Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
Since quite a few people have requested that I tell my own story, it's time for me to lay it out. I've ony posted bits and pieces spread out through the various threads.
I was married to my college sweetheart when I first joined the Air Force, and I was stationed in one city, and allowed my wife to live with her parents and finish college in her hometown.
I would definitely consider myself an alpha male, being the eldest of 6 kids, and my father in the Navy who was frequently out to sea, I learned to take charge at an early age. Even became some sort of a bad boy, going to bars to get drunk and fight. I used to love to have a good fight, even fighting in college classrooms, and even when I was still an airman early in my career. The rush I got from a fight was incredible. I had a lot of anger in those days, probably stemming from the fact that my own father was a serial cheater and a gambler. Since then, I’ve toned it down a lot and its certainly not a past that I’m proud of. But like many who are alpha in public, to my own wife, I was beta. My ex-wife took advantage of that, because I treated her like a princess, and practically became like a slave to her.
She started displayed the affair signs and I knew something was up. Through my family and friends, I found out that she was seeing her classmate and used the "he's just a friend" excuse, even though it was a fairly small city and they had been seen in public walking around holding hands and eating together at restaurants. I found out that it went from an EA to a PA fairly quickly, and spent time in a hotel together on a class field trip. I demanded NC, but quickly found out that she broke that, even meeting up with him for their rendezvous at a nearby restaurant. With my friends, I was waiting there at the restaurant when he showed up, and when the OM showed up, he looked startled at seeing me and he took off. Needless to say, I ended that marriage, but not after much begging and pleading and humiliation on my part, which disgusted my family, especially my younger brothers and sister. I finally let her go, but the divorce nearly broke me.
Less than a year after the divorce, I met my current wife, and she knew all about what happened in my first marriage. And yes, this was not long after the divorce and she was the rebound girl. She knew that I had trust issues and was scarred from it. But I felt she was much better than my first wife and learned to trust again. Fast forward 23 years: I retired from the Air Force and became a cop, and though things haven't always been smooth sailing, we had a good marriage and 2 sons, one 21 years old, the other 12 years old. Then I created a facebook account for her so she could keep in touch with family and friends. This is yet another facebook story.
Unbeknownst to me, an old boyfriend from 25 years ago had made contact with her, and from the beginning, she hid this from me. I would find out later, from her TT me, that they had never really broken up, and that they had only lost contact because he went to work in Saudi Arabia. Later investigation would reveal that he works in Canada, while we live in the US. Her behavior changed radically, hiding the laptop, always coming home and snapping at me and finding reasons to fight with me. She would come home really tired, and we stopped going to church because she would sleep in. I would later discover that it was because she would be getting up as early as 4am to call him and stay up all night on weekends talking to him. She kept saying it's because her job (she's a banker) was so stressful now, especially with her bank, XXXXX, buying XXXXXX bank. I even felt sorry for her and did my best to help her by doing all the household chores and cooking. Just wanted to add that I’ve ALWAYS helped her through the years with the household chores and such, I just started doing more. Things only got worse and I couldn't understand why. Her behavior had changed so much and was destroying our marriage, that I was going to suggest to her that she move to a different bank or change jobs.
The affair signs were in front of me and I didn't figure it out until later on. It was only after my investigations after D-Day, that I would find out that she's been chatting via Yahoo Messenger, then Skype, plus cell phone calls, with this old boyfriend. I wish I had been on this board a year ago, because I screwed up: When I first found out by accident that she had created a secret facebook account linked to her work email address, I went to pieces, and followed a friend’s advice to confront her about it. So I committed the cardinal mistake of confronting too early before I had more proof. Of course, she denied everything, once again with the "he's just a friend" excuse. Her mother was visiting and staying with us for the summer when D-Day occurred, so I really didn’t have to expose. This was June 10, 2010.
Her mother and I demanded the password to her secret facebook account and she refused. She outright lied to her mother in front of me, saying nothing was going on. She did the whole “I swear to God” and “God is my witness” thing in front of her mother and I. It was only weeks later, using a password decryptor, that I was able to get the password (password was his name and age), but by then she had cleaned it up I think. Like I said, I confronted her too soon without getting all the evidence. After obtaining the password to the secret facebook account, I changed it and took control of it.
So for the next few months, everything that I've found out was only after the fact, and I only have bits and pieces, since she wouldn’t give me full disclosure. I found out that they have been carrying on shortly after they made contact with each other. That they had been talking for hours and hours on the cell phone and using international calling services like Pennytalk and cloncom.com. I found out using Google history that she had been searching on the net for information about renewing her passport (ours are expired), calling Canada cheaply, and visa requirements for US citizens on immigrating to Canada and working in Canada. I searched our account records and found out that she had a secret account with her mother, and she used that checking card to fund her calling service purchases. Her mother didn’t know that she was just using the joint account as her secret account, and that my wife held the debit cards for it. She could barely speak English after all. I’ve since gotten access to the account.
I also checked the calling history, and I'm pretty sure that it never went PA...... But I discover a text message from him telling her that "yes, just fill out the application form with the company" leading me to the conclusion that she was planning to leave me, and possibly my son too, to escape to Canada to be with him. Of course, he's also married, but he's only a contract worker and his wife lives in the Philippines and she isn’t online that I can tell.
I remember during the time that the affair was going on, she was always fighting with me, and at one point told me that she can easily find another man, and that she never cheated on me even though she had many opportunities. Little did I know that she had already made contact and was in a long distance relationship with her old boyfriend.
Re: Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
Continued:
After D-Day, I demanded she have NC with the OM but didn’t know about NC letters. I took control of her secret account, and changed the password. I’ve always had the password to her regular account because she always asking me to post our pictures and videos because she doesn't have the time to do it herself. A month after having taken control of the secret account was when the I discovered OMs first attempt to fish for renewed contact. And that’s when I had her send the NC message.
Then a month later, I notice she's checking her work voicemail all the time, which she never did before. I got the password to her voicemail from our home phone which keeps a record of the numbers pressed and found out that he left a message for her. Before she knew that I had her password, I asked her if he'd called her, and she claimed that he didn't even have her work number until I played the recording that I made on the computer. She claimed earlier that she never answered his calls, and that she was checking her voicemail for work. I didn’t realize at the time that this is also breaking NC when she didn’t inform me that he tried to contact her. I’ve since told her that should OM try to fish again and she doesn’t immediately inform me, that R would be off the table and I would pull the trigger on D - which she’s so afraid of. She knows I’m dead serious because she knows I don’t threaten, I do it.
I didn’t know about key loggers at the time, thinking they were just Trojan viruses, and never even thought about going to an infidelity support site like this. It wasn’t until 3 or 4 months after D-Day that I started going on support sites like this.
Since then, I've since installed key loggers on all the computers and check her voicemail regularly. For the past 2 years, I've detected no unusual activity. Her cell phone records are clean. Our home phone records are clean. Our accounts show no unusual activity. I bought 2 VARs, one for her car, another for our bedroom, and they are clean so far. The only thing the VAR shows that I didn’t know about was that she sings a lot to the music on the radio, which I’ve never seen before. lol. She knows I'm computer savvy, but doesn't know about the monitoring software. And learning from the experience of others, we upgraded her blackberry to an iPhone, where only I know the password to the iTunes account, and she can’t install any unknown apps.
I’ve tried pulling the information out of her blackberry, and even though it wasn’t password protected, the information was overwritten long ago because I didn’t know about the Blackberry back up logs until almost a year and a half later. I also regret not being able to get into the Skype logs because in my haste to install the key logger, I bought a cheaper one, and it messed up the laptop, causing me to have to reformat the hard drive on the lap top.
She's thrown herself completely into the marriage and seems completely remorseful, and she’s met the behavior requirements of true remorse. Her behavior changed back, except she seems more intimate and loving than before. I can't verify for certain that there has been NC, because I don't have access to her work computer at the bank, or her work phone. She did let me into her office at work when her manager wasn’t around and let me go through her work email, but there wasn’t anything in it older than 2 weeks. And I know how easy it is to just get another email address and create a new facebook account. So that’s the hole in my surveillance.
So I did something that I learned in the Investigative Tips forum at Surviving Infidelity, and they finally came through last April. I was able to just about get the full scoop and timeline about the affair, and it devastated me, and just about ended R. To tell the truth, if I had discovered this information during D-Day, R wouldn’t have been on the table at all. The messages and emails showed just how deeply she loved him and the affair had gone deep much earlier than I thought. They showed that she was the one pursuing him, not the other way around like she made it out to be. The sweetness and love in her messages to him were extremely painful.
I showed her this and she broke down. Yes, I finally got the mascara running down the face, snot bubbles, begging me not to leave, on her knees pulling at my leg to keep me from going out the door, etc. Told her that I needed to get out of town for a while and clear my head, but she held on to me. So I ended up not leaving and I realized that this is old information that opened up the old wounds. But this set my healing back to almost D-Day. At least during this kind of mini D-Day, we got some more hysterical bonding in.
So that’s where I’m at heading towards the 2 year mark, and I’m sure I’ve left quite a bit out that I can’t remember right now, but have posted bits and pieces in other threads. Because of her radical change in behavior compared to her past behavior, I believe that this was her first time to betray me, but I’ve made it crystal clear to her that any more TT or breaking NC will immediately cause me to divorce her.
One thing I never got, was blameshifting. Her only excuse was that we supposedly had grown apart. Excuse me? We took the 5 love languages test, and her main language is quality time. We do everything together, everything, from shopping to going to the gym together. It was only during her affair that we seemed to drift apart and I couldn’t understand why at the time.
We’ve since discussed this quite often about why this happened, and she’s adamant that it wasn’t my fault, that it was all hers. She says that I’ve been a great husband and father, and for sure it wasn’t a lack of attention on my part. It was the excitement of being on facebook for the first time and reconnecting with this old love that lowered her boundaries. She’s the type of person that loves to reminisce about old times, I know because she’s that way with me. For years, we would always talk about how we met and fell in love. Unfortunately, she started reminiscing with this old boyfriend and started slipping down the slippery slope. She said talking about the memories with him made her feel like a teenager again, exactly how Dr Shirley Glass describes it in her book “Not Just Friends”.
As I approach the 2nd antiversary of D-Day, I actually don’t dread it at all, its now just another day. I’ve been ashamed to post my story because it’s nothing compared to many of the horrific stories that we’ve all read here. Those people need the help much more than I do and my heart goes out to them.
Re: Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
My fWW was smart enough to to use text messaging because they would show up on the bill, especially international text message to Canada. So she used a calling service, which I was able to eventually access. She mainly talked to him on her cell phone. She would call him late at night when I was asleep or when I was downstairs. She got away with it for so long because of the language barrier between us. She speaks a different dialect, which I've been able to learn some of it over the years, but it was easy for her to play it off like she was talking to one of her family members. At the peak of the affair, she was talked to him for 3514 minutes in one month, talking everyday. All times show are eastern time. He's since changed his number.
Re: Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
Thanks for sharing that, lm. We're closing in on the second anniversary of a pair of D-Days, ourselves, and a veritable minefield of potential trigger dates, but as we do get closer, I'm not feeling as anxious as I did at this time last year.
Glad things are going well. Posted via Mobile Device
Re: Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
Quote:
Originally Posted by Almostrecovered
how did that go, and who found out?
Friends and wider family. I'll leave out the part about local police involvement. And no, I didn't hurt her or go to jail or something silly like that.
Re: Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010
Thank you for sharing that, LM. In a way I know it's hard to even remember it, but it's so helpful to hear other people's stories and to see one that did end up saving the marriage. It's encouraging.
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Approaching the 2nd Antiversary of D-Day - June 10, 2010 
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