Wife is talking to her Co-Worker through private messages
My wife and I have been together for over 10 years now, we will have been married 5 years this September. About a month ago my wife came forward to me with a conversation about not knowing if she wanted to be with me anymore. Up until that day I thought we were both happy. When I first met her she was a single mom struggling with a horrible co-parenting situation and was unsure of what she wanted to do for her career and life in general. She is an amazing woman and over the last decade we have built an incredible family together. We've built an environment together that has allowed her to figure out what she wants to do in life and thrive at it. She is now working on two different careers, one as a teacher and one as a personal trainer and has an incredibly positive outlook on life . At the time she fell in love with me she was very content with a quieter lifestyle and truly loved who I was as a person. We share so much in common and love doing so many of the same things in life, but there is no doubt that we are quite a bit different socially. I lean pretty hard towards the introverted side of things and she is the opposite. She grew up around a big family and constantly had people around her and she prefers to be around people a lot and have a big group of support. I have always been there for her and until recently that seemed to be enough, but I failed to notice that she was slowly becoming more and more unhappy, especially with our social life. I am completely content just coming home to my wife and kids everyday and that makes me beyond happy but it's not enough for her. I want to make it very clear that she loves her family very much and enjoys spending time with our kids more than anything else but needs to have more time around adults than what I require. I will be honest, I am not extremely comfortable being out in groups of people, but for her I would do anything. It helps a lot if I'm with her, but with recent events I feel distance growing between us and it doesn't feel the same even if we're out together.
So back to a month ago when she sat me down for our initial conversation about our marriage and how she felt. She feels like we're growing apart and our social lives are going in two different directions. She knows very well about my social anxiety and has opted to just go out with her friends without me most of the time in the past if she wants to go out. Now I am 100% okay with this as much as I love to spend time with her, it's important to me that she gets the stimulation socially that she needs. It's clear that she wants someone she can share these experiences with and be around her friends. I want nothing but for her to be happy. I want to be a part of everything in her life and want to make it clear that I would absolutely go out with her in any situation, but it's been a while since she's really wanted me to go because she says I tend to be quiet and can be awkward at times and that embarrasses her. Recently a couple weeks after we had our initial conversation I wrote her a letter, just putting everything on paper about how I feel and what I want from our future. She responded with a really nice letter as well and it seemed like we both love each other a lot and care about each other and want to grow as a couple. These letters were great for us and I would highly recommend it to other couples. It gave us both a chance to take as much time as we needed to gather our thoughts in a peaceful environment.
Unfortunately, on the same day I opened up our laptop to read the letter that she had typed. Her Instagram was open and there was active message box. She was having a conversation back and forth with one of her fellow co-workers at the school she works at. This fellow is a single father and was being very forward and aggressive flirting with her. My wife as I have said is an amazing woman and is absolutely drop dead gorgeous. I have seen hundreds of guys eye her up and down and can only imagine what the thoughts in their head are like, but it didn't matter because I trusted her with every fiber in my being and knew she loved me. If I was single I would never flirt with a woman in a relationship, especially married and up until I read this conversation, my wife had always been outspoken about morals, especially in relationships .But I will be honest if I was single and so is she i would obviously flirt with her so I understand the attraction from him to her. Now if she had simply not responded or told him thank you for the compliment but I'm married or anything that would resemble defending our marriage I would have not batted an eye, I'm sure there's plenty of these conversations she's turned down in the past. She not only responded to his advances positively but was sending memes and comments back to him of the same nature.
I am beyond heartbroken and just reading the first part of the conversation felt like my chest was going to implode. Knowing that the woman I love is receiving messages from another guy and sitting there smiling about them and probably thinking about him at times blows me off my feet. At a time where we're trying so hard to strengthen our marriage, I can barely smile and look her in the eyes because I just don't know what her true intent is here. I'm trying to be mature and hope that this is just some innocent flirting in a time where she's trying to figure out what she needs or if getting attention from another guy is what she wants. Now something that I am sick to my stomach about and definitely not proud of is that I lost trust in her after reading this conversation and it pushed me to go back time and time again to check the Instagram messages between them . They have been steadily talking over the last couple weeks and what unexpectedly hurts the most is that she talks about my flaws to him. somehow, even though the flirting feels awful knowing that she's confiding in him about things that I need to work on, really really hurts . I love her way too much to just drop all of this on her and I just don't know what to do. I want to change not just to be the person she needs me to be but to be the person I want to be, but it's so damn hard when I know this is going on in the background. I will never give up on her, honestly, even if she cheated on me with him physically right now, if she truly wanted to stay with me i would wrap her up in a hug and take her back in a heartbeat. I hate saying this because she's still mine and I know she still loves me, I just don't know if she still wants me.
I'm writing this all down with hopes that some of you guys out there may have any advice at all to help me navigate how to handle this situation. I have no interest in Petty or immature ways to go about this. We have two kids together and I will fight to the bitter end to make this work and to keep our family together, but all in all we both need to be happy for it to work. I did not get into any specifics when it comes to the actual conversation between them because I just don't have the heart to write about it but if people want to hear a few of the comments to help better assess the situation, I will edit those in later.
Thank you to anyone and everyone who takes the time to read this and respond!
Edit- wanted to add that we have two kids together. 12 years and 6 years. The 12 year old is a stepdaughter
So many responses already. Thank you so much everybody!
Another edit! Quite a few people have mentioned obviously confronting her immediately about the situation and on the other side some people have mentioned talking directly to him. I'd love to know from you guys if you have a preference between these two options, I don't have a lot of respect for him so I don't know how the conversation would go, but I am pretty solid at non-violent communication.