Confused

Hi,

I’ve been reading these forums for a while now but yet to post, I didn’t feel ready.

I’m 9 months out from DDay. My partner had a ONS while away for a work, a job he’s still in and refuses to leave. It involves a lot of travel, mostly 1-3 days here and there, but sometimes longer, one trip this year was six weeks. He loves his job, it’s hard to get one and the same field that doesn’t involve travel. He did look but I didn’t like the amount of travel that came with the jobs he found, they seemed worse.

Aside from this he’s taken some actions on improving himself, has changed the way he behaves while away for a work in that he no longer involves himself in social activities, just works and returns to the hotels afterwards, he’s stopped drinking, he calls and texts a lot when he’s away, he’s putting in more of an effort at home, and has taken on a second job that is more steady and local and helps more financially.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and ‘soul searching’ I guess and this has been up and down. I feel like I’m always realising something new about myself/our relationship that I hadn’t noticed before.

We tried MC immediately after DDay which was an awful idea but she did point out some things I hadn’t noticed, like how he makes big decisions that affect me/the kids without me.

He won’t allow me full access to his phone/laptop, although he does tell me the code but he doesn’t like me looking through it because it’s an ‘invasion of privacy’ and says he has a right to have private conversations with his friends. I wouldn’t like him reading my messages with my friends either so I wavered on this and said I can ask to look at who he’s been messaging any time I want. I haven’t actually done this at all yet, but one night last week, I noticed him delete a message thread on WhatsApp so I asked who it was. It was one of his friends (female but I have no concerns there) so I asked why he deleted it. He said she’d asked how we were doing (she knows about everything) and he had said that I’d been really mad at him that week and then he thought I might get mad that he said that so he deleted it. Thing is, I wouldn’t have asked to read those messages. If I looked at who he was texting, I’d only be looking for questionable people, ie females that I don’t know or would have reservations about.
So that’s spun me out.

Another thing is I asked him to book the whole month around our DDay anniversary off working away (which is totally doable with notice). He’s booked one trip off, in which he’d be returning to the country of where he cheated and would be on DDay. Although he left that a while because ‘I hoped you might change your mind’.

He has another trip at the beginning of that month for a week far away, which is also the week of my birthday, and he said that seemed like over kill.

My dilemma now is, I can’t decide whether to keep trying, whether to dig my heels in about these things that are bothering me, whether to just accept the good that he is doing and take that for now. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve seen a lot of people say they feel they didn’t know their WS, that they looked at the differently after. Thing is, I tried to block this out, but I always felt like this would happen one day. I always thought his boundaries with women were a little skewed and that he was always looking for something else, like I was never enough. We’ve been together fifteen years, and over that time, I’ve counted nine women he’s been involved with in some way or another (mostly when we were younger and off and on, but four of them since we had kids - one an EA (which he still refuses to accept), one an inappropriate friendship, one a girl he met on dating apps while we were broken up for a short time and slept with, and the ONS). Throw in some alcohol and drug problems, I feel like he’s always looking for something more.

Yet he won’t leave. He doesn’t want to leave and when I made him leave, he begged to come back. Swears he loves me, can’t live without me.

And I’m just very very confused and honestly very very depressed lately. I’m at a complete loss at what to do. How do I make such a big decision? We have three kids aged 7-14. I just feel so stuck. One minute I think oh he’s trying so hard, cut him some slack and the next I’m raging about not only the ONS but stuff he did years ago that I should probably be over by now but I clearly just rug swept at the time.

I’m so overwhelmed by it all I can’t think straight anymore.

5 comments posted: Wednesday, November 20th, 2024