Discovered long term EA

I posted this in another forum a couple days ago but am posting here and hoping it's not a faux pas to do so.

My husband and I have been married 33 years. I found out three weeks ago that he has been having a long term EA for 6 years- although he still insists it was "just" a friendship. Right- whenever someone uses an emphasized "just," you know they are full of it. He claims that he never had anything physical with her so it was not an affair. A little back story, in October 2022 I heard a voicemail she left on his phone and it was very inappropriate. I told him that I felt that way and he piffled it off. I wasn’t even intentionally snooping on his phone, he had asked me to check his phone for something and it popped up and I listened to it. After that, I did snoop a couple times and he deleted all texts and voice mails from her instantly (although he forgot to empty the deleted voice mails at first). He travels for work often, sometimes two weeks a month, sometimes less. His AP is a work colleague. In October 2022 I asked him to stop going out to dinner on work trips with that woman and he immediately claimed that he stopped. I found out a year later in October 2023 that he was not only continuing to do so, he had funds from his paycheck diverted that he bought gift cards with and was using them for expensive dinners with her. For whatever reason, my son (adult) recently saw his work calendar and he had many, many dinner dates with her in just a few months when away from home.

He first met her in 2018 when she joined his work team, and things were seemingly fine between us. Minor things here and there but fine overall from my perspective. However, over 2018-2020 we started to have arguments, mostly over the constant lies he was telling me. Stupid, petty, and obvious lies and he would get angry when I told him I did not believe him. He has multiple glaringly obvious ‘tells' when he lies. When I asked him why it made him mad when he was literally lying, he said that he does not like it when I call him out on it. Seriously. As our relationship deteriorated, I now know that his phone calls with her lengthened and so did the texts. Last week I logged in to our phone account- they have call/text logs for only the past two years and the loooooong phone calls with her were always when he was on a work trip or I was not home. He says that he called her at those times because he didn’t want to take time away from family time. Right. I asked him if he would feel comfortable having those same conversations with her if I was sitting next to him and he had the decency to blush and say no. I now know that they referred to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, plus other nauseating pet names. We have two children- son who is 30 years old and daughter who is 18 years old. He was an involved father when our son was young and less so during his teen years/our daughter’s early years. After he met his AP in 2018, he basically became an absentee father. Not physically absent, but absent in all ways that kids need parents to be present for. My kids actively detest him now for how he has ruined our family life. My son, daughter, and I have basically moved on as a family of three in the past few years. It has become normal to the three of us and it doesn’t make me sad anymore like it used to. He now tells me that it makes him mad and he hasn’t done "anything" to us and that we are being cruel by 'excluding' him. He says he doesn’t understand why no one likes him at home. All in the most whiny voice possible. He is the breadwinner and the one good thing I can say, is that he never uses finances in any negative way to manipulate me. At least not yet. He basically doesn’t care about our money situation and I have always taken care of all of our bills, investments, etc. It has been his choice to be uninvolved in managing our finances. That explains why he had to secretly find a way to buy gift cards to fund his dinners with his AP since I pay the credit card bills each month, including his corporate card for work. They both stay at the same hotel for simultaneous work trips so that’s not an expense he has to sneak or lie about. He used to call me every night when he traveled for work and that stopped when he met her. I now understand why he never reached out to me when I often asked for us to find ways for us to re-connect as things between us got worse and worse over the past few years….he was connecting with his AP.

Four weeks ago husband was on a work trip to DC (I now know that his hotel was conveniently only two metro stops away from her house.) He also "lost" his phone and purchased multiple metro passes..even though before leaving he told me he planned to "never" left his hotel until he came home. His story before he went was that his work function was AT the hotel but somehow needed to use the metro, leaving hotel around 6pm and going back to his hotel each night between 11pm-midnight. His job that took him there involved teaching a class during standard business hours. He changed his flight to come back two days later with yet more lies about why. None of it added up. His lost phone story was so ridiculous because he didn’t keep his lies straight and contradicted himself on different days. He disabled find my iphone the very morning that it got "lost." He got really angry with me when I told him the day before he was supposed to come home that I had gone to the AT&T store and got a new phone set up for him. I was like WTF are you mad about…that I took care of that so you’d have a new phone ready and waiting for you? I was trying to be nice even though I did not believe his BS lost story.

My son deeply despises his father for how he has acted over the past few years. He remembers the good years we had when he was young. I know deep down he is so hurt and feels abandoned by his dad. My son is protective of me and he says he will never be interested in any relationship with his father, especially after finding out what we have about this long term affair. My kids are 12 years apart in age so in the past four years, my son has stepped up for his sister and been a father figure for her. They have a great relationship. My daughter just started her freshman year in college (3 hours away from home) and is thriving but she is struggling with the infidelity issue…a lot. She has been going to the campus counseling center because she lost her mind that her father’s AP has the same first name as her. As if the affair is not bad enough but she is so creeped out that he would do it with a woman with the same name as her. Gross.

Husband claims he has ended all contact with his AP. On D-day he told me she was "just" a friend and colleague. The next day he said that he works closely with her and cannot end contact with her. I told him he should consider getting a job with a different company. He disagreed. On the third day, he then said she works in a "completely" separate area of the company and he doesn’t even need to interact with her at all. On the fourth day he told me that she IS (not was) a good friend and he hasn’t done anything wrong. So, you can see that I don’t believe a word of him telling me yet another story this morning that he "ended it" with her. When I asked if that took place via email, text, or phone, he said that he just stopped any communication with her and that it is now over. Okay. It is rather insulting that he thinks I am so unimaginably stupid to believe any of that BS. He looked all confused when I pointed out to him that he has told me multiple stories (that’s his word for his lies- I use it sarcastically) about his AP.

A week after D-day, he had a work trip scheduled. We live in Florida and were in the direct path of Hurricane Milton going over our home as a Category 3 storm. For the week leading up to this work trip, he was staying at a local hotel because I could not abide being in the same house with him after finding out some of the gory details about his affair. His first career was as a meteorologist so he is always majorly in to tracking all of the weather systems. Plus, the weather notifications go crazy in the days leading up to a major storm. The day before he was to leave, I called him and asked him to come help put at least some the hurricane shutters on the house. Claimed he was "sleeping" and hadn’t heard about the storm. Okay. He was pissed but he grudgingly came to do it with many complaints. He put one window cover up in the same time that my son did five. Gee, so sorry that we spent a lot of $ years ago on the storm shutters and actually thought it was a good idea to try to protect our house as much as possible. It’s not like it was a tropical storm or even just a Cat 1 storm. Unbeknownst to me, he was upset because he had changed his flight to leave earlier for his work trip and putting up storm shutters prevented that. And he had no problem going away for a week while a hurricane went right over our house. The eye went over us directly. He forgets that he told me a year or so ago that he doesn’t really need to go on most of his work trips but he goes because he likes to go. Understandable I guess, but my understanding stops when I felt strongly that his place was to stay home and help deal with the situation from the storm. He was also out of state when Hurricane Helene went over and never once called during or after to make sure things were okay.

I am over the initial shock and now vacillate between profound sadness and anger. We met in my freshman year of college almost forty years ago and were together several years before we got married when we graduated. I do not want this to dominate my life or define who I am. We had been planning on selling our house in 3.5 years when my daughter graduates college and move to another state to retire. Right now I don’t even want to eat dinner at the same table as him let alone spend the rest of my life with him. My son is an attorney and is giving me extensive advice on preparing for a divorce. My daughter has strongly suggested to sell the house now, and she wants me to move to her college town until she graduates and then I can move to the state I have been wanting to move to. Single.

I don’t want to make any rash decisions when things still feel so traumatic. Husband basically is a mute to me. He hollowly told me once that he wants a future with me and "only wants to be with me" but I have also heard all of the other "stories" he continues to tell. (My daughter thinks his AP may have dumped him.) A marriage without trust is not a way I am willing to live long term. I firmly believe in the vows that I took on our wedding day but I also feel like he threw those vows in to the trash long ago. I do not feel like I owe him anything based on those "vows" at this point and I could choose divorce with a clear conscience. He does not understand when I tell him that an EA is far, far worse to me than a physical one. He thinks he is standing on a moral high ground by saying that he never had sex with his AP. He does not understand when I tell him that I don’t even care about physical sex nearly as much as the emotional connection he sought with another woman, and for so long, and that is the monumental problem that hurts more than any other thing he could have done.

This is very long and if anyone reads through the saga, so my apologies for the mini novel. It felt good just to type it out but it was also sobering to actually type it which made it feel so much more real. I don’t know what to do or what I want the future to look like. It is fortunate that my children are both adults when this came to light and they support me unequivocally. I would prefer for them to be blissfully unaware but that is not the case but they didn’t get it from me trash-talking their father to them. I am far from perfect but if he was unhappy about anything, he had multiple moral choices he could have made instead of an affair.

4 comments posted: Monday, October 21st, 2024