I apologize, this is a long one...
So I am new here and just feel like I need to talk to someone about my wife's emotional affair. I am still discovering just how deep this rabbit hole goes every day. First a bit of background, we were married 5 years ago, this will be my 2nd marriage and her 4th. I am an engineer and she is a therapist (sometimes not such a good combination and displays quite a bit of Irony as well since she did her doctoral thesis on Cyber affairs!), and unfortunately an adult child of an alcoholic. We adopted a foster child about 2 years ago and are currently fostering 2 more. We moved across country away from our families and our friends about 3 years ago and moved again still almost 1200 miles from our families and friends due to my promotion. So this should fill in the complicating factors and I will elaborate on them a bit more as I tell my story.
Where to begin.... Well, upon our first move it was quite tough for my wife as she is very tight with her family; I on the other hand can live comfortably with only seeing my family on rare occasions. During this time she had several blow ups, yelling at me for dragging her away from her family and a job she loved, threatened divorce multiple times.
It wasn't about 1 year after the move that I noticed the cell phone lighting up when we both should have been asleep. I ignored it at the immediate time but looked on her phone later to find a few chats with a guy on yahoo messenger. The messages weren't to concerning but I made note to monitor her communication when I could. It was around this time she actually accused me of seeing someone to which I handed over my phone and said take all the time you need to go through my phone, I told her I had been cheated on in my last marriage and knew how much pain it caused and would never cheat for that reason among others. She took the phone and upon not finding anything gave it back in disgust. Over the course of a couple of weeks the messages to this stranger began to get flirty, and I was demeaned, slandered, and just portrayed as a lowlife husband. I would check her phone at night when she was asleep, and when I saw "I Love you" on the screen, I was furious. As I was in a new place with no support network other than my family back home, I called my sister to talk about it. We talked and she suggested I talk with my wife and try to work things out. I told her I would. Later that day, I was accused of cheating again; this was the opening I used to let her know what I knew. She claimed that I was emotionally shut off and that She knew I had chatted with women in the first few weeks when we were dating. I admitted that I had yes, but the moment we got serious in our dating relationship, I cut off all communication. She said it didn’t matter and that the damage was done. I was incredulous over this and stated that not only did that not justify what she was doing; that the damage she was doing was far worse. It did no good. We discussed it for what seemed like forever and at some point I told her about talking with my sister about it, that apparently was a huge mistake which still gets brought up today when she gets angry with me, that I hurt their relationship and she has never treated my family kindly since. Well, the next day she came to me and apologized profusely and said she would no longer contact him and wanted to work on our marriage. I accepted her apology and acted like I believed she would not contact him but I knew I would verify it at night and I did nightly then weekly, then occasionally.
Well she kept her word - for about a year - Around this time; we got a phone call from her mother saying she had some bad news. My wife's ex-husband #3 apparently still loved her and was trying to work with her to get the house refinanced back in his name and had had an argument with my wife over the house refinance had also had an argument with his new wife and was upset and decided to OD on pain meds in the house he and my wife still jointly owned. So now we have another house and payment. She took his death very hard and I noticed the phone on at night again with her back to me. I checked her messages and sure enough, back to the same person, her messages were about how her ex was really the love of her life and that she really wished she had stayed with him instead of getting remarried to me, and that she regretted moving so far away to be with me. This time I confronted her and told her she needed to cut all ties with him. She said she just wanted to talk with him to see how he was doing, and to talk about her ex's death, she said she would delete her Yahoo IM account. I told her to do it in front of me and she did. I did notice IM back on my laptop a few weeks later but a key logger I have installed on it shows it isn't accessed anymore; I keep it there in case she goes for it again. This was last year and so far, so good - with this guy.
Enter her Ex fiance - Well about 3 months ago, I notice the lit phone again. It's her ex-fiance, apparently his marriage is about to end with his wife due to her drug use and neglect and he has 2 autistic sons. My wife specializes in autism in her practice and she claimed she was helping him find services for them. I begin monitoring conversations again, this time I got a bit more complex with packet logging and routing all in-home traffic through a router I can monitor. Well, again the same pattern, innocent texts and messages get more and more flirty; I become a worse and worse husband. A charge shows up on our account for a spa in her ex's hometown, she gives me a lame excuse saying her best friend back home was passing through and she wanted to give her a gift at the spa, I told her I saw through it, to which she denied it, again and again. Then our 5th wedding anniversary, I get her a diamond ring, I didn't even receive a card. The night of our anniversary, I see a chat message to her ex saying she just knew I would give her something materialistic that says "I Love you" - REALLY! This comes to a head the next night when she accuses me of beating her and our children. At this point I go into self protection mode. I photograph the messages including one she sends to her best friend saying how bad of a husband I am but at least I have never hit her only hours after she tells her ex that I did. The next day I talk to a lawyer about it, they wanted a $5000 retainer but gave me a number for a free legal advice line that operates once a month. So I must break my silence to one of the ladies I was communicating with during my early dating relationship with my wife. My sister is a lawyer and she introduced me to another friend of hers years ago that was also an attorney, we dated a bit but it was a long distance relationship and I met my wife not long after. So I sent her a face book message asking if we could talk. Not 1-2 days later my wife blurts out that she wants to look at my phone. I hand it over after opening up the very message I sent to my sister's friend. She saw it and went ballistic, I told her I knew everything she had said about me and that I was contacting her because I was concerned about the false accusations she was making about me and I wanted to talk to a lawyer, and I knew what happened when I talked to my sister the last time. She said she didn't want me talking to her again and that we both needed to shut down our face book accounts. I did and she did, and she said she would stop communicating with her ex as well.
She did stop communication with her ex, through conventional means at least, now she has gaming apps on her phone where she chats with him. My packet logging picks them up. The bashing of me does subside and it appears to be a bit more professional for a bit, but then it returns back to the way it was. She returned back home for a week with our son, so I didn't think I had to worry, when she returned I noticed messages talking to him about driving halfway to meet at a restaurant and it coincided with the time period she left our son with my parents and borrowed their car! I asked about this and she made up some story about trying to meet her bestfriend who cancelled, I didn't believe it but acted like I did. Then the phone calls begin because she suspects I can see her messages, her first call to him lasts 97 minutes. Then the calls happen daily, this month, the cell phone bill has a total of 536 minutes of calls to me and 839 minutes of calls to him. She will bring up little bit of how she is helping him with his kids in conversation to which I ask her to cease contact with him. It goes unheeded. Now she has begun texting him away from here and deleting her texts before she gets home, and is very protective of her phone, even sleeping with it, I have to grab it off the charger and sneak glances occasionally, or sneak it from beside her in bed. The last thing I saw was her talking about putting bunk beds in the house so all the kids will be comfortable together, and that their visits will only get better in the future and that she was hurt by him leaving her before the wedding but she could forgive him. I am unsure of the context of the messages as she had deleted the earlier messages from her phone. She has another trip planned in March and has already filled him in on it. I did learn of the trick of putting a voice activated recorder in her car from this forum, so far I only have one call that I was able to catch that was clear after playing with the sensitivity and other settings of the recorder. In it she says she just wanted to call to hear his voice and that she couldn't call back in an hour because she will be at home but could text him. She is back on facebook and rarely communicates with him in this manner but just this week I see some very inappropriate messages to a guy she knew in college about oral sex and asking why they never got together and that she wanted to meet him to surprise a mutual friend when she comes down in March, to which he insinuates a threesome and she calls it cute.
So this is where I am now, despite my distaste for drama; I now seem to live in a soap opera. As I write this I realize this in itself is therapy and clarity. While just reading it objectively it causes me to think leave her ASAP. Why don't I? I consider myself a strong willed person and can indeed detach from my emotions, but what I don't want to happen is to lose my son permanently and secondarily the one passion in my life outside of my family if she should decide to go after me in the divorce just to hurt me. My wife has said to me in anger in the past that she will get custody because she knows the system and that extreme circumstances must be shown for me to get custody, that I will not see our son except on rare occasions and she would take him back halfway across the country. She has threatened me with this and I know she will push for it. My life passion is flying and my other big concern is for my aircraft that I have saved my entire life to buy. When I fly during all of this it takes all my stress and worries away and has kept me sane and offers one of the few things I look forward to during my week. I have been passionate about flying my whole life and it has been the one constant in my life. I fear that if she realizes this and wants to hurt me in addition to taking our son from me, then she knows how to truly do it.
So for some reason I continue to look at her call records, hide the recorder, and wait for opportunities to grab her phone to check her texts, not sure what I am looking for to show up. Part of me is numb to all this, treating it like a game and part of me resents her for it. The weird thing is that I am not sure if I would be devastated if it led to a divorce, I am not sure why these EA's aren't hurting me like they should be, like a PA would. Am I just waiting for the inevitable, or should I just take the leap so I don't have to go through this next time if she stops this time and I find out again in a month? a year?