my wife cheated on me and i don't know what to do.
this is my first time using reddit so please bear with me,
so from the beginning, we were young when we got married (me 23, her 20) and when we did get married we were in love, it was perfect, but then as time went on i think we kinda realised that we were a little naive as the honeymoon period faded. but we both stuck it out and tried our best to go back to how we were. don't get me wrong we've had some amazing times together, plenty of them and i've always been under the impression that there was still love between us no matter the small issues... until recently. a little back story ive been suffering with severe depression for about a year now but i tried to hide it from her because i knew that she was having problmes of her own and i wanted to be there for her and not have her worry about me aswell.
taking it back to about a month ago my wife was visiting her mums and she was there for around 3 days, i went to go and pick her up and on the drive back she told me that she wanted a divorce, i was of course taken aback by this and didnt really know what to say. i sort of agreed with it at that time but then very soon after (a day or two later) i started to question her reasoning behind it and told her that i dont think its the right move and that i still loved her. but she was set in the idea of a divorce. we agreed to live together for about a month or so just so that we could sort the finances out and let the families know and of course come up with a schedule for our 1 year old child. this is where the issue starts.
prior to her telling me that she wants a divorce we never had an issue with trust or the other person using each others phones or anything like that, but now all of a sudden the password had changed and the phone would almost always be moved out of my line of sight whenever i was around. that was my red flag number 1. of course that felt weird but i didnt think anything of it. then a couple of days later she told me that she wanted to go and see her mum because she was missing her and she was gonna go for the one day. ( i would like to say that she was going to go the day before our wedding anniversary and come back the day of in the eavening) of course i didnt really like this because it was our wedding anniversary but ive never stopped her from going to her mums and never will. but then the day day she was leaving she told me that she lied and she booked a spa eavening for herself in a hotel in manchester because she needed "alone time"
i had two main issues with this the main one being that it was on our anniversary and that she decided to lie to me about where she was going. me still completely trusting her at that time tho didnt really think anything of it. now after this day it starts to get problomatic. a day after she gets back i needed to use her phone to log in to my own insta because my phone was glitching so without even thinking i took it and it was already open so that wasnt an issue, as im starting to log in to insta i see a notification pop up on insta from someone that i had never heard of before (lets call him ZEE) and so (i know i shoudt have but i did) i openned the messages and they seems off, like from the quick scroll that i did so they wearnt openly flirty but definately had a vibe to them, at that point she came running own the stairs and snatched the phone off me, i asked her about it and she got angry with me saying that i should have never been on her phone and that he is a friend and she then went back upstairs without answering any questions. of course i confronter her again that same night and i tried to express how i felt and how her actions were making me feel slightly insecure by also suspicious and she said to me that it was all in my head and that he was nothing but a friend and that i was completely in the wrong for assuming the worst. funnily enough she said to me so many times that i actually started to believe her.
but then it got worse, its like she was playing with my head on purpose, its like she was having fun torturing me. she once said to me about this guy that he had a girlfriend and then in the next sentance she joked sayiing that "mabye i am his girlfriend" icl that one line made me overthink everything. but there were other instances like that where if i look back on to it now knowing what i know make me physically ill.
i remember because i was going a little crazy over this whole suspecting but not knowing thing i started to check her location a lot when she ws out of the house, she and our son were going to her mums house for a party and that was fine but then as she was friving about an hour a half in to the drive her location suddenly went off and then came back on 2 hours later, and she made it to her parents hours 5 hours after she set off. please remember that her mums house is only 2 hours and 30 minutes away with heavy traffic. again this was something that i questioned her about and she told me that she got lost, she got lost on a drive that she must have made at least a dozen times and always has her sat nav on. again me being an idiot i let it go because i mean she had our baby with her, she wasnt gonna do something like that with our child there....right ,... (she did exactly that) but after that moment her location went off and it never came back on and when i questioned her she said it was because i kept on asking her about it and she was getting annoyyed. lmao.
there are a fair few instances like this but moving on to the day that i actually foud out, i remember i couldnt sleep and so i went on to my laptop which used to be her laptop. (again i know i shouldnt have but boredom and sheer curiosity got the better of me and i went in to her emails and that where i found a hotel recipt that she had booked for the day that she told me that she was going to a spa night please remember this was the same night as OUR ANIVERSARY, but the recipt was in a completely different city about an hour away from where she said she was and it was a holiday in. so again out of suspicion i called up a hotel and turns out they dont have a spa service. it all started to click together so this time i went purposefully snooping, i logged in to her snap chat and theres where i found all of the messages, ZEE was saved under a completely different name, but when i openned the messages it was all there. in plain sight, the cheating the messages the hotel nights and so much more that i really dont want to say on here, (just thinking about it makes me sick)
i felt like she wasnt understanding exactly how much all of this was affecting me because i was dealing with mental health issues and so about a week before i found everything out i thought that if i had told her it might make her realise how bad its making me feel and she might actually try and help me and i did. boy was i wrong because as i scrolled through the messages i saw that the same day i told her about my depression, not even half an hour later she send him a message that i really would rather forget. and the dumb thing is that at the time i had the conversation with her, i had genuinly thought it had helped her understand what i wa going through and i was actually feeling better.
the morning i found out i went over to her house to confront her, honestly i dont know how to even describe the emotions to you guys. i went there and gave her the opportinity to come clean honestly for at least 6 hours before letting on that i had found out. and she kept on denying it and denying it so i told her to prove me crazy, prove me wrong and show me her phone and if theres nothign on there then i will accept whatever is heading my way. at this point she didnt know that i had seen the messages, and saved everything to my own phone incase she decided to call me a liar later on, like she was doing now. after abour 5 hours of back and forth she said she needed to go to the bathroom and went upstairs and didnt come back down for at least 30 minutes, i held on to her phone because i didnt want her deleting anything while she was up there but turns out she did exactly that just by logging in to her socials on her own laptop. then came down and proceeded to unlock her phone. and actually gave it to me with a smile on her face. i honestly wasnt even surprised when i saw nothing there. she lied to me for so long, whats another lie in the grand scheme of things.
of course then after she had done feeling good about herself i showed her everything on my phone and actually confronted her about it. and she proceeded to the thing that you would expect, cry and blame me, saying that she wasnt happy, (and there i was fighting my depression for over a year in silence just so i could try and help her without burdening her) i had no intention of coming home with her but i did, i had full intentions of divorcing her on the spot and exposing her to everyone but then i thought abouy our son and what he would have to go through if anyone ever found out, i dont know how it happened but we ended up going back home that day. its been a full month since then and i still cant get over it, my depression has gotten worse because of it, im constantly overthinking, had at least 3 panic attacks for no apparent reason and everytime im not doing anything my mind forces me to go back to the messages, the hotel, the pictures. everyday i feel more and more dead inside. she has said to me over and over that she wants to fix it that she still loves me and that she cares but where was that love when she was with someone else, where was that care then. i finally built up the courage to tell my parents that i was divorcing her but i didnt tell them the reason why because after all this time i still didnt want her to get in to trouble because her family is very very patriarchal and hot headed if you know what i mean. so i decided to tell my parents first.
because they didnt know the whole truth they were pushing to move away from the divorce and go in to fixit felix mode which makes sense from their side because like i said they dont know, to them this is all stemming from a breakdown in communication and disstance, simply falling out of love i guess. so they suggested a bit of a reset, no contact with each other for 5 weeks, gets urs heads straight and really think it through. the problem with this is that its already been the better part of a month and honestly speaking my minds only gotten worse and i really dont think 5 weeks will make any difference. on top of that because of everything that i had to go through because of her, the lies the torture before i found out, the messages, my depression worsening i dont think that i want to fix it, i dont think that i want to try again. but theres a TINY part of me that thinks that what if i do and its all okay, what if i stop overthinking eventually, what if i cant forgive someday and i dont constantly remind myself about everything that happened, what if it gets better, honestly with my headspace right now i cannot see that happening but what if.
apologies for the long post but believe it or not this was just snippits of the story. i'm not really sure what to do, am i in the wrong for feeling the way that i do? i know its my life and i need to make the desicions especially ones that pertain to things like divorce but i would like to know the opinions of others too. if anyone has any advice ide apprecciate it.