Starting Over
leahkate
member
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
How did you find out your ex cheated?
One of my best friends recently found out her H has been cheating on her. She's devastated. Last night she told me how she found out. She found an earring that wasn't hers in their car, asked him about it and immediately knew he was lying. He couldn't hide it and she found out that he'd been seeing a girl from work for the past 3 months. She's beating herself up for not finding out sooner; she even thought about blowing off the earring incident, but she just felt like she had to say something. So, it got me thinking:
1) how did you find out
2) how long had it been going on before you found out
Thanks!
Re: How did you find out your ex cheated?
I felt that something was "off" so I looked through XH's phone. There were texts that were obviously between he and another woman but he put her in her address book under her last name (like he did with all of his male friends). She lived OOT (could tell by the area code) so I looked through the phone records. Lo and behold weekends when he told me he was camping with the boys, he was really visiting her.
I have no idea how long it had been going on nor did I really care. XH was out on his ass shortly after that.
3/12 5 mi -- 49:22 Pace: 9:52
5/1 Half Marathon -- 2:11:22 Pace: 10:01
5/22 10k -- 56:29 Pace: 9:00
5/24 3.6 -- 29:03 Pace: 8:18
7/10 15k -- 1:44:46 injured Pace: 11:14
10/29 5k -- 28:24 Pace: 9:04
The police told me. I mean beyond the child porn he was arrested for they found communications and chats with legal age women. they also found a video of him with a woman that was dated during the time we were together.
I had a feeling something was off but I found nothing at the time to prove anything and I thought it was pregnancy hormones making me insecure. I knew he would look at porn, but the only stuff I had found was legal so I didn't care.
ETA for more info
I got a text message one day on my cell phone saying the password on me and my ex's online cell phone account has been changed (as a fraud alert - if i didnt change it I should call them...). So I called ex to find out if he had changed it and he said he needed to get on to pay the bill. The problem was I was the one who always paid that bill for years...so I thought it seemed weird he would just get on and pay it without me asking (he was not that kind of guy). I went online to look at the account and saw hundreds of calls and text messages on his account to the same number (that i didnt know) over just a few week period of time. I questioned him about it and said it was just a coworker and then he started hiding his phone...to the point that when he took a shower he would hide it in dresser drawers, pants pockets under a pile of clothes, etc. One day I finally got ahold of it and found some very very incriminating emails.
I later found out it was not a coworker, it was actually a girl he had met at a wedding we had gone to together for a mutual friend of ours a couple months earlier.
Seriously? I gotta hear this one....
3/12 5 mi -- 49:22 Pace: 9:52
5/1 Half Marathon -- 2:11:22 Pace: 10:01
5/22 10k -- 56:29 Pace: 9:00
5/24 3.6 -- 29:03 Pace: 8:18
7/10 15k -- 1:44:46 injured Pace: 11:14
10/29 5k -- 28:24 Pace: 9:04
Clarified below
Fvck me. I think I remember your OP on this....
3/12 5 mi -- 49:22 Pace: 9:52
5/1 Half Marathon -- 2:11:22 Pace: 10:01
5/22 10k -- 56:29 Pace: 9:00
5/24 3.6 -- 29:03 Pace: 8:18
7/10 15k -- 1:44:46 injured Pace: 11:14
10/29 5k -- 28:24 Pace: 9:04
I knew in my gut for a while - the hiding of the cell phone, acting "off" if I wanted to drive his car, change in sex drive, not coming home at night...
I filed for divorce before I ever confirmed that he was cheating, but I didn't really feel a need for the smoking gun. I received the actual confirmation a couple of months later when one of his friends accidentally texted my cell phone to congratulate him on his hot girlfriend. I played along and the friend spilled the beans. I never told XH that I knew, and he never mentioned it either.
I don't know how long it had been going on. I have a couple of theories. I think the actual affair started a few months prior to our separation, but I think they had met a few years prior to that.
Lack of love (stopped kissing/hugging/touching me) coupled with suspicious behavior (not inviting me to movies, parties, vacation, excess computer use with password protection) and lying (claiming his online dating account from a few years back, that I had blown off at the time as a one time-meaningless event, had been created by BOTH of us - so we could laugh at the questions together
For the most part, XH never really acted differently at home. He was home when he said he should be, he wasn't gone on the weekends to places I couldn't confirm (like hanging out with my dad), etc. However, I guess he didn't need to be, seeing how he worked 8-10 hours a day with the OW.
I had my suspicions but no physical proof. Two weekends after XH told me he was done, he texted to tell me he was at the bar with the OW, and only her. He never came home that night. I never went through his phone, but I had other ways of getting the OW's number. I logged into our Sprint account and saw multiple calls between the two of them, several times a day. This continued after he moved out and up until he got his own phone plan.
He still won't come out and admit it, but I'm not stupid.
I had a sneaking suspicion
Overall, I heard from a friend that an ex co-worker bragged about it. He denied, but I have no doubt he cheated with her.
My situation was different in that I had already kicked him out when I found out he cheated and honestly, the drinking and abuse was so bad, that the cheating seemed like nothing...just another reason to add to my decision.
1) I used our office computer to check my email one morning and found his email was left open. There were emails back and forth between him and his mistress that detailed their sexual escapades.
2) He admitted it had been doing on about 2 months, but I think it had been going on longer than that in retrospect (about 6 months).
Someone hacked into his email account (that I didn't even realize he had) and forwarded me conversation histories.
After we seperated, we got seperate cell plans and he apparently had to get an email address to go with his phone since it was a Google based phone. I knew nothing of this since we were seperated and if I ever emailed him, it was to the address I knew he had since we were together.
So I got an email from a weird email address that had multiple conversations between him and my then BFFs. I never suspected it. I never would have dreamt it, actually. I broke down at work, and finally called him and said we needed to talk. He played dumb, and I told him that someone had apparently screwed him over...because I knew everything.
I drove to his house, yelled at him, etc. He alerted my BFFs to let them know that I'd found out.
Granted, all of them swear there was never anything physical. Just the inappropriate conversations. It was still cheating.
What sucked is that he had accused me all along of cheating on him, and I never had. Not once. Now I know why he was so adamant. Cheater's guilt.
I knew something was off for a few months. In December 2010, I looked at his phone and found emails between the two with "I love yous" and "Hey beautiful". Confronted him that night and he admitted bits and pieces. After more digging, I found out that they had been flirty/inappropriate as early as October 2009 (about 2 months before we got married). More came out as time went on, but I still don't think I know the whole truth, nor do I care anymore.
I looked through his email. I actually wasn't looking for cheating, he had just seemed distant in general and it seemed like we weren't "really" talking anymore. A lot of his friends that were girls had warned me that no one gets all the way in with him, and I guess I was just kind of curious what he talked to his friends about on a regular basis, since it didn't seem like he was talking to me about much of anything.
Turns out he was having incredibly flirty/inappropriate conversations with both other women and with men - it pretty much seemed like whoever would listen he would flirt with. Including very graphic emails to other people describing all of the sexual trysts he was having with other men and women (still not sure which of these were true, since many of these emails had escapades taking place during weekends we were together).
After that I went through the phone records, and found ex-girlfriends and a host of other things. I bought data restore software for his iphone and made him hand it over, which he did after stating that once I looked at it I would leave him. As if the other stuff wasn't enough.
He had developed such an alternate life that I'm still not sure the extent of it or what kind of physical cheating he did or with how many people. Those issues are for the next person to figure out!!
I suspected and installed a key stroke think on our computer, that gave me his email password and voila....
Admittedly I took him back and got burned again...and again...lesson learned the hard way
I had so much evidence, it is really sad that it took me so long to walk away:
1) His account on Adult Friend Finder (It was to find his dad who had cheated on his mom, but all the profiles he looked at where female, hmmm.)
2) Inapropriate text messages (inside joke with a work friend, HAHAHA).
3) Late night phone calls he would take in another room/go outside for
4) e-mail complete with a meet up time to "blow off some steam and get rid of stress" (It was spam mail and he responded because it was funny...)
5) He didn't come home multiple times (He was drunk and crashed at a friend's, didn't want to drive)
6) out of town trips with a "friend" that I was not invited to and he would not call me during.
7) AFTER I finally left and was moving out, I found professional boudoir photos of one of the girls I was suspicious about FRAMED and hidden among books. She moved in with him into what was our apartment about a week later. She had even lived in another state.
Your friend shouldn't beat herself up. She did nothing wrong, HE did.
Where did you get this? My H has a work phone with a password that he supposedly can't disable when he is home. But I get a feeling that something is going on and I think getting to look through his email might help
We weren't married but I was with him for 5 yrs living together. He owned his own company and pretty much never went into the office just collected a paycheck. He spent a lot of time in his hometown supposedly to spend time w/ his grandma since she was on her way out. By a lot of time I mean like 6 months out of the year. I got a call at like 2am from that area code and when I answered the caller hung up. I called it back and it went to a female's voicemail. I found an apt and moved out before he return from his trip out there and I took pretty much everything. He would never admit to it but I am pretty sure it was going on for a few years.
edited to add... his phone was NEVER out of his sight, like he even hid it when it was charging and took it in the bathroom with him.
My work phone has a password that cannot be disabled, there is absolutely zero way to disable it. The password is to protect the private company data stored in the phone, not to protect me from someone seeing what number I dialed.
He started to take his phone with him everywhere - which he normally did not do. Like the bathroom. He kept close tabs on it.
The first time I caught him, I was checking our cell phone bill to see if FIL had been going over his minutes again (we added a phone to our plan for MIL and FIL because they didn't have a cell phone and wouldn't pay for one on their own). I found calls dating back several months between him and a woman he met while traveling for work. He lied about this, even going as far as to call AT&T and go through this whole charade about disputing the calls and added the "Smart Limits" feature to our account to block that number. He didn't fess up to this until this spring and it happened 3 years ago. Supposedly, he had ended things with this woman just a few weeks before I found the calls. It's hard to say, though, because he only talked to her when he was traveling and he hadn't been on the road in a few weeks. I found out a couple of weeks ago that he added her as a contact on LinkedIn last summer, which really doesn't make any sense since they had NO business dealings together. She works in a hotel and he works for a manufacturing company - she was just some slut he met at a bar. I can only deduce that he either 1) had plans to start communicating with her again or 2) never stopped communicating with her in the first place.
The second time, it was tons of calls and texts on our cell phone bill. He always paid the bills, so I never really thought about it, but he started acting distant, talking about divorce, and always had his phone with him. When I looked, he had been calling and texting a woman from work for several weeks. I think there were like 120 calls and texts in a 3 week period. (He's got a genius IQ, but apparently doesn't learn from his mistakes, although this stuff makes me look pretty stupid too.)
A few months later, after it was supposedly over, I found out he was still communicating with her while I was checking out the features on his new phone. He had been writing to the tumblr blogs that the two of them maintained in order to go behind my back to talk to each other and it was still up in his browser on his phone.
He now has a company cell phone, which is Cricket and has no call history on the bill, so if he and I got back together, I'd never know if he was calling or texting someone else. After writing all this out, it sure looks like I'd be an idiot to get back together with him, doesn't it?
I found out because I finally decided to look through my husbands truck and found condoms. A week earlier I had found text messages on his phone from another woman. I only looked because I had a pretty clear idea that there was something going on.
I don't have any idea how long it all had been going on-possibly for our entire relationship. Multiple women, multiple incidents.
I was the dumb one who knew he cheated on me while we were dating - but thought it was early early on and it was done. (He just admitted that to me one night while he was drunk and wanted to break up with me.)
The time he cheated on me while we were married?
He had been out of town with some family members (and this I know was the truth - I talked to him and the phone was passed to another for a moment to say hi) & upon his return - we were getting ready for bed that evening and I noticed scratch marks on his back. ( I was ALWAYS hesitant of him going away on this family weekend (guys weekend) because previous years they had been in fights and he had cheated before up there. Not to mention, he was always very guarded with his phone.) He said he did that just a moment ago - that his back itched, and he showed me he could reach them (it covered his back). I didn't push the issue because if I questioned his faithfulness then *I* was the one who was cheating, his thoughts - not mine.
I was sitting in bed playing a game on my phone waiting for him to shut the light off - he did and got settled but wouldn't stop moving in bed and kept sniffling. I asked if he was getting a cold or what the matter was .. he started crying and went to the bathroom, came back and said "if i tell you, you will leave me." Right then I knew. The first night he went up he met up with the same "lady" as before and spent the night there - her husband was overseas with the military. Real nice huh? Supposidly she was going to divorce him upon his return home. -eyeroll- The marks were, by that point, 2, almost 3 nights old. YUCK!
They were to stop contact - but he left his phone out a few times while in the shower and forgot it at home - so of course I looked - they were picture mailing each other and texting/calling yet. She was in our area one weekend I guess and they met up while I was working ... I was done with our marriage by this point.
We still stayed together - and the final straw was he sent me a picture mail of him standing in front of the mirror showing me his abs (and that was it) but it was sent to others and he denied it. Why would you need to send that (a) to me, and b - to anybody else?
I went to check my email one day on his computer and when I typed in the email inbox address, a different email inbox popped up that I had never seen before. Turns out, STBXH created an alternate email so he could communicate with women via Craigslist, Adult Friend Finder, Match, and HotorNot.com.
Upon more searching in his alternate email, I found that he was sending penis pictures to other women and finally that he had gone on a date with a girl where they, at very least, made out in his car.
I checked his phone and saw many pictures and calls/texts from a variety of women. It made me sick! I don't know how long it was all going on or how many women there were, but that was enough for me. I left two weeks later.
As many others have said in this post, all the signs were there. He was distant and not very attentive to me physically or emotionally. We rarely talked and hung out with each other and when we did, he was always picking fights.
In retrospect, I am glad it happened because I had been looking for a reason to leave for a long time. God works in mysterious ways!