You Asked About: How To Know My Wife Having An Affair

Chas answers:

I’m really sorry to hear about the kinds of problems you’re having with your wife. Reading your post left me with a sinking feeling in my gut. I’ll try to be as objective as I can. Remember, this is only my opinion.

Have you ever heard the term “emotional infidelity”? It’s used to describe a spouse who is actively engaged in a strong, flirtatious, emotionally charged (but not, or not yet, physically sexual) relationship with some one of the opposite sex outside of their marriage. It can involve many activities together, frequent, often intimate, communication, extra time away from home, and secretive behaviors to the complete exclusion of the other spouse. The “straying” spouse partially, or even completely, cuts off genuine emotional connection and honest communication with their marriage partner, in favor of “emotional fulfillment” with the outside person. It may be that her emotional needs were not being met, either because of the structure of your marriage, or possibly lack of attention on your part, or possibly that she isn’t fully invested in your marriage or may not be emotionally mature enough for a marriage commitment.

Her behaviors are definitely of concern, some are very disturbing. Invitations to swim, attend church, and even to come over for a visit/dinner are typical and common friendship activities, but taken in context with other behaviors of hers, merit some concern. On the other hand, pictures of her and her friend in close physical contact that she did not originally make you aware of are disturbing, and the idea that she tried to hide them from you after the fact and could not give you a reasonable explanation is very disturbing. Did you say that she spent the night at her gay male friend’s house? What was her explanation? Were you out of town? Did she voluntarily tell you this at that time, or did you discover it later on your own? Under any circumstances, spending the night at his house, without your prior knowledge and then trying to hide pictures taken that evening from you is absolutely unacceptable behavior. For me, the thing that really stands out is that she has tried to hide some of these things from you and omitted others. In a healthy marriage there is openness and honesty, and a genuine desire to share the great things about our other friends and our experiences with them.

“My love”, “Hun”, “love U” are declarations of love and affection that are very personal and go beyond simple friendship, and it doesn’t matter what the author’s sexual orientation is, gay, straight, or bisexual. These statements stand on their own.

Posting a profile picture on Facebook is a public statement that says, “This is who I am and these are the people who are important to me and that I want to be recognized with”. If one is married and genuinely loves their spouse, shouldn’t that be the person in the picture that they want everyone to know about?

I don’t know your wife, and I can’t judge her. Nor do I know you or anything about your marriage and family other than what’s written here. It is, however, abundantly clear that there are some serious problems here, whatever they turn out to be. At face value, my impression is that your wife seems to have some major problems with her emotional priorities, the both of you probably need to take a look at your own part in problems within your marriage, and it seems like you might have some difficulty sorting out what you see.

The only thing that I can suggest is that the both of you seek some QUALIFIED marriage counseling. I hope there is something in here that was helpful to you. Best of luck.

Edward