# I'm pretty sure my wife had an EA and I don't know what to do anymore.



## Forsaken (Feb 14, 2011)

I just want to thank you before hand for taking the time to read post and help me out. I really appreciate it.

In October of 2010 I found out that my wife had been texting and calling this "friend" of ours that we had only really known since July of 2010. I had found out about it because I went to pay the cell phone bill and noticed that we had used 1300 minutes that month and our plan only has 700 which was never a problem because we usually only use about 350 a month. I looked over the bill to see how AT&T messed up, only to find out that they didn't. My wife and this "friend" had texted each other 5600+ times and talked around 1200 minutes in a 6 week period. She was also texting 2 other guys during the same time frame, and each of them she was texting around 1200-1400 times.

It was all so secretive, the calls between my wife and supposed "friend" had happened like and hour after I left for work and they would talk like 50+ minutes at a time. He would call her on his lunch break, and she would call him when she was driving to and from work (she works around 5pm and I get home from work at 4pm) and sometimes she would talk to him up until I was about to get off work or get home from work.

When I confronted her about it all she said that they weren't really talking about anything, and sometimes she would say that they were talking about our marriage.

My wife works at a little restaurant as a "bar tender" (though they only serve beer and wine) and before this friend came along she never really drank alcohol much accept an occasional mixed drink because she thought beer was disgusting, but because this friend was a bit of a drinker I began to notice she started to drink more. I found out she was drinking while she was at work and asked her to please stop, and I explained that work is for work, not for sitting around drinking, plus I said it’s not safe for her to drink at work and then drive home. She told me she would stop and then a week later she called me from work and had implied that she had to work later because it was a busy night and then an hour later she called me up crying because she was so drunk she was throwing up, so I had to go pick her up. When I got her back to the house, I got her setup in the bathroom so she could vomit in there, and she called me in to talk. While we were talking she had told me that she wasn't in love with me anymore, and this was the second time she had told me this, the other time was when she was sober.

I asked her if she wanted to stay and work things out or if she just wanted to get a divorce, and she said she wanted to stay. I told her that I wasn't comfortable with her talking with that friend anymore, and she was pissed and said she wasn't going to stop talking to him, though eventually she said she wouldn't talk to him. I would occasionally ask her if they had talked and she would say no, and one day I caught her lying to me because on the google page it shows the 6 most visited sites and a picture of what the site looked like the last time you visited it and it showed the last time she was on facebook and her messages were dropped down and the first message was from that guy. I only noticed this because right after I asked her if she had talked to him or if he had tried to talk to her at all she said no and then said she was going to go check her e-mail before she got ready for work. While she was checking her e-mail she deleted the message from him and when I asked her about it she said that he wrote her but she didn't write him back and that she only lied to me because she didn't want me to be upset.

My wife has told me so many petty little lies that now I don't know what to believe. Every time I've caught her lying to me she says that she only lied because she didn't want to hurt me, and it makes me wonder what else I'm not being told because she doesn't want to hurt me.

Before I found out about the cell phone bill she had asked me to go to marriage counseling and I agreed to go, so we were going but the counselor we talked to stopped taking our insurance at the beginning of the year. I don't mind not seeing that counselor again because she didn't seem to think there was a problem with the all the text messages and phone calls.

A month after I found out about the cell phone bill a friend of ours had called my wife and asked if she had sex with the guy she was texting so much and my wife called me up crying while I was at work because she felt bad because our friend had asked her that and it made her notice that other people thought something suspicious was going on, not just me. 

About two weeks after that call, she got a call again from the same friend, and she talked to me about it again saying that our friend said she was drinking with our roommate and our roommate had said that he had sex with my wife 10 minutes after I had left to go drill with the army national guard, and that he loved her and they he was going to marry her one day, and the friend had said to him something along the lines of "well didn't she have sex with Lynn (which is the friend my wife was texting and calling so much) and doesn't she like him?" and he said yea that my wife and Lynn had sex, and that she likes Lynn but he's sure he can win her over (or something along the lines of that).

My wife swore on her life and her moms life that none of this ever happened, and my roommate swore on his childrens lives that it never happened. I told our roommate that it may not have happened but it’s best if he moved out so that me and my wife could be alone to work our marriage out and he said he totally understood and that it wasn't a problem. I also told him to lose her number because he was one of the other guys that she had been texting a lot.

The third person that my wife was texting a lot was a guy she worked with named Tommy. I tried to explain to her that I didn't want him texting her because he was texting her late at night when he was drunk and stuff, and I have no idea what her conversations were about with everyone she was texting and that I wasn't comfortable with it, and she said she would talk to him about it. As far as I know my wife hasn't talked to Lynn at all since the end of October, and she hasn't talked to our old roommate since the end of November, but Tommy still texts her occasionally and it pisses me off. I looked at the phone bill the other day and saw that Tommy had texted my wife at 11 p.m. and then again at 3 a.m. I was at work when I looked at the phone bill summary and it was like 8 a.m. and I texted her and asked WTF is so important that Tommy had to text her about at 11pm and 3am, and she didn't respond, so 5 min after I sent her another text saying not to delete the texts, that I wanted to read them word for word, and she replied back that she had already deleted all of her texts and all she had were the texts from me in the morning saying that I made it to work safe and that I loved her.

I told her that things aren't going to get better if she continues to work with Tommy and have any contact with him, and she put in her 2 weeks notice on Saturday, though she made it sound like she told her boss she was just going to take some time off for a while because she said her boss told her that she will keep her on the pay roll.

I don't know what to do, I've been having really bad anxiety and depression problems, I talked to my doctor and got put on antidepressants and medicine for my anxiety but the antidepressants make me sick and I feel really dizzy when I'm on them (for a week I didn't take anything but the antidepressants to make sure which medicine was messing with me). I feel like sometimes I obsess over the phone bill summary because I feel like I have to check it multiple times a day. Sometimes when I talk to her about everything I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall because she acts like she understands my thoughts and feelings, but like a little over an hour afterwards she will do something that I had just talked to her about. She just seems so self-centered, and it feels like she isn't talking anything I've said into consideration, and it seems like she doesn't think before she acts or speaks.

I feel so alone, especially when I get off of work and she leaves for work right after. I feel like I'm doing everything by myself. There are times when I can't think about anything but what has gone on.

We both developed separation and communication issues during my deployment to Iraq in 2007-2008, and we both just put up barriers between each other. We are talking a lot more about problems now, but it still just doesn't seem like she takes most of what I say into consideration. I think the worst part is that she doesn't really answer any questions I have and she gets really defensive when I talk to her about everything. I love my wife with all my heart and I want this to work out. I just want all the pain to go away.

There are times where I think about everything that has happened and I think that my wife doesn’t really love me because she said twice before that she wasn’t in love with me anymore and that she wanted to leave me before we started working this out. She says now that she is in love with me and she doesn’t know why she ever said she wasn’t. Sometimes I’ve felt like she has only stayed with me because she needs the health insurance and I pay all the bills because she doesn’t make very much money a month. She has a condition called ulcerative colitis, and she has to get a transfusion roughly every 60 days that costs around $13,000 before the insurance picks up the bill, and she sees a doctor a couple of times a month.

I just don’t know how to think or what to feel anymore and I don’t know what to do. It just feels like talking about everything is useless most of the time because nothing really has changed. I know she stopped talking to Lynn and our old roommate and that’s a huge step, though sometimes I start thinking about how they could have found other ways to communicate, and maybe I think like that because there was so much secrecy going on.

Thank you very much if you have taken the time to read this novel I have written, I would really appreciate any suggestions. Also I’m sorry if this has been kind of hard to understand, I was trying to leave out names as much as possible, and there’s just so much information that I had to break it down a ton because I could have written page after page after page.


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## alphaomega (Nov 7, 2010)

Forsaken....
I'm going to be candid. A lot of us have been in this situation.

How much more evidence do you want? really? You have what is called analysis paralysis, where you will keep searching for clues NOT to find evidence of infidelity, but evidence that it's not there and that this is all in your head!

Your wife is not only a cheater, but a serial cheater. Is this something you actually want to live with for the rest of your marriage, second guessing her and never trusting her again. Your wife is in the FOG of multiple affairs. Normally, this is bad enough, but to have so many at once is confounding to me.

The first thing you have to decide is if you want to save the marriage. If you don't, there is nothing wrong with that. If you do, then search this site for the 180 program, no contact letters, plan A, and plan B. I can't go into detail because other members have much more insight into this situation than I do, o listen to them when they comment....I wouldn't do the explanation any justice.

You have a hard road ahead of you, friend.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## Forsaken (Feb 14, 2011)

Alpha -
Thank you for your input. I do want to salvage my marriage, and I am willing to do whatever is necessary to save it. It’s hard to explain all of this, and the bad part is that I have had trust issues with a lot of people because of things like my military experience (watching people screw each other over in hopes for what I can only presume would be a promotion), my “friends” (watching my friends screw each other over for personal gain), and now this, so the story has gotten so long and overwhelming and I haven’t felt like I can really talk to anyone about it.

Part of this all is my fault, just like they say it takes two to tango, it also takes two to run a marriage. So, part of this is my fault and I can accept that and I have admitted to my faults and have done pretty much a 180 in order to not make the same mistakes I made in the past. Allow me to add more detail to the story. I’d hate to make it seem so one-sided even though it’s natural instinct to do so when you feel you have been victimized.

So here is more to the novel I have written, if you take the time to read all of this I thank you, and if you don't, I don't blame you. I know my time is important to me so I value your time as well. 

I didn’t have the greatest childhood (I know no one really did), so when I was little I learned to escape my reality through video games. When times are tough I turn to video games, I always have and I probably always will. A little bit before I left for my deployment, I started playing World of Warcraft (WoW). I never played it excessively, always in moderation and when my social life called I answered. When I got home things were so different. I had a hard time during my deployment because I began to notice how terrible people really are toward each other and towards cultures they don’t understand. I don’t want to go into my deployment because that’s a sensitive subject to a lot of people. Just know I felt like I was going against my own personal beliefs, and beliefs that most Americans probably follow, and I was very disgusted with the way I saw some people behaved (I mainly had problems with people talking about wanting to shoot people). 

Needless to say I had a rough transition when I came home because I wasn’t very proud of my deployment. I had a hard time talking about it, the only time I really would is if I was drunk and I would hear someone talk badly about the Iraqis as a whole or even Muslims, or if I overheard someone say something that was just despicable that reminded me of conversation I had heard overseas.

I couldn’t talk about it with my wife and I know now why I couldn’t. I didn’t want the person that I love most to see me as I saw myself. Communication is key and I know that now, I just wasn’t proud at all. I held in so much and I should have just talked about it but I didn’t know how so I just held back. Eventually I started playing WoW more than I should, and I didn’t show my wife the attention that she deserved.

Before she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC) she was in a lot of pain and had a lot of moments that she was embarrassed about. When they finally determined it was UC they started trying some meds and none of them were helping her. She eventually had to resign from a really great job that she loved because she was in so much pain and had to many bathroom emergencies to the point where she couldn’t even leave the house. They kept trying more and more meds but nothing helped her except prednisone but the prednisone made her gain a bunch of weight which only made her feel worse about herself, because it didn’t completely make her feel better so she was still having accidents and she had gained a little weight.

So we were both a having communication, self esteem, and depression problems, and probably more than that. But she was also dealing with physical and emotional trauma because of the UC. I failed to mention that while I was deployed she lived at her moms and when I returned we stayed there, it was only supposed to be a temporary thing but I had a hard time finding a job when I got home and she was having her medical problems and then had to resign from her job. She would occasionally treat me and her mother pretty badly. I know now that she didn’t mean to, and couldn’t really help it. I couldn’t take being treated badly so I left her three separate times for about a week and a half to two weeks each time. I had explained when I left that I didn’t deserve to be treated like that and I just left.

I eventually found a stable job, it was alright at first but then it turned terrible pretty quick but I put up with it because I had bills to pay and the money I had saved from the deployment and my enlistment bonus ran out. That job only made me worse. I hated waking up every morning because I knew I had to go back to that hell hole. I worked swing shifts at first which was terrible for any kind of social life so when I got off of work I would just go home shortly after I got home my wife would go to sleep. I’m not the kind of person that can go to sleep right after work, I had to do something because I’m pretty much worthless when I wake up in the morning, so I would just stay up late and play WoW and go to bed at like 5-6am. I moved to graves eventually because I had a problem with my manager on swings, he tried to fire me because I couldn’t work late one Friday night because I had to drill for the army national guard the next morning. Working graves can be really terrible on human. For the most part I was working about 5 days a week up to 12 hour days so I was just physically and emotionally exhausted and I wasn’t always in the greatest mood because I didn’t like the way things were going.

The way everything was going we had pushed each other away from one another. Then things started to look up, I got a great job making double the pay. I found us a house to rent that’s not too far from her mothers house (her mom is older and her husband divorced her over a decade ago so she needs some help with things now and then). Shortly after we moved into the house one of our friends went missing, he was later found dead in his backyard because he had killed himself. This is how we met Lynn, he was our friends best friend. Lynn was having a hard time with the whole thing and we befriended him. At this point I was a recluse still because there was a situation between my friends that made me rethink who my real friends really are, and I stopped associating myself with 90% of my friends. I had talked to Lynn about how I had trust issues with friends because of the whole situation that happened, and I let him know that I was there for him even if it didn’t really seem like I was. I had explained that I didn’t mean to be so reclusive that I had social problems and he said he understood.

The person I refer to as the “roommate” is named Travis. Travis moved in with us about 3 or 4 weeks before I found out about the cell phone bill. I didn’t really want Travis to move in, he wasn’t really a friend of mine, he was alright company though and was having a hard time where he was living and I was having a hard time paying all the bills by myself so I agreed to let him move in for a month or two because him paying rent would help us out a little bit financially. Travis wasn’t really even at our house that often, he went to the bar pretty frequently and came home late. Also Travis was friends with Lynn though we had known Travis since during my deployment, he was dating a really good friend of my and they broke up but eventually became best friends. All in all he didn’t pose as a threat. I did start to bug me though that when it came time for me to go to bed because I had to work early in the morning that my wife would stay up late and bull**** with him and Lynn.

Once I found out about the phone bill Lynn wasn’t welcome in my house anymore. Travis seemed to not come around as much, though when he did it was usually right after he got done hanging out with Lynn or being at the bar so he would come home late, and my wife would still stay up late and talk with him. At this point I was so upset with everything that had gone on with Lynn that I couldn’t sleep as it was so I would occasionally get up and get a drink of water and smoke a cigarette, and I would kind of go about it in a manner that showed that I wasn’t very happy with everything. 

About a month after I found out about my wife and Lynn and the cell phone bill is when I had heard about our friend Brooke saying that my wife slept with both Lynn and Travis.

So there’s more to the story. It’s a lot and I probably still missed a bunch of info. I didn’t help the situation in my marriage, I focused more time into WoW then I did my wife. I pushed everyone so far away that I lost myself and I was emotionally numb. I was pretty much a zombie. Before I found out about the cell phone bill I didn’t even really notice everything that was going on until I got my wisdom teeth taken out and I sat at home all weekend by myself, taking care of myself while my wife was at work. I was sitting there playing WoW high as a kite on the pain meds and I finally snapped back to reality and realized everything that had been going on. I started talking to my wife and this is when she asked me if I would go to marriage counseling.

Like I said, I have owned up to my mistakes and I identified what I needed to do to make sure I didn’t continue on down the path I was heading towards. I realize now that communication is the key. I should have opened up to my wife and talked about my feelings and our future more, and I should have paid more attention to my wife then I did a video game. I had focused so much on everything that was wrong with the world and I pushed my wife away to the point where she turned to someone else because I wasn’t there for her.


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## Forsaken (Feb 14, 2011)

Thank you all again for your time and input. I really appreciate it.

I saw this quote some where that I wanted to mention because it pretty much sums up how I feel mentally and emotionally, which has been physically draining.

"A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work".


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## Forsaken (Feb 14, 2011)

What does FOG stand for? I see multiple people use the term but I haven't been able to figure out what means. I'm really new to this site and I've figured out what all the other abreviations are such as LS, DS, OM/W/P, H/W ect. I just can't seem to figure out what FOG means.


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## michzz (Jun 6, 2008)

Forsaken said:


> What does FOG stand for? I see multiple people use the term but I haven't been able to figure out what means. I'm really new to this site and I've figured out what all the other abreviations are such as LS, DS, OM/W/P, H/W ect. I just can't seem to figure out what FOG means.


It is not an acronym. 

"the fog" refers to the way of thinking that at cheater indulges in that makes them think what they are doing is right and probably the "fault" of their faithful spouse.


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## Pit-of-my-stomach (Nov 2, 2010)

Some info in my thread about The "Fog"


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## twotimeloser (Feb 13, 2011)

ok... break those pamiced thoughts down into little thoughts.

start writing them down in small sentences... here I will start.

1. My wife is definately having an EA
2. My wife MAY be having a Physical one.
3. I do not trust my wife
4. My emotional state is effecting my work and or life.


Once you complete the list, go through it and make sure it all sounds right, THEN wiegh the facts.

I mean how do you feel? would forgiveness come from a place of grace and love, or from a feeling of loss? Men have a tendancy to treat a declining relationship like a hole in boat... we spend so much time bailing the water out that we never fix the hole, or get a new boat.

I can see buckets and buckets of emotional water that you're bailing out... but stop.... JUST STOP. fix the leak or get a new boat. 

Whatever you do, never get into "begging" mode. let her know she is damn lucky to be with you.


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## Forsaken (Feb 14, 2011)

Michzz & Pit -
Thanks for explaining the FOG for me, I understand it better now.

twotime -
Thanks for your input. Should I write the small sentences here in the forum, or is it a reflecting thing that I should do for myself?


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## twotimeloser (Feb 13, 2011)

They are really for reflection, but if you post them here, you will surely get some input from the members of the board, who can help you sort out your feelings. 

Remember that ultimately you are the one who needs to evaluate the information.


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## zsu234 (Oct 25, 2010)

Regain your self respect and dignity, kick her to the curb.


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