SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Not mine

Thank you for your advice, it has been quite the struggle with not only me trying to heal from the affair but the drinking. I asked him to leave yesterday and figure out his crap because he is only hurting me more and it sucks. You were right he will continue to keep drinking because he is in a safe place to do so and that is what caused all this in the first place. I do think he will do it again and will not control his drinking in anyway. I care about him so much but I read in a post sometimes you have to end the marriage to save the marriage and I guess I need to be strong and do that.

And sometimes you have to end the marriage to save yourself. If he's not motivated to get help and change, then the toxic behavior continues.

You're worth saving, Diva.

I don't know your WH and of course I don't know you so my comments are only my best guesses. But I will tell you a little story about my past situation that relates directly to this:

I have seen alot of actions from my husband that makes me believe he is sincere about what he did or didn't do. He realized it's still cheating even if no sex was involved.

My WH was one of the rare cheaters around here who, when caught, pretty much confessed to everything. There was VERY little that he told me later that I didn't already know (meaning he may have provided me more detail later but he told me the basis facts from the get go when caught - what a blessing that was I didn't realize for a long long time). BUT for some reason he kept something from me. My WH had a workplace A for about 20 months in a very secure facility (with a very high governmental security clearance) where had they been caught having sex on site they would have unequivocally lost their jobs - so they didn't have sex there but one time (I know this not because he told me but because I later - like 16 months after d-day 1, had his phone forensically recovered and found text messages from her talking about how she wished they could do it at work, how many days, weeks, months it had been since they last had sex, etc, confirming they didn't have actual sex for a very long time). He confessed to all the disgusting sexting (which IMO was far worse that sex), and the video masturbation, and the when/where that they actually had sex (which was almost entirely in the beginning of the A when I was out of state for work), but for some reason he never confessed to the time I knew about from an email I had seen, and never told him about about 4 months after d-day 1, which was the single time during an entire year that they met up and had sex after I got back from my out of state job..

He denied over and over and over that sex happened during that year - all the while I KNEW that it did and said nothing. I mean honestly he was so convincing that I almost believed him even though I had seen the email with my own eyes. Only when I had the phone sent out for recoverery - which was well over a year of him lying about this one stupid thing (by stupid I mean in the sea of things he had done withholding that one event from me seemed outrageous) did he sheepishly come to me and tell me he has something else he needed to tell me. I don't think he EVER would have told me about it had he not been concerned that I was going to get the phone back and see messages during that time and know he was lying.

I have NO idea why a WS would withhold something when they have been caught. I have no idea how my WH could seem so sincere and yet be so totally dishonest. But it can happen and unfortunately often does. I would highly doubt that your WH is being 100% honest with you. What he is and isn't lying about no one here knows, including you most likely. But memory loss and making up stories for what exactly?

Lies are tools of manipulation. They are designed to manipulate. Everyone has lied - me included. And there was a reason, and normally it is to control the outcome. So try to allow yourself to think of the motive for the story you are being told - by him and by her. The chances are that it is not 100% the truth (it may be but the chances aren't good). Is the AP worried you might tell he spouse? I mean shutting you up seems like a pretty decent motive - so she takes the blame so she seems like the bad one and you aren't so mad at your WH lessening your motivation to blow everything up?

but my concern is for you - you seem to want to believe him, and I get that too. But honestly put yourself first now. You are completely entitled to (and in my opinion) should not trust him right now as he has proven himself to be, at bare minimum, untrustworthy, no matter how much you want to. Trust will come in time if its real.

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 7:09 AM, Saturday, May 6th]

I have heard of others having phone recovered for text messages how is this done if I may ask? I have done the recovery on the actuall phone but because they were all deleted nothing comes up and just to ease my mind I thought about doing this.

Phone recovery: The way most phones work is when you delete messages they don't "disappear" and are not "erased" - instead that portion of your phone's memory is available for reuse. Those messages will eventually get overwritten with new information - when that happens they are "generally" gone. My WH got a new phone - so the old phone wasn't used much after a period of time - so those deleted messages were not overwritten because the phone wasn't getting or doing anything new. So I think I was able to recover a lot more than most people just by luck. That being said I used one of those programs that cost like $100 to recover (can't remember which one now) and got nothing. The forensic recovery I used was done by a company I used when recovering text messages done in the process of representing a client (I am a lawyer and we had a case where we received access to a phone that was recovered during a criminal investigation and we used a service to recover messages on it pursuant to a subpoena).

I contacted the same company to do it and sent the phone out - this was not something you could have done on your own - you would have to have permission from your WS to access his phone (if it's not "yours" - which it may be if you share a phone account and you are the account holder). In my case my WH knew I was going to do it, gave me permission, and paid for it (which was not cheap - 5 years ago I think it was likely double the cost of most people's mortgage or rent payment - meaning it was a significant expense). I can't link to companies on here but if you search the internet for phone data recovery and see information about companies you send the phone out to, what I used was something like that.

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 12:38 AM, Monday, May 8th]