Ever since he was just 17, this 31-year-old man has been with his wife, who is the same age as him.
But after all this time, he still is head over heels in love with his wife, and he always knew she was as in love with him, too.
They’ve experienced traveling the world together, have shared many rollercoaster moments, and moved across Canada so they could start a new life together.
They both have careers that pay extremely well, but that’s at the expense of them being able to hang out at home together.
He has to work away for 4 months out of the year, and during that time period, he can only be at home with his wife for 1 week out of every month.
Sadly, a bit more than a year ago, things in their marriage changed. His wife was distancing herself from him, and she was closing herself off.
She stopped laughing, she stopped opening up, and their conversations turned pretty shallow.
“I have the utmost respect and care for this woman, my life partner, but things were weird, and something felt off,” he explained.
“I wasn’t perfect either, having a moment of drunken weakness in another city, and started talking to a woman on Tinder. I didn’t do anything with her, but we had about a day and a half of pretty intense [steamy texting]. When I got home, I owned up to that and told my wife, and she told me that she had been fooling around with a guy from work.”
His wife promised she had not slept with her coworker, but they had been physical, and it was getting more and more intense.
He and his wife had an emotional conversation full of honesty, and they both confessed that they wanted to save their marriage and learn to trust each other all over again.
They decided to allow one another to have access to their phones as part of regaining trust, and their marriage went back to normal right after that.
Two months ago, though, his wife started to get distant again, and he tried to just trust her and not intervene.
He struggled to keep that all up, and as time went on, he was alarmed that things were seriously wrong.
Taking matters into his own hands, he did go through his wife’s phone, and that’s something he has only done on occasion in the 15 years that they have been together.
He came across his wife’s phone diary that she had been keeping for months, and in the diary, his wife admitted she was in love with her coworker.
His wife also discussed how emotionally painful it was for her to not be with her coworker.
“I think she still does love me, but her feelings for this other man are clearly taking over and becoming the most important thing to her,” he said.
“I am devastated because even though we tell each other I love you and hug and kiss and cuddle every day, she is cold about it.”
He thought that he and his wife had built up enough openness and trust again that she should have been able to be honest about her feelings with him regarding her coworker.
It hurts him that she has been keeping all of this a secret, but he has yet to confront her about this new information.
He was hesitant about how his wife felt for her coworker, so he’s slowly been gathering enough information to piece things together, and he didn’t want to cause drama with his wife before arriving at the truth.
“But tonight, I read the words in her diary. She truly loves him,” he continued. “It’s the last thing on my mind, but we bought a house together, have directed all of our joint finances at paying off her student loans, and I try to do everything I can to financially make her life as easy as possible.”
“If we were to split, the losses, while not crippling for me, would be in the hundreds of thousands, but more importantly, I would lose my wife.”
“I’m probably the lowest I’ve ever been in my life right now. I feel like I now know this relationship is doomed, but there is still real love there, so it’s so hard to say and accept. I don’t know what to do, who to talk to, it how to move on, but typing this out has been a bit therapeutic, and it’s been nice to get the secret I know off my chest.”
What advice do you have for him?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
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