SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Somewhat related to my other post but a different perspective. Who suspected an affair and didn't listen to anyone's advice about not going down the rabbit hole of "excessive gathering of evidence" with voice recorders, cameras, or the biggest prize....an unlocked cell phone?

I'm the kind of person that just has to have details. It isn't enough to know someone "let something go too far" or "he's just a friend". I need all the details like I'm writing technical documentation for Nasa. We are in a really weird situation where we agreed not to lock phones but I have plenty of reason to want to dig through hers.

So, for those that crossed that ethical boundary of expected right to privacy, did it help you to know the details or do you wish you'd have just filed based on circumstantial evidence and divorced without it?

If you want to divorce you don’t need evidence.

So you didn't check? Or you weren't in the same situation of suspected infidelity?

If I hadn't gone done the rabbit hole I wouldn't have ever discovered how deep it really went. What I discovered on D-Day was only the tip of the iceberg and what I found and uncovered next was far worse.

[This message edited by crazyblindsided at 12:20 AM, Thursday, January 4th]

It’s controversial how far down the rabbit hole you should go after details. Some believe it’s a sadistic form of pain shopping.

I, for example, felt a great need for detail. I felt that I could not be expected to understand, reconcile, and someday, even forgive, something like this, unless I knew, EXACTLY what it was I was expected to holistically reconcile. I needed to know the depth and the breadth of the betrayal. I was looking for a deal breaker factoid that would make the painful decision whether to R or D, easier, more clear.

My WW claimed she loved me, that her affair was not the result of marital dissatisfaction, but her actions contradicted that. She claimed sex with me was better than with the AP, but her actions-again, contradicted that. I searched relentlessly for definitive answers, proof to back up her assertions or disprove them.

Also, I have an inquisitive mind and a very active imagination. Any voids, gaps, contradictions or mysterious dark corners in her storyline, drove me crazy. I felt that if I took her entire affair, from its genesis to its demise, and laid it out in an anatomical position upon an examination table and flooded it with bright unflattering light, illuminating every detail, and performed an autopsy upon it, I would finally get closure, one way or the other.

[This message edited by RealityBlows at 1:37 AM, Thursday, January 4th]

After dday2 I really didn’t care what my H did. In fact, I told him he was free to go and be with the OW or anyone else he wanted to be with. I was just no longer interested.

During the affair, I was finding out tons of stuff about what was really going on. How often they spoke but not what was said (they resorted to Skype).

But once my I don’t give a damn meter was on overload, I really didn’t care. That’s why it took so long to fully Reconcile. He had to convince me he was worth it and that was about a 1 year process.

To make a very long story short, I dug up all I could find on my own but could never find definitive proof that his affairs were physical. I didn't use a VAR, cameras, keyloggers, etc, because I didn't find out those resources existed until after we were separated. I considered hiring a PI, but it was too expensive; I might've dug up the cash or asked my parents for it if we had kids.

At the end of my miserable 3-year journey, I simply came to the conclusion that I didn't want to be married to someone who treated me like garbage, lied to me constantly, and didn't see anything wrong with having inappropriate relationships with other women.

I also had to use plain old common sense. If adults are attracted to each other, have ample opportunity to see one another, are saying "I miss you" and "I can't wait to see you," sending each other gifts, etc, then it's fair to assume they're fucking. The last time I did nothing but pass notes and hold hands with a "boyfriend" was 6th grade.

I'm not going to discourage you from "going down the rabbit hole," if that's what you want to do. But there are 2 important questions you need to ask yourself:

(1) What are you going to do when you find what you're looking for, if anything?

(2) Even if you find out nothing new, is this relationship--as it exists right now-- acceptable to you?

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 1:58 PM, Thursday, January 4th]

I’m a former cop and trained in investigative techniques. I think there are a couple of big mistakes we see here on SI regarding investigating.

The first one – heavily encouraged by many posters here – is to investigate to prove a predetermined conclusion. Like if you think your wife is cheating and all the investigation is based on proving she is.
Why is this a problem? Well… you can find dozens of lists called "signs your spouse is cheating" and if you find 10 lists with 10 items I can more-or-less guarantee you will find at least one thing on each list that your spouse does. Like if she locks her phone you will be told she is cheating. But if she gives you access to the phone you will be told she has a burner. If she changes hairstyle it’s a sign of cheating, if she doesn’t give a damn about her looks then that too is a sign of cheating… Basically… you can find "evidence" to "prove" she cheats no matter what.
Like if you have been secretly tracing where she goes for 8 weeks and don’t find anything suspicious then maybe it’s because there is nothing going on.
The solution is quite simple: Investigate to find the truth. That truth might be shes cheating, or it might be she isn’t.

The second problem is that we investigate to an excessive level.
Some years ago we had a poster that had proof his wife – on a work-weekend – spent the evening with her boss at dinner, and then shared his hotel-room. This was only like item number seventeen on a long list of circumstantial evidence (like – maybe it is "normal" for the boss to call his assistant "babe", maybe Friday nights are the typical "working late on the marketing-plan" days…).
Yet – despite all he had the poor poster wasn’t convinced there was an affair… He needed the glossy pics, the dna samples or whatever…
There is only ONE person you need to convince and that is YOU.

You don’t have to convince her she’s cheating. Somehow they sort-of-figure that out when making out with the OP… You don’t have to convince friends or family – they aren’t breaking a vow or an expectation. You only need to be convinced yourself.

Your posts are strange…
You state you have a no-secret policy as in the open phones, yet you don’t want to use that to check her behaviors. Then you are trying to catch her exercising her right to an open phone in searching through yours… Frankly this sounds pretty childish… and I’m not certain monitoring what she’s doing on your phone will give anything away.

I didn’t go down this rabbit hole mostly to spare myself from seeing their interactions. I did however ask and ask and ask questions over and over and had to learn the very hard way that XWS was not going to stop lying and feeding me bits and pieces at a time that may or may not be accurate.

Ultimately the more she lied the more I realized that she was not the person I thought she was, she was going to do whatever she wanted to and continue to do so potentially in secret. If she wanted to cheat or sleep around more there was nothing I could do to stop her. And I wasn’t in a relationship that represented two honest, authentic, considerate people that shared things with one another.

I opted to stop asking questions eventually and to see it for what it was. I let go of hope and decided I do not want to live a life where I’m paranoid at what my partner will do next, and certainly won’t live one where I’ll exert so much energy trying to police my partner and figure out what they’re up to.

We are in a really weird situation where we agreed not to lock phones but I have plenty of reason to want to dig through hers.

Think back to your wedding day...You agreed to many things, including fidelity to one another. You probably swore before friends and family that there would be no one else and we see how much she has honored that commitment. There isn't a person alive who would try to argue that your commitment to fidelity is on the same level as your commitment to not look at each other's phones. It is like comparing a paper cut to being disemboweled, they just aren't on the same level.

I see you have several posts on the board this week and it is quite clear that you are struggling, which is to be expected. Again, back to your wedding day, you didn't ever plan to have to be marriage police. You asked about ethical boundary crossing as if there was an ethical boundary for your WW to go off fucking another dude...again...you wouldn't even be in the position to have to peruse through her phone if she hadn't cheated on you. If you have done any reading around SI, you will find that cheaters follow what we jokingly refer to as "The Cheater's Handbook" and your wife seems to have purchased a copy and read it cover to cover multiple times because she is following the playbook.

Cheaters lie and then lie some more. They know what they are doing is ethically far more egregious than any snooping through a phone. Those who have nothing to hide don't hide anything. Take me for example, I am what we refer to here as a Madhatter, which means that my wife and I were both unfaithful to our marriage and in our case, it was for a duration, simultaneous. When I was in the midst of my emotional affair, it was rare that I ever let my phone out of my sight for very long and since my wife is the one who has paid our bills for most of our marriage, there were times that I needed to hand her my device to get a sign in code and whatnot, I would be an anxious mess, just hoping and praying that my AP wouldn't choose that specific moment to reach out. I've been no contact with my AP since December 2019, so about 4 years and change, fast forward to today, my wife had my phone for hours just the other day when she was paying some bills and in that time I went to the store to pick up a couple of items we needed for dinner, went outside with our son and shot hoops with him and his friend, came inside, took a shower and actually had to use my Apple Watch to find my phone only for her to tell me that she left it in the office charging when she had finished hours before. I have nothing to hide on my phone and it is the way to live one's life.

All of that is to say that your wife hiding her phone is the issue. If you have nothing to hide from her and are not being unfaithful, don't lose any sleep over her looking at your phone. There is a saying, "The hardest thing to escape is your own perspective" so I acknowledge that, but the thing I have to ask in 2024 is, why are your phones not locked? My iPhone is the key to my home, a key to my car, my wallet, my camera not to mention all the personal, private information that I have stored on the device in various forms such as pictures, emails, passwords, banking apps (and their passwords), etc. At the very least, you should have a passcode or touch/face ID enabled for both you and your wife to safely and securely access those sorts of things. Now, if you don't use your phones for all those different things, that is a bit different story, but not having some sort of lock on your phone is a practice I would urge you to reconsider if for nothing else than to protect your private information from being exposed.

I saw red flags, but they 'said' to me that my W was too involved in her work. She blew through a lot more than marital boundaries, but I thought she'd never do that. Also, I was pretty career oriented, too, and I never cheated, so I had every reason to believe she wouldn't cheat either. During the A, I did no investigation.

I asked her if she was cheating at least a couple of times during her A, and she denied it. On and after d-day, she maintained that our M was good before and during her A. I think she was an example of a WS in a good M who cheated because of lousy boundaries, not that that made me hurt less.

After the A, I was IN the rabbit hole. I asked every question I wanted to ask. I'll still ask a question if I want to.

I discovered my ex' affair by accident. My youngest was exhausted all of the time. He swore he wasn't on his phone late at night. I was checking his phone number online and saw a number I didn't recognize. It was constantly on the record and at all times of the night. I fussed at him. He was so confused and told me I must've accidentally clicked on his brother's because he swore he wasn't on his phone at those times with anyone. I double checked his and his brother's. Since it wasn't me and it wasn't the boys', I clicked on my H's. Bingo. When I examined more closely, I saw thousands of text messages and probably about 50 phone calls spanning a month. I started pulling the records month by month. I never needed anymore evidence than that. No married man had any business talking and texting a woman that many times and at those hours in the night. I confronted and later filed solely on the phone bill and his body language after I confronted him. Of course he lied. Hell, according to him to this day they were just friends all that time. I've never really understood how others can ignore the facts when they are staring you right in the face. Why continue gathering more and more evidence when you already know they're cheating? Or is it some kind of shock preventing you from pulling the plug until you see it over and over?
ETA: the youngest had mono and was tired because of that.

[This message edited by StillLivin at 12:27 PM, Monday, January 8th]

Duplicate post

[This message edited by StillLivin at 6:31 AM, Sunday, January 14th]