She Tried to Sell Him the Brooklyn Bride One Time Too Many

Cheryl Lavin
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 10:45:14 -0800
Lifestyle

Dear Cheryl: My wife is extremely outgoing with both men and women. She's always making new friends, and she works at keeping relationships with high school and college friends alive. But three things have been bothering me.

Issue No. 1: Several years ago, I found a man's cellphone number in my wife's cellphone. They had dated once many years ago. I asked her if she'd been calling him, and she said no. Later that night, I looked up old phone records and found they had talked on the phone many times, including one call the morning after she lied to me.

I confronted her, and she apologized for lying. She said she was worried about my health and did it to spare my anxiety over nothing.
Updated: Fri Jan 24, 2020

Dear Cheryl: My wife is extremely outgoing with both men and women. She's always making new friends, and she works at keeping relationships with high school and college friends alive. But three things have been bothering me.

Issue No. 1: Several years ago, I found a man's cellphone number in my wife's cellphone. They had dated once many years ago. I asked her if she'd been calling him, and she said no. Later that night, I looked up old phone records and found they had talked on the phone many times, including one call the morning after she lied to me.

I confronted her, and she apologized for lying. She said she was worried about my health and did it to spare my anxiety over nothing.

Issue No. 2: Recently, while checking our phone bill, I found she had been texting an out-of-state number up to 200 times a day. I installed spyware on our home computer and captured two conversations that made me uncomfortable.

One was a discussion in which the man said he was lonely. My wife responded, "I could make you less lonely." In another conversation, he talked about his sex life.

When I confronted my wife, she said they were just joking around, and many of the texts were just one or two words. She had been texting him to see if he wanted to get set up with a friend of ours who's in a dysfunctional marriage.

Based on her previous lie, and not knowing this man, I was skeptical, jealous and insecure. I asked permission to back up her cellphone to retrieve the deleted text messages. Sometime that day, her phone was lost and has yet to be found. She blamed it on our daughter, who, it's true, is very absentminded.

Issue No. 3: While I was out of town, my wife took our kids to visit my sister out-of-state. She told me she would be having ice cream with a male friend and his kids. When we got home, she didn't mention that she also had dinner with him, went back to his house and didn't get home till 3 a.m. My sister told me.

When I confronted her, she said I was overreacting and that there were three others present. I asked their names. She gave them to me, but without any contact information. I searched everywhere but couldn't find any record of them.

At times, I'm able to dismiss these incidents as perfectly normal for a woman as outgoing as my wife. Then my logical brain kicks in and tells me she's cheating on me and I should no longer trust her.

I recently flew into a rage when she showered a male friend with attention at a party (in her defense, she shows everyone, male and female, a great deal of attention). The following day, I told her I hated her and no longer loved her. We'd been growing apart for months, mostly because I'm unable to reconcile my feelings about these past events.

I know something has to be done to save my sanity and our marriage.

Here's my question. Do I have valid reasons for my insecurities? — Skeptical

Dear Skeptical: Yes.

Readers, what do you think? Is Skeptical right to be skeptical? Do you believe his wife's excuses?