u/Idk_anythinghelp

I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me, I lived in a land of bliss for 4 months thinking I’d managed to escape it, but here I am at 17 weeks post partum losing clumps of hair every time I shower.

I’ve already had to cut my long thick hair to just below collar bone level because of how thin and ratty the ends started looking, I’m absolutely heartbroken about it as I’ve been on a long and very painful journey growing my hair out after frying it all off with bleach a few years ago.

Please be honest, how long did it last until your hair stopped shedding? How much did you lose? I just want it to stop😭

I really need some advice from people with an outside perspective/experience. I’m currently 3 months postpartum, and I have developed a gut feeling about my husband cheating that I can’t seem to ignore.

I have previously caught him being, well, not exactly loyal so to speak. I’ll list these incidents for some context -

1. he used to work with his ex girlfriend around 4 years ago. There was one time we were laying in bed and she called him. I told him to answer it, and he seemed on edge on the phone and quickly ended the conversation - when I asked what it was about he said work, nothing important. I pushed this a little bit further and asked why she called him (without sounding harsh, she was positioned quite high above him and wouldn’t really have any reason to be requesting help) and he didn’t really have an answer. This escalated to him shouting at me to go through his phone if I’m that concerned, not expecting me to call his bluff as I tend to be relatively non confrontational. This time I did, and found messages of him replying to her instagram stories calling her fit, messaging her when he had to ‘leave early for work in the morning’ that he was on his way with photos of him driving etc. god knows what they were doing, but he was adamant it was ‘friendly’ and didn’t want to tell me in case it made me jealous. (He frequently used to talk badly about her to me during the time he was still ‘friends’ with her little to my knowledge.)

2. when going through his phone, I found messages to a girl he was seeing before me saying he wanted to drive his car into a tree because they were no longer speaking. These messages were sent a couple months after we got together.

3. for context, we both like modified cars. There was a girl local to us in our village which he was acquainted with very loosely and he knew I disliked, and he told me she asked him to come over and help wire in some speakers to her car. No biggie, I thought it was nice he went to help. Going through his phone I then found messages of him OFFERING to go and help her not her asking and he didn’t have much to say when I questioned why he lied.

4. we had issues on and off for a long time of him never initiating sex - there was always an excuse, he was tired, stressed, busy etc. fair enough, it is what is it. But In this timeframe I also found him visiting porn sites, looking at nude models on instagram etc so it was clearly something more to do with me rather than his libido.

5. about a year ago I opened his phone to turn off an alarm and he had left it open on Snapchat, where I found a conversation with a female friend of his where he had the notifications muted. When I questioned this, he said they were just friends, nothing happened and he muted the notifications because he didn’t want me to have a problem speaking to her. I’ve never once had a problem with him having female friends but with lying and secrecy and he knows this. There was nothing saved in the chat for me to confront when I looked, so god knows if he was telling the truth.

6. a few months ago while heavily pregnant I had a weird tingly suspicion, so I tried to go through his phone to see if I could find anything. I didnt find anything concerning, apart from a missing chat in his WhatsApp from a girl he works with (I know he’s messaged her before because he was having to keep her updated when we were at the hospital early in my pregnancy as he had to leave work due to me bleeding) but there was also calls in his call log from her, so why the chat was deleted I don’t know.

Now I feel like a complete idiot for staying after typing this all out, but he always seems to have valid reasoning when put on the spot and makes me feel like I’m overreacting. Recently I seem to have developed a gut feeling I really can’t ignore that something is going on. He seems more secretive with his phone, specifically when on Snapchat, his moods seem incredibly up and down without any valid reason that I’m aware of, and suddenly his libido has increased MASSIVELY. We’ve gone from barely having sex, to him wanting it every day if not multiple times, wanting nudes etc etc. I know that seems a bit backwards but the drastic change has put me a bit on edge.

Basically what I’m getting at is most of the things I caught him doing were a long time ago and I got past it, but I just can’t seem to shake the feeling that something is going on. Just based on increased libido and more erratic moods do I seem to have a reason to have concern, or is it just my hormones from being 3 months post partum making me overthink everything that’s previously happened? I really don’t know anymore and I’m exhausted