She Found Out!!!

[Spurned]

Ha ha. Well, my secret methods of spying on my wife have all been found out! After I served her the divorce papers, she called and asked to try to work it out.

 

So we've had a hellish last five or six months of breaking up, getting back together, therapy, tears, a little bit of laughter. Rebuilding trust, as it were. And all the while, right or not, I have been checking her voicemails, emails, bank accounts, to see if she was hiding anything from me and still in contact with the OM, without her knowledge.

 

So as part of the whole "please let's not hide anything from each other" I gave her all my passwords to my accounts, and for whatever reason, she checked my cell phone account and found out I've been dialing her voicemail access number.

 

So I came clean and told her I had been continuing to spy on her to make sure she wasn't still seeing anyone else. She was freaking livid, angry that I was so obsessive (I called multiple, multiple times a day to see if the OM was leaving her messages, which thankfully he wasn't recently and I was happy that it seemed to be over between them).

 

So she's convinced I'm a psycho for spying on her and wants the divorce again. Maybe it's better this way, once the trust is gone it's freaking hard to get it back, and I didn't like the person I had become, always wondering if I was going to get hurt again.

 

Ah, life.

[clubking]

I understand your desire to know the truth becuse having an affair hurts so bad and all of your trust is gone. However I have learned from experience that if you do not give trust unconditionly you not be able to move forward. You are going to have to expose your heart and soul again if you want to trust to be rebuilt, and it will not happen overnight. I had the same feelings of mistrust and they are a deal killer. If you truly want your relationship to work you need to trust blindly and wish for the best. You spouce will see that you are exposing your self to hurt and will not try to hurt you again. But you can not spy on your wife, all it does is create a gap between you. Best of luck.

 

Clubking

[Owl]

CK-

 

I don't completely agree with you my friend. Unconditional trust is an impossibility. Trust isn't given...it's EARNED.

 

You didn't hand your wife your car keys and wallet on the first night you met did you? Give her your house key and tell her make herself at home?

 

Nope...you did EVENTUALLY reach a point where you felt comfortable doing these things...because by that time she'd EARNED that trust by demonstrating trustworthy behavior over a period of time. She SHOWED you that she could be trusted with these things.

 

Now..in our poster's case, his wife has SHOWED him that she cannot be trusted...by having an affair. This resets his trust level for her to 0. At least when it comes to honesty and emotional issues.

 

So...he should just 'unconditionally trust' her again? Nope...because the only thing he knows is that she isn't trustworthy anymore. How does she GET that trust back? Same way she earned it. By demonstrating trustworthiness...only after a let down like this, her trust level is actually negative...so it takes LONGER to build it back up. Or...it takes more work to build it back up now than it did then.

 

What SHOULD have happened here is that the poster should have INSISTED on checking her emails and such as part of a possible reconciliation to begin with. Part of recovery from something like this is for the WS (wandering spouse) to become "an open book"...meaning that they no longer have the potential to maintain secrets from their spouse.

 

And, he should have been checking up on her...not because he truly expects to find something, but to reassure himself that she IS being honest now.

 

Exactly what my wife and I did after HER affair. And it worked. I still have her logins and passwords to her IM and email accounts...but haven't looked at them in AGES...because she's rebuilt and regained that trust.

 

I'm not sure how long ago that affair was, but it sounds to me like the two of you never really worked on recovering from that. Go over to marriagebuilders.com and read up on some of the tools there you can use to help yourselves with this.

 

I got lucky...we had an MC who really did understand both sides in what happened with my wife and I, and was able to help BOTH of us learn how to rebuild our marriage.