We have been together for 14 years. And we got married 3 years ago. We have a 2-year old boy. I am convinced by the signs that he is cheating on me but he says I'm being paranoid and OCD and asks me to seek help. I need advice. These are the signs. 1) Before we got married, I have caught him masturbating to pornography more than a dozen times over many years. Each time I caught him, his reasons would range from him promising to not do it again to philosophical justification that it's his right and it does not mean he doesn't like me. I've told him I feel like he wants to have sex with other women and pornography is a way to relieve that desire without having to actually cheat on me. Isn't it the same? After we got married I have never caught him again. It seems like he's changed after the birth of our son. But I'm inclined to believe he's mastered the art of hiding. He's a smart guy. 2) He doesn't have much friends except for clients and business contacts. He has been freelancing for many years and that's our primary source of income for the family. Sometimes he goes off to work on a more permanent basis for companies who can pay him. For example his last stint which lasted ten months was as a consultant for half a week per week at the clients site. When I try to contact him when he's at work sometimes he would not be contactable. He would sometimes miss the call or take more than half an hour to get back to me. His excuse is that he's being paid to work and the works involves a lot of meetings and that he always tries to get back to me as soon as he can albeit not immediately and that I need to be reasonable. The thing is, when he was at the company it was on a hiring spree and a few young and quite good-looking women joined the company. And he also recently hired a female team member. He says those women are in another department and he don't work too c losely with them and he's not interested in them in anyway but if he has to work with them he has to and he will. As for the girl he himself hired, he said he had difficulty hiring and she was the only viable candidate and he had an immediate need to fill the position as he recently dismissed another person in his team (also a woman). He also said he wouldn't hire with a gender biase. When I probed after a few months, the girl he hired wasn't actually performing very well yet he had no plans to replace her. And why did he hire an incompetent person in the first place if not for other purposes? He said he had always been trying to look for better people for his team and while he's looking the work still need to be done and he cannot dismiss the girl. 3) My suspicions grew the longer he stayed at that company. Eventually he offered (I didn't ask him to!) to wear a camera that to his office so I can see what he's seeing by streaming the video online. It didn't work very well. I'm not sure if it didn't work very well or it's just an excuse. He would say the camera was as only big as a two pieces of chicken mcnuggets had limited battery life and memory and he can't capture a whole day's worth of footage and sometimes the Bluetooth connection would die and thus the recording would fail. I think he's lying. I think the times the camera failed are the times he's actually somewhere with the girl making out. 4) I started monitoring the tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram pictures of the girl. A pattern eventually emerged. For example. If I had discussed topic A with my husband the night before, I would usually find her posting about topic A. It seems that he had been sharing our secrets with her. His excuse is that whatever we were discussing came from the Internet anyway and it's not surprising to find other people talking about similar things, especially in a similar geographical location and industry. I wasn't convinced. It's too much to be of coincidence. 5) Our distance grew. He had become more emotionally disconnected. I could feel that he's stopped loving me. Very often he would hole himself up in the bathroom for up to an hour. He said he was working and got lost in the productive environment the bathroom made. He could show me his work and web browsing history but that still doesn't prove that he had not been using the private time to communicate with certain people. When I look at his IM history, they always look clean. But if he wasn't secretly doing something in that uncomfortable place meant for defecation, why would he spend such a long time in there? 6) The girl in his company eventually resigned. When I asked him to shorten her notice period which he was authorized to, he got upset. He said nobody does that sort of thing for no good reason and that his wife's whim is not a good reason. I had access to his email and found out that the people in his company had recently criticized her work attitude and performance. Since she's so unpopular why is it so hard for him to get rid of her sooner? 7) He himself went back to freelancing eventually. He blamed me for his difficulties at work. It's really that's he not a very good manager, which he accepts. He's an introvert and not exactly a people person. So he's usually at home working and as I'm studying at home, he would buy our meals. To prevent him from communicating with whoever he's seeing I made him go out without his phone. Getting lunch usually takes less than twenty minutes and he was fine with not bringing his phone out as long as he had a book or Kindle to read while waiting for the food to be prepared. We've been doing this for a couple of months but lately he started complaining that he's lost his dignity and he would not allow me to treat him like this. He then took his phone and went out. Despite texting him and saying what he did would further break my trust in him, he ignored me. It is as if he doesn't care about our relationship anymore. 8) When he was out, I tracked him on Find My iPhone (we share the same Apple/iCloud ID and use Find My iPhone and Find My Friends to track each other). His location was erratic. It would jump from one place to another and those places would be kilometers apart. The jumping pattern was predictable though. I believe he had installed some kind of software in his iPhone to alter his GPS information so he can be untrackable if he chooses. Later when he came home, his location was still erratic and thus I wiped his phone to get rid of any "software" that was causing it. True enough, his location became stable and accurate after a factory reset. Thus I am convinced he was "jamming" his location to avoid tracking. 9) Generally I feel he's not serious about us any more. When I suggested we talk about our relationship, he wouldn't be serious. For example, on several occasions at night when he had just gone to bed, I would raise my suspicions to him and seek clarification but all he does is ignore me and continue sleeping. Sometimes he would turn around and snarl. When he does get up to answer my questions he would struggle to stay awake. This is about our marriage! How can he sleep? I don't just bring things up at night. In the day too. He would do things like changing the subject. 10) He's idealized me, devalued me and is on the path to discard me. On at least two occasions, he suggested that I'm like his late father. For your information, his father died of stroke and was a terrible unemployed alcoholic who caused his family to become dysfunctional. Thought I am unemployed it's because I am a housewife taking care of our child. I feel hurt when he compares me to his father. And one would only hurt someone he doesn't love. He used to be my best friend. We used to do things together. He used to put me on a pedestal. He used to care about me. Now he's cold and distant. When I demand that he be the husband that he's supposed to be he becomes even more distant. I'm pretty sure he's sick of me and I'm just an obstacle to his next pursuit. That's why psychopaths do. They charm you. You fall for it. Once they drain you of all your value they devalue you and then discard you. And for the above reasons I'm pretty sure he's already found his next target. I am at my limits living with this person. Please advise me how I can deal with this. We've tried relationship counseling but it's too slow and expensive and the therapist could never seem to get things. We've seen a psychiatrist and it too is mega-expensive and the medications cause more problems than they solve. I'm seeing a psychologist now but it isn't really addressing my problems with him. | |||
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I believe he's been cheating
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