Is my husband cheating?
Please bear with me this is a long rant.
My husband I think is a compulsive liar. At first I thought it was just to me but he showed me his Reddit and he was on forums saying he was from X country and pretending to be a dr. Giving medical advice.
They’ve always been ‘little’ lies but they’ve progressively been getting worse and worse. It’s driving me crazy and making me so distrustful of him about anything. There was a female coworker he would text a lot, but in front of me. It was always about work. But he’d text her so much to the point we’d be out at dinner and he’d be ignoring me and I told him it bothered me. He ended up changing her name in his phone and I found out but initially when I confronted him he tried to convince me I was crazy. He then said his reasoning was that I backed him into a corner and made him do it because he was tired of hearing me complaining about her.
He has really weird behaviors with his phone. It is always on his person. He’s constantly texting or on it. If he’s showing me something he’s practically hovering over me. He said he doesn’t think he’s being weird and I see what I want. He’s so hyper aware of his phone that one time I went to his nightstand to unlock it. He was in a deep sleep. Snoring and everything and he woke up when I was unlocking it.
He also has this woman from his past (who I know from school) who kept texting him intimate things like ‘I thought about you three times yesterday’ and wished him Happy Birthday. He was ‘transparent’ with me initially and showed me the messages. I told him (I was pregnant at the time) that I felt uncomfortable and I told him to tell her he was in a relationship and he refused and said he’d continue to ignore her. And she continued to text him, allegedly with no response from him. I told him at that point to block her and he immediately started shaming me saying that was a toxic behavior and he didn’t want to block her just because I’m insecure, etc. Anyway allegedly he told me he blocked her.
We were on a little road trip one time and his messages weren’t popping up on the screen like they normally would and I happened to look over and saw he had a Face ID to unlock his messages and apparently that hides your notifications. He said he didn’t know how that happened but his WhatsApp was also locked. But none of his other apps were locked and he tried to convince me he didn’t do it on purpose. He started to say I was policing him and looking for him to be guilty.
I cried the other night because I don’t trust him. He offered for me to go through his phone and in the moment I declined. A few hours later I was testing him (I know that’s crazy) but I asked if I could take him up on his offer. I honestly just asked because I wanted to see if he’d hand over his phone no problem and I was only going to go as far as unlocking it. Of course he did exactly what I thought he was going to do. He asked me why. Then he said he wasn’t going to do it. Then he said if he did that he would look at me differently and that I was invading his privacy and that it was a toxic behavior. I said okay and kept asking him to hand me his phone. I said ‘you offered’ and he said ‘well when I asked I knew you wouldn’t take me up on it’. HE then unlocked his phone and said he’d show me whatever I wanted to see, but I couldn’t hold his phone. He started scrolling through his messages and I saw that he had messages muted from all his female coworkers. He also had one of his other female friends muted. He said that he didn’t know how they got muted and it was an accident and he didn’t notice. He came up with a million excuses. He has his texts set to auto delete after 30 days but he also didn’t have any messages in his recently deleted. On the other hand, he showed me his phone without having time to prepare. Unless he got rid of everything when he offered the first time. then asked him to go through his apps because I got weirded out and he’s really tech savvy. He said you can duplicate apps and if he wanted to hide something I wouldn’t know which is odd to say. So at that point I felt defeated. I didn’t know what to even look for. He pulled up his contacts and that girl he allegedly blocked last year, was still saved in his phone and unblocked. He then proceeded to say he knew for sure he blocked her and he doesn’t know what happened. He also then said that he must have fabricated that memory but never thought to check again because she hasn’t messaged him since the last time. At no point did he let me hold his phone yesterday. I asked what he was so worried about and he said he had nothing to hide that I was just being really weird and he wasn’t sure what I would do. I’ve stressed this since the beginning though that he’s broken my trust and he needed to help me work through it and I needed more reassurance. Every time something weird happened the first thing he did was get defensive and make me feel bad. He has too much pride also which is a big part of it.
Am I being paranoid? What could he be hiding? He really doesn’t go anywhere besides work and home. He’s a big home body. I don’t know how to work through this. What should I do?