. It never leaves her hand. She has it password locked and fingerprint locked and when she sleeps she stuffs her phone under our pillow. She has also begun to frequently go out with her co-workers, both male and female. She will get off work and go grab drinks or go to bars with them to “unwind” she never calls to let me know, and when I call her if she is a couple hours late she blocks my call and when she gets home and I confront her she says “Sorry, I just grabbed a drink with friends. I didn’t even think to call you.
One night she pulled this exact thing, except she never came home. The next morning she pulls up to our house to get her ready for work and tells her a friend who she had grabbed drinks with picked her up because she had been too drunk to drive and she crashed at his place because she was embarrassed to come home. The guy she claimed to be with is gay, and I have met him before, but when I asked him about it, their stories were off. He claimed it was just the two of them, and she said it was pretty much everyone that they worked with. It would appear she attempted to coach him on the answers and they got their facts mixed up.
I eventually let this go as I had no other proof that she did anything other than what she claimed to have done. However one night I got her phone unlocked and found that she had “SnapChat” (Google it if you don’t know what it is.) Anyway she had this guy saved to her contacts and he was labelled with “Bestfriend” I text him from her phone on the off chance he’d respond – he did almost instantly and he was extremely concerned that she would text him because they strictly snap chat and so I played along and asked why wouldn’t she(ME) text him and he said because her husband might find out. I was instantly suspicious of this and so I tried to push the subject to get more out of him, asking for a picture. So I could see if maybe I had ever met the guy before. He asked what he should send a picture of because he wanted to know “What she was expecting to see.” I told him to surprise her, because I started to suspect that they had exchanged photos before because that is basically what SnapChat is for. Instantly erases the photo so there is no proof. He suddenly became very concerned that I might not be her. So he asked me what she got him from her trip to Cambodia. I obviously had no idea what it was because I didn’t even know this guy existed let-a-lone what she had got him. It was about 2 am and she woke up and found me with her phone. She flipped shit when I asked her what she had gotten him, and denied anything other than being her friend. She has since blocked him on snap-chat, all her social media and blocked his number from calling her, but she still refuses to admit that anything ever happened between them. Do you think she is lying to cover it up, or do you think I should continue to trust her and give her another shot? Thanks in advance for all the advice.
