I don’t think my partner cheated, but I still feel massively betrayed. How do I move forward?
Apologies for the length. I'm not good at being concise.
I (45M) have been with my partner (45F) for about 14 years and we have two children together.
My partner has always had very strong opinions about platonic friendships with members of the opposite sex. Specifically, she has always said she finds them weird, inappropriate and suspicious. Personally, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with those friendships.
She also has a lot of unresolved anger around her late father's affair and subsequent divorce, along with fairly low self-esteem. I've long felt that her deep suspicion and insecurity around platonic opposite-sex friendships stems from that. Essentially: if her father could have an affair, then men in general can't really be trusted.
When we first got together, one of my closest friends was a woman. I'll call her "Susan". Susan and I had met about five years earlier and we slept together a few times over a brief period. It was something that I regretted, and we mutually agreed we were better off as friends. From that point onwards, the friendship was entirely platonic, and it became an important close friendship for me. And we retained a close, supportive friendship over the next few years, during which time Susan met someone, got married, started a family.
We’d maybe meet once every month or two for a beer and a chat about life, books, whatever; go to the cinema from time to time in a group which included Susan, her husband and other friends. So, by the time my partner and I met, that platonic friendship dynamic had already been firmly established for a couple of years. I was always completely transparent with my partner about the friendship, it's history, and every aspect of our communication. I regarded it as a complete non-issue. Susan spoke very positively about my new partner and was entirely supportive of the relationship.
My partner, meanwhile, was very uncomfortable with the friendship and clearly felt threatened by it. It lead to many arguments. In practice, I felt I had a choice between constantly justifying the friendship against accusations that I wasn't fully committed, or letting the friendship die. I wanted the relationship to work and I was serious about her, so with a some sadness I allowed the friendship with Susan to fade away and cease. Essentially, I lost an important friendship in order to comply with boundaries that I didn't really believe in myself.
In the 12 years or so since then, my partner has quite frequently accused me, directly or indirectly, of not being fully committed or somehow being at risk of infidelity. This is despite the fact that I can honestly say I'm probably one of the least "player-like" men I know. I'm also very aware of her sensitivities around the subject and try to behave in ways that reassure her.
For example, just the other week she accused me of "not having her back" because she believed I was Facebook friends with a female friend of hers she'd fallen out with years earlier. I barely even use Facebook, never particularly liked this woman in the first place, and when I actually checked - it turned out I wasn't friends with her anyway.
Another time, she was buying something online and the checkout page had a random postcode pre-populated, for some unknown reason. She accused me of having previously bought something for a mystery woman and saved the address. Which makes absolutely no sense for multiple reasons, but it gives you an idea of the pattern.
Over many years I've felt viewed through a lens of suspicion, where my actual behaviour seems less important than some underlying assumption that, as a man, I'm inherently prone to cheating.
Fast forward to a few days ago:
We're having dinner, everything seems fine. My partner goes upstairs while me and the kids continue chatting. About an hour later she comes back downstairs in a really angry, snappy mood, which ends up causing an argument. I'm annoyed by the sudden shift in atmosphere and the impact it's had on the evening. I ask what’s wrong, but she won’t say.
I've never done this before, and I'm not proud of it, but I ended up checking her phone after guessing her pin. I wasn't expecting to find much beyond maybe some Googling or messages that explained why she'd suddenly switched in mood. It'd been happening a lot in recent days and I think my frustration got the better of me.
Instead, I found a Facebook Messenger chat going back about 20 years with a man whose name I recognised. She had previously mentioned having had a crush on him when she was much younger, but she had never told me she was still in contact with him.
There's no outright infidelity in the messages. His tone is occasionally a bit flirty, and the contact itself is infrequent, usually brief exchanges every six months or so. It looks like they were in light contact (via messenger only) before my partner and I got together, then didn't speak for several years before reconnecting a few years into our relationship.
But the messages are emotionally warm. They share thoughts and feelings around important life events, there are kisses at the ends of some of his messages to her (though not reciprocated), that sort of thing.
However, this is clearly an intentionally concealed friendship. She had kept it entirely hidden from me.
And while I don't personally see the messages themselves as constituting infidelity, I'm absolutely certain that if the roles were reversed and I had been sending those messages to another woman, my partner would have gone absolutely nuclear, as in: relationship-ending levels of anger.
I was furious. I feel like I've spent years abiding by her very strict boundaries around opposite-sex friendships, sacrificed an important friendship because of those boundaries, and denied myself exactly the kind of light emotional connection and sharing that she herself has quietly been maintaining through this hidden friendship. And despite all that, I've still spent years being treated as fundamentally untrustworthy.
Discovering that the standard apparently doesn't apply equally to her has made me incredibly angry.
It has also damaged my trust in her. I would genuinely have bet the house that she wasn't the kind of person who would maintain this sort of hidden friendship, precisely because she has expressed such strong opinions about them for so many years. It turns out she was doing exactly that, just privately.
When I confronted her, there was initially a lot of defensiveness and deflection, including attempts to equate her hidden messages with my old friendship with Susan. Eventually, though, she accepted that she had been wrong to keep this Messenger friendship secret. She apologised and said she would delete the messages and remove him from Facebook, though that wasn't something I requested, and I haven't confirmed whether it's actually been done.
I told her that wasn't really the point. The issue isn't the specific content of the messages. It's the double standard, the secrecy, and the years of distrust directed at me while she herself was crossing the boundaries she insisted upon.
That conversation happened around 24 to 48 hours ago. Since then, neither of us has mentioned it again, though the atmosphere has clearly been frosty. She has switched into a fairly angry, resentful mode around domestic chores and my own distant mood.
It feels as though the discomfort, shame or frustration she feels is now being redirected back at me in the form of anger and resentment, rather than accountability. And so far as I can tell her attitude is: "I apologised, we talked about it, it's done".
Personally, I don't feel that's adequate. I regard this as quite a significant breach of trust that merits genuine self-reflection and some acknowledgement that I'm not simply going to process and move on from it overnight. I'm not really sure what that would look like, though.
At this point I honestly don't know how best to move forward. I don't want to weaponise this mistake or use it as a permanent stick to beat her with. But equally, I don't want to minimise it or simply brush it aside either.