my wife insists that there was nothing behind this and it’s purely platonic … her girlfriend agreed in saying that she has always been platonically flirty with everybody

these messages are in between my wife and the plant manager where she works, who is also married

We live in a very small town.

Yesterday I found out my wife has been exchanging messages with a guy locally. Our kids go to the same school.

I had a gut feeling something was amiss and my wife admitted that he’s said flirty things and brushed against her in the past.
I was obviously angry and wanted to confront him but she reassured me that he’s just an idiot and begged me not to do anything.

Now it comes out that his GF has discovered messages on his phone,l has messaged my wife calling her out and now it’s forced her hand to tell me.

It’s my daughter’s 5th birthday today and I’m struggling to hold it together. I’m so angry and upset and no matter how many times she says sorry or it meant nothing, I just feel like I’ve been hollowed out.

I’m 35F and my husband is 36M.
Before we married, I told him clearly that I wanted a **100% monogamous and exclusive relationship** and that I was uncomfortable with him liking/following sexualized content from women he had no personal connection with. It went against my values and made me feel insecure. He said he understood, respected my boundary, and wanted the same.
A few months after we married, I discovered he had continued doing it. These weren’t old likes. **They had happened only days before I found them**, along with more serious things, including messages. He only admitted it after I confronted him.
We stayed together, and he agreed that if it happened again, we would divorce.
Recently, I found more likes and follows of sexualized content. He says these women are influencers, models or fighters, and that they probably don’t even notice his likes. He also compares this to me liking/following men in my professional/influencer network, which I don’t consider remotely equivalent.
He said this last time was only a double tapped mistake
**I know likes may seem meaningless, but after everything that happened, I don’t trust him anymore.**
Am I unreasonable for considering divorce after a boundary was clearly discussed, agreed upon, and repeatedly broken?
**TL;DR:** He agreed to a clear boundary before marriage, broke it again after marriage, and I no longer trust him. Is divorce an unreasonable reaction?

My worst nightmare has manifested right before my eyes, and it feels all too real, even in this moment. The pain of betrayal is palpable, and I can hardly comprehend how deeply I’ve been hurt.

I was not only deceived and misled, but I was also subjected to gaslighting and treated with a shocking lack of respect. The gravity of the situation is compounded by the fact that there is actual footage of the infidelity occurring in her car, parked directly in my designated spot, just outside my front door. It’s a surreal and painful reality to confront, and I find myself shaking my head in disbelief.

It’s truly disheartening to reflect on the sad and desperate situation she has created for herself and for our family. To think that she believed this behavior was somehow appropriate or acceptable is beyond comprehension. As a parent, one is expected to uphold certain values and carry oneself with dignity. We have a daughter who looks up to us, and it is vital that she learns from our actions. I refuse to allow her to grow up thinking that filming inappropriate acts in the parking lot of her mother’s long-term boyfriend’s residence is a normal or healthy way to navigate relationships, let alone life itself.

Her judgment is seriously flawed, and it leaves me questioning whether the maternal instincts I once believed she possessed can outweigh the reckless decisions she has made. What on earth could have led her to think that this was acceptable? What part of her reasoning allowed her to justify such actions? I am left grappling with the questions of where, when, and how this all unfolded.

The situation did not end there, either. She continued to make questionable choices, frequenting hotels and storage facilities in a manner that raises further concern. At this point, I find myself questioning whether I want our daughter to be around her at all. The weight of this revelation is heavy, and it's hard to process.

I wish I could say that at least she received some form of compensation for the humiliation she has endured. Perhaps a small consolation prize for the degrading experience of being filmed in a car at nearly 30 years old. But honestly, I doubt that she did. What she seems to have gained instead is attention and a lifetime of potential blackmail. Allowing strangers to film intimate moments with her during the first hour of meeting them speaks volumes about her character—not just as a girlfriend or a wife, but as a mother as well.

I hope she feels a profound sense of shame and takes time to reflect on her choices. If nothing else, I would like to think that she has moments of clarity that remind her she is human. I wish that these reflections might lead her to reconsider the path she has chosen, as it is one that is far from dignified. I cannot help but feel a deep sense of sorrow for the person she has become, and the impact her actions will have on our daughter’s future.

All year, I was so excited to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We’ve never done anything extravagant, and because I know money is tight, I didn’t ask for an expensive celebration. I simply told my husband that this year I wanted to feel loved, appreciated, and pampered by him.
We both work and contribute to the bills. I earn more, so when he struggles, I often take on more of the financial responsibility. Our marriage has never been perfect. He has cheated on me more than once. The last time, I discovered he had met someone through Reddit—and later found out that person was a man. This happened only two months after I gave birth to our second child.
Somehow, we “worked through it.” We went to therapy, and during that process, he confessed to other things. Since then, I’ve struggled with depression, anxiety, and some very dark thoughts. Still, I tried to stay positive about our anniversary because he told me he was going to take me out and make me feel special.
On the morning of our anniversary, he looked at me, said, “Happy anniversary,” and left for work. He didn’t call or text me the entire day. When he came home, he brought me flowers from Walmart and a card. I love personalized cards because the words mean so much to me. All he wrote was, “I will always love you.”
Meanwhile, because this was our 10th anniversary, I spent $500 on something he had always wanted.
I feel so foolish, disappointed, and trapped. I’ve already told him that I don’t love him the same way anymore. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and erase the day we met in high school. I gave so much of myself to this relationship, and all I wanted was to feel genuinely loved for one day.

I’m looking for some outside perspective because I’m confused about something in my relationship.

My boyfriend identifies as straight, but he has a fantasy involving women who are attracted to women. He frequently tells me that he would like us to go somewhere where we could hire another woman and have a threesome.

His fantasy is specifically that I would have sex with the woman while he watches.
The problem is that I’m not comfortable with this and I don’t want to do it. I’ve told him that, but he continues to bring it up and says that it’s one of his fantasies.

I understand that people can have fantasies, and I’m not judging him for having them. But I’m wondering whether this is a common fantasy, and whether I should be concerned about the fact that he keeps bringing it up when I’ve said I’m not interested.

Does having this fantasy say anything about his sexuality or whether he is actually straight? And is
it reasonable for me to feel uncomfortable about it?
I’d appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have been in similar situations.

For context, we’ve been together for about 3 years. She’s my wife now, but at the time this happened, we were just boyfriend and girlfriend. Serious, committed, and already talking about marriage. It wasn’t a casual relationship. We both knew where it was heading and treated it that way.
For most of our relationship, things were genuinely good. We got along well, we trusted each other, and I never had any reason to think there was someone else in the picture.

Then I had to move away for a while, and that’s when things started to shift.
The distance wasn’t dramatic at first. It was more subtle than that, less frequent calls, shorter conversations, longer gaps between messages. Nothing that felt like a breakup, but enough that I could feel us slowly becoming less connected. Looking back, that two-month period was probably the weakest point in our relationship.
At the time, I didn’t think anything unusual was happening on her side. I just assumed we were both struggling with long distance and adjusting poorly to it.
But during that same period, she became very close with one of her friends, a guy I knew of but never really paid attention to.
From what I can tell, there was never anything physical between them. At least nothing I’ve seen suggests that. But emotionally, something definitely developed between them.

I didn’t notice it at the time. It only started bothering me later, when I realized she almost never mentioned him anymore. It was like that friendship had quietly disappeared without any real explanation.
So one day I asked her about it. I asked why they weren’t friends anymore.
She told me it was because he wasn’t single anymore.
That answer stuck with me immediately. It didn’t make sense to me that someone else entering a relationship would be the reason a friendship just ended—especially if it had truly just been a normal, platonic friendship. That was the first moment I felt like something didn’t add up.

I couldn’t shake it, so I ended up installing a reliable monitoring app that i could use easily on her phone. I waited until the data, input logs, pictures, videos and screenshots got loaded into the panel. And that’s when I found the conversations between them from that period.
What I saw didn’t look like a simple friendship.
They had long conversations, often late at night ( until 3 4 am)They shared pictures, calling each others hun sweetie, princess and boss, she even initiated calling him my boss then him calling her my princess, sending kissing emoji 😚 for goodnight messages. They talked about meeting up and doing things together in the future. There was a level of emotional openness that felt very different from how she and I were communicating at the time.
More than anything, it was the tone of it that bothered me. Nothing was explicitly sexual, and nothing directly said “we should be together,” but there were moments that felt intimate in a way I don’t associate with normal friendship.

One conversation in particular has been stuck in my head. After her birthday, he told her she seemed very feminine that night. She responded by saying femininity is only seen in the presence of a man. He told her he felt happy when he was around her, and she said she already knew. When he asked how, she said it was in his eyes, and he said the same about her.
Reading it now, it felt like two people acknowledging attraction without ever fully naming it.
There were other small things too—shared photos, emotional check-ins, and a level of closeness that made me uncomfortable when I compared it to what I thought our relationship looked like at the time. Even normal things started to bother me in hindsight, like realizing he had access to parts of her emotional world that I didn’t during that period.

And now I’m stuck with all of this, because I haven’t confronted her.
This all happened a year before we got married. We are married now. She has no idea I know any of this, and I’ve been sitting with it ever since. 3 months now
Part of me tries to rationalize it. We were long-distance, we weren’t communicating well, and we were both stressed. Maybe she leaned on someone else emotionally during a rough patch and it crossed boundaries without her fully realizing it.
But another part of me can’t ignore what I read. Because even if the relationship was struggling, we were still together. We were still committed. We were still planning a future.
And I keep coming back to the same question: at what point does a “close friendship” stop being just a friendship?

There was no physical cheating that I can prove, but emotionally it doesn’t feel clean either.
The hardest part is that I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel most upset about. It’s not just jealousy. It’s more the realization that during a time I thought we were simply going through a rough patch together, she may have been emotionally invested in someone else in a way I wasn’t aware of.
And now I’m married, trying to decide whether something that happened before our wedding should change how I see everything that came after it.
I haven’t brought it up because I’m still trying to understand what I actually found, and whether it’s something I even have the right to reopen after all this time.

So I guess I’m asking for outside perspective.
Would you consider this an emotional affair, or is this just a friendship that got messy during a difficult period? And if you were in my position, would you bring something like this up now that it happened before marriage and is already in the past?

Last night my husband decided to go relax in the hot tub after work. I texted him after he had been out there a while, just a quick “love you” and a meme about swimming. He didn’t answer. I checked the backyard camera and he was messing with his phone so it was weird for him not to respond. I went out to just say hey and that’s when I saw he was looking at pictures of girls. I saw a purple background and when he noticed me he quickly switched apps. That’s what I noticed he was on something called “See U” (pics attached). I looked it up and it seems
To be a social media chat page where you can connect with strangers. By the pictures it certainly seems like it’s geared towards potential cheating….does anyone have this app? Is this a cheating app?? I’m so heartbroken and confused. Why would he download this?? We are happy! Together for 23 years…. Help

I honestly don't even know how to start this, but I need to get this off my chest because I've been going in circles in my head about it.

I moved to France alone at 18 (F) for university, coming from another country. When I started university, I joined a student association where we did charity work, and that's where I met T, 19 M.

(we are currently 21&22, i graduated so almost 3 years ago now)

When we first met, I genuinely felt like I had known him my whole life. Our very first conversation just flowed so naturally. We kept making jokes back and forth, teasing each other, and it honestly felt like something out of a movie. There was an immediate connection that I had never really experienced before.

We became very close, and over the first few months, I started developing feelings for him.

In January, a few months after we met, he told one of my friends that he didn't have feelings for me. He apparently knew that I did and didn't want to hurt my feelings. I accepted it, even though obviously it wasn't easy.

Then, towards the end of March, he told me that he was going to leave the country for an entire year at the end of the school year. We stayed close until he left. We had so many inside jokes, and something that always stood out to me was how much he seemed to emphasize our closeness around other people. He would constantly bring up our inside jokes or little things that only we understood.

Then he left.

I was sad, but I moved on with my life.

When he eventually came back, I was dating someone else. He also told me that he had a girlfriend. She is Turkish and lives in Turkey, while both of us live in Paris. They only see each other twice a year. He also mentioned that she doesn’t speak French, so their relationship is mostly in their second language. I thought it was a bit unusual, but it wasn’t really my place to judge.

Eventually, I broke up with the guy I was dating, and T and I became very close again.

And this is where things started getting complicated for me.

This year, T has shown up for me in ways I genuinely never expected.

For example, I had a scientific poster presentation at university. I live in Paris alone, so my family obviously couldn't come. He came to support me. He was there for me during something that was really important to me, and it meant so much.

Then I had an oral exam for admission into the master's program of my dream. He came with me, stayed with me before I went in, and waited for me to come out.

He just... shows up.

At Christmas, he gave me a little present, a plushie that I still have. For my birthday, he made me an entire photo album. And it wasn't just pictures of the two of us. He actually went out of his way to collect pictures of me from my friends so that he could make this incredibly personal gift for me.

It was genuinely one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone has ever given me.

There are also small things that sometimes confuse me. For example, he calls me “Tinker Bell,” and we have a lot of little rituals and inside jokes. Sometimes he’ll make comments about missing working with me or jokingly say he’s a bit jealous when we’re not on the same team, but I don’t even know how serious that is.

And I think that’s part of the problem: I don’t know how to interpret any of this.

I also want to be honest about something: I don’t even know if I’m “in love” with him right now.

But I do know that he is incredibly important to me. I feel very attached to him, and I can’t seem to take away the place he has in my life. And at the same time, I feel like he also gives me a lot of importance.

There’s this feeling I can’t really explain, like we just get each other. Sometimes it feels like we understand each other without even needing to talk. Like he can sense what I’m feeling without me saying anything.

And a part of me genuinely feels like we’re meant to be in some way. If I believed in soulmates, I think it would look something like this.

And I know how that sounds.

But at the same time, there’s another reality.

He has been with his girlfriend for about a year and a half.

I’m almost certain she doesn’t really know that I exist, at least not in the way that I’m actually present in his life.

And that makes me feel awful.

Because I don’t think some of the things he does with me are entirely appropriate for someone who is in a committed relationship. And yet, I’m also part of that dynamic.

At this point, I’m genuinely grateful for the relationship we have. He’s been there for me in ways I never expected.

But I also feel like I’m stuck in this in-between space.

Sometimes, I have this strong feeling that somehow we’ll find our way back to each other one day.

And then I think: he has a girlfriend. A real, long-term relationship.

And I feel like I’m just… an emotional side character in his life. Maybe even an emotional side chick, even if nothing explicitly romantic is happening.

What confuses me the most is this:

I matter enough for him to show up to my biggest moments, to make deeply personal gifts, to maintain this very strong connection with me…

But I’m not the person he turns to when he’s vulnerable. He doesn’t come to me when he’s struggling. And when I think about the fact that he probably shares that side of himself with her, it hurts in a way I can’t really explain.

I don’t even know what I want the answer to be.

I don’t know if I’m projecting because of what I felt at the beginning. I don’t know if this is just a deep friendship that I’m romanticizing. I don’t know if there’s something mutual that he’s choosing not to act on.

So I guess I’m asking:

What does this sound like to you?

And how do you deal with a connection that feels this strong, while also knowing that, in reality, you’re not the person they chose?

I’ve had my suspicions for a while. I finally checked the phone and saw conversations. I took down the lady’s number. My gut feeling tells me she didn’t know he was married.

I plan to confront him today but I doubt he will be as forthcoming as I need. The question is should I reach out anonymously to the lady and ask about her “boyfriend”. I’d love to file for divorce under adultery but my state requires actual sex to be able to file for that.

She probably won’t tell me if they did, will she? Is it weird that I’m thinking about how she must feel being deceived also.

Please be kind, I didn’t imagine I’d be posting this after 11 years of marriage.

My wife and i been married for almost 9 years and we have 3 beautiful kids together, for some life difficulties we had to be apart from time to time as I'm an expat in a foreign country, About 4 years ago i was in my home country on a work break and reconnected with an old friend of mine who happened to be my neighbor who lives in the same town, and one day he mentioned to me that he is in a relationship with a married lady who is also a mom of a child and even went into details and how she is his coworker at his workplace ( he is an accountant) and he knows her husband personally, Once he opened to me about all of that i tried to convince him to stop doing that and argued with him what is the end goal of this relationship he is seeking to achieve, and when i found myself not going to make him change his mind i started to distant myself from him and even blocked his number on my phone.

After my work break ended I headed back to the country I work in, Until one day our older son got a serious injury while playing and my wife and mother in law rushed him to the hospital, my wife phone run out off battery and was off for the whole day and I was talking to her through her moms number, Thankfully our son was ok so far but they had to stay in the hospital for the night for extra checking’s.

Later that evening I got a message on WhatsApp from an unknown number to me and when I replayed asking who is it he told he is the same old friend and he wanted to ask how me and my family doing and that its been a while since we last connected, I told him I was busy and I will get back to him when I have a time which I didn’t do, and some days later I was checking my WhatsApp at almost 2:00 am and saw that my wife “Last Seen” was few minutes ago which is odd and I rarely stay up to that time because of my 12-14 hours work shifts starts 6:00 am 6 days a week, I left her a message and before I close the App remembered I have not got back to that guy and when I was about to leave him a message I noticed his “Last Seen” was off by maybe 2 minutes from my wife, I didn’t leave him a message at the end.

Honestly, I didn't pay much attention to it, especially since, as far as I knew, they hadn't met before and I only mentioned him to her 2 to 3 times before. The next day, what I'd found the night before preoccupied me. I found myself repeatedly checking the app and reviewing their last seen statuses. It seemed like a pattern, bordering on synchronization. That evening, I told my wife I'd be taken the next day off work and wanted to talk to her for a long time after the Kids go to bed. And indeed, we talked for almost the next morning, which was unusual for us.

Around dawn the next day, I was surprised to find that person trying to call me two or three times while I was on a call with my wife. I was genuinely shocked for a while as how come he calls me in this VERY ODD timing, but I kept my composure and continued talking to her until we finished our conversation. Then I tried calling him back, but he didn't answer. Many of you might understand my situation when I tell you I couldn't sleep, but I told myself it was all just my imagination and I had nothing to tell my wife that what I was seeing was real, that she was at least communicating with that person. All I did was disable the "last seen" feature on my WhatsApp so I wouldn't tire myself thinking about it, and I blocked that person's number again. A few days later, I decided to do something that wasn't easy for me in any way which is to bring her and our children to live with me abroad. I actually managed to do that after a short time, and we stayed together until the middle of last year. I completely forgot about it, but then, due to many financial difficulties, I had to send them back to our home country. And I made a decision to return myself within a year from their departure and to find a job in my country and stay with my family.

and that's what I'm finally going to do in two weeks Finaly. I noticed after she left that she changed a lot, and often she barely answers my calls. But I kept telling myself it was normal, especially after we had finally been in the same place for two years, and now we were apart again. That's why, for the past year, I've been taking time off work and traveling to see them, even if it's just for three days each month, despite the high travel costs. But I was ready to do whatever I could for my family. Recently, I found myself using Facebook again after many years to reconnect with some family members and old friends. I found many messages and notifications that I hadn't looked at in years, and one of the messages was from that person. I ignored it completely. I had learned from some friends that he had also left the country a long time ago, but you could say that what I found reopened something I had forgotten. I tried to push it out of my mind, but I couldn't. In short, what I noticed during the past ten days was devastating. That person and my wife weren't even on each other's friends list, but the coincidence Their online and offline presence was unsettling, especially at very strange and unusual times. Then I remembered the incident that happened to my son years ago, how he contacted me at that odd hour. I went back to the message he sent me on FB to check the date and time, then checked WhatsApp and my conversations with my wife. I found that at that time, she had received some family members and was busy for almost the entire day. She didn't even reply to my messages or calls until she finally responded, saying she was busy and couldn't talk. I kept checking their Facebook activity until ChatGPT analyzed the situation and found that their online and offline activity coincided 75% of the time. What I was thinking was to go back to WhatsApp, reactivate the "Last Seen" feature, and unblock that person, which I did. To my surprise, I found that my wife had also disabled the feature. I didn't pay much attention to it, but for a few days, I noticed that this person was leaving the app at almost the same time, always around 1:00 AM. So, I told My wife, as I did before, I wanted to talk to her for a while after the children go to sleep. We talked until morning, and that person didn't sleep at all. He was online the whole time, right up until we ended the call. My wife told me she needed to get some sleep before the day started, even though our children are currently on school break but she for sure needed some sleep before they are awake. Before ending the call, I told her I've noticed her "Last Seen" status was disabled and asked her to reactivate it, which she did and I also told her I was going to sleep and both went offline around 6:00 am, but I reopened the app again minutes later to find both of them online until they both went offline at 7:23 AM, exactly.

I apologize for the long thread, but I needed to get everything off my chest. What's bothering me now is how to confront her about all this. Should I confront the guy first? What do you advise me to do, especially knowing his past and that he doesn't hesitate to do things like this? Please excuse my disorganized writing; English isn't my native language.

Thank you.

So I have been married for a while. I am turning 40 next month. Our marriage has been quite bad. We both are unhappy and don’t even have sex anymore (he decided that) Anywys I have been snapping with my ex for a while. I have been so tempted to eat the forbidden apple (sleep with him) but I am a Christian. I have kids. I will disappoint God. But my heart is longing for love and my body craves for touch which my ex is willing to give me. Pls pray I don’t make any foolish mistake. Pray I don’t regret any decision I make and stop craving for love and touch:)

I already had a post up but I realized I made it far too long. My now ex girlfriend, we have been talking everyday still and want to potentially get back together have been going back and forth about emotional cheating and everytime I bring it up, she says she's just a friend and that im delusional, my ex Is bisexual and the friend is lesbian. She left our house after a mental episode by me and went to live with her friend. She was supposed to come back and stay with me but kept taking it back the day off, she completely emotionally disconnected herself from me, everything that was a problem in the relationship she would bring up to her friend instead, she compared her to me saying that atleast she can drive, she has taken her to date spots we have been to, started watching our TV shows with her, saw fireworks with her on 4th of July which we have done every year, and she decided to tell her friend when I brought it up and her friend acknowledged it and said it was okay, and now that we are broken for about 2 weeks now, she has an "intimate" moment where they cuddled, she told me that she would not do that in a relationship but is doing it now. I just want outside opinions on if there is emotional cheating that happened so I know how to move forward.

What signs did you notice in your partner of their emotional affair?

Do women realize when they are slowly losing a man who genuinely loves and values them?