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blindsightedwife wrote:

Thanks Elle. Wow you are a brave woman and I really take my hat off to you. Do your friends and family know the truth about what happened or have you kept his secret? There came a point where I cared less about his secret and more about  what that secret had done to my life so I told those people I thought should know. My children, a few friends, my counsellor and everyone here of course  
He has said he will move to the spare bedroom if it makes me more comfortable but for some unknown reason, I seem to want to camp out on the couch. You deserve to have your own bed and room! Don't let yourself appear like a victim. Stand up for yourself! (and your comfort)
It is so weird as I am having all these conflicting emotions as I don't seem to be able to think clearly. One moment I am extremely sad and then furious that this has happened, and he was willing to jeopardize our whole life together for a literal stranger. Make the anger work for you is all I can say. You need to start driving this, not him.
There seems to be one specific guy that he met on GrindR that he has met a few times for coffee (He maintains that nothing sexual happened but I dont think I believe him). He expressed in an email that I found that he wanted to be in a relationship with this guy more than anything. Apparently, this other man is in a relationship already. My worry is that what happens if I do try and move on and work it out with my husband that his guy reaches out again in the future and it all ends up imploding anyway??? Once this Mindfuck gets dropped into a r'ship/ marriage things can never ever be the same again unless there is total honesty between both. You'll have to decide about trusting him.But it does sound like, by divulging his desires, he wants you to be okay with it.
I have this other guys phone number and the crazy part of me wants to contact him (Is this nuts???) Yes. It is nuts.  Why would you let yourself be dragged into the secret bullshit 2 married men are mired in. I'd be thinking of the other guy's wife, not the cheating husband. 
He has agreed to put Life360 (tracking app) back on his phone as well as change password on his phone so that it is open book in a way. This does make me feel safer, but I am no fool and know that there are still ways to keep things hidden. He wants to stay and try and make this work and has promised no more secrets, but I find it hard to believe coming from a person that has lied to me so many times before. I am really not sure how to feel or act at the moment.This 'being in the closet/keeping a secret'/tracking app/password situation just means you'll always be on the lookout for dishonesty. if he can't be respectful and trusted without your monitoring why bother putting yourself through the angst?

Last of all.... Do you love this man, and if so why do you accept his appalling treatment of you? During my 6 years of introspection and decision I worked on myself more than my r'ship with A. because he saw nothing wrong with how we were living 'his' life and I often felt like a tag-along extra in it. All because I was with a man who held a desire to "one day fuck a man". Seeing myself worthy of a life without a deep feeling of unease in the pit of my stomach about the man I once loved was what moved me to disentangle myself from it.

E  
 

Blindsightedwife,

I gotta say these cheating negligent spouses seem all the same.. we are in therapy,  the kids are on therapy, the dog is in therapy  but they see nothing wrong with what they are doing.

I say build your support system; therapist, priest or pastor, psychiatrist, trusted friends and family. Slow and steady..think what you want your life to look like.  For myself it was freedom from abuse and hurt..meaning it was without my GX in it. This is not something we caused.


Wishing you strength and stoicism on your journey.

Dear blindsighted wife (nice chose of "blind" and "sighted" as a way to signal you were blindsided but now have your eyes open):

I've been there, "mixed up and hurt," wondering whether I can "live with the fear of him" not being satisfied with me and our marriage, and feeling "like a different person inside" knowing "something has broken in me deep down."  It's a horrible place, and, may I say, a stage in the whole rotten and unwanted but now necessary process of coming to terms with your spouse's deception and predilection. 

My now-ex was also "remorseful," for exactly the same reason--to keep his secret.  It was an important revelation for me when I realized that what my ex was remorseful about was not his behavior, not about his having deceived me, along with engaging in all the accompanying behaviors like devaluing me, making me doubt myself, casting me in the wrong (this last aka "blameshifting"). No, what he was sorry about was that his secret life was now in the open, and he was going to have to deal with the consequences of it.  What he was really sorry about was that his closet had been breached.  He didn't feel sorry for me; he felt sorry for himself.  It took me even longer to see that, and to see that he relied on his feelings of remorse as a manipulative tool to get me to feel sorry for him, which made me more compliant, more focused on him and his feelings, and less on my own.  

It was my experience that my ex tried hard to re-establish what had been lost, and started acting as if everything had returned to the previous status quo, and made it clear that any failure of mine to accept this, to bury the reality, to sweep things back under the rug, to ignore the elephant still taking up the oxygen and space in the room, was an act of hostility against him and to our ability to maintain our marriage.  Just one instance of the blame-shifting and manipulation he engaged in.  The thing was, I could not pretend I didn't know what I now knew, and I couldn't live with the uncertainty of wondering what was coming next.  His stonewalling me ironically had the opposite effect he thought it would.  I didn't just compartmentalize my knowledge of the content of his closet, didn't turn my back on the closed closet door and pretend it wasn't there or relevant.  To the contrary, his attempts to deep-six what had been revealed, to predicate the possibility of our future together on my ability to ignore it, made me feel if felt as if I were living with a time bomb, and I couldn't live knowing it was there ticking.  I was always waiting for it to go off, for the other shoe to drop."   It was maddening, and I couldn't tolerate it.  That's not the only reason I left, but it is part of why I left.  Living in that uncertainty and the cognitive dissonance that was required of me was a compromise too far, because it required me to compromise myself.  It required of me a dishonesty and a willful blindness I couldn't live it.  

I don't know what you'll decide, how you'll resolve your feelings, what will be tolerable to you  I do know that one thing that helped me, and might help you, is for you to get some physical distance from him as you process your feelings.  Trying to sort your feelings out while constantly having to interact with the person makes it very difficult to do.  A visit to family or even just a weekend away (with a natural area where you can walk outside) can help. 

So sorry you're in this situation.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (May 14, 2026 8:52 am)