Well...letting you know that I am all still alive and kicking.

We've had a fairly serious problem pop up in the past few week.
Backtracking: about 4 years ago, I found that Wolfie was having some fairly intimate conversations via e-mail and cell phone with an old (female) friend from back in high school. It was not an EA, to my knowledge, but I threw a big fit about him sharing very detailed information about our R, and that he had been disclosing to her some issues that I should have known about but didn't. We went to counseling briefly at this time due to this discovery. I felt very strongly that the pattern I was seeing with Wolfie would lead to infidelity (geez, it didn't take a fortune-teller to tell me that).

The counselor strongly suggested that Wolfie start to communicate more openly with me and that it was really concerning that he didn't take me seriously when I say that something is a BIG DEAL and maybe even a DEALBREAKER.

One of the things I found out at bomb time was that this correspondance with ff went on continuously, as did others he had started having with other ff's.

OK, fast forward now. We're rebuilding and planning to make our R more technically legal by getting married (as opposed to the common-law like legal R we have now).

For the most part, I see him really trying. I see him wracked with guilt, but this is focused on beating himself up more than on looking at the damage head-on and addressing it. I'm trying to be patient. Some of the things that are really trying my patience are that he has not made an IC or MC appointment since he moved home last Sept. (despite repeatedly saying he was going to) and still has not closed down his PO Box in order to get mail at our house (despite promising to do so last December).

For several weeks, the name of the first ff "pen pal" kept popping up in my mind out of the blue. There is usually a reason for that kind of thing--as I have a highly developed sense of intuition.

So earlier this week, I asked him if he still talked to her. "No, not for a long, long time", he says.

The problem here is....even though he SOUNDED so sincere...I immediately knew he way LYING. I took me right back to the time before the bomb--when I felt every lie as if it were a kick in the stomach--and knew there was much, much more that he was hiding.

I told him that I feel I have a right to know basic things about his relationships with other women. I told him that what I cared about was that he not keep important secrets and that what I needed to know was that he had boundaries in his friendships with other women. I wanted to give him the opportunity to retract the lie and be honest with me.

He didn't.

So I contacted the woman in question. I told her flat out that I had no concerns about their friendship, so long as there was no reason to be keeping secrets.

I told her that I had asked Wolfie if they were still in contact, and he had said NO, but that I knew that wasn't true.

She confirmed that he had lied. She said that she had gotten a call from him early last year when he told her that he had cheated on me when he "told" me and I'd made him leave and he was going to go to MC with me because he wanted to try to make it work.

She said she told him that she was disgusted that he would cheat on me and called him "Peter Pan" and she didn't contact him again for many months after that.

She said that she had called Wolfie two weeks ago (that's what must have set off blips of intuition), and that they had emailed a few times since then.

She seemed to be a person that has a lot of integrity and was very concerned that he had lied to me about the contact.

She felt that maybe he just "doesn't get it" and was never going to really grow up and that maybe I should ask him to move out again because he really needed to face up to his dishonesty and what he was risking.
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I very gently confronted Wolfie about all of this yesterday. I told him that I don't have a problem with his friendship with women, but I do have a problem with secrets and lies. He said he had lied because he thought I had a problem with her--the email friend.

I told him that gave me zero confidence--that his rationalization for lying was because he thought I might have a "problem" with the truth! WTF kind of excuse is that! I told him that BS told me that I can't trust him and that if he would lie about that--he'd lie about bigger things too.

I am so sad. I am seriously wondering if there is some character flaw he has that makes him so much of a conflict avoider--so dishonest--that trusting him is a fool's proposition.

I have tried not to let this get blown out of proportion. I said these are my expectations:
1. have well-thought out appropriate boundaries with other women.
2. stop lying to me

He says my expectations are "reasonable", and says he understands my concerns. He's acting (somewhat) ashamed about lying and is having difficulty looking me in the eyes.


Please would someone remind me why I am trying to rebuild this R? Am I expecting more than he is capable of? Am I just setting myself up for more pain by trying to trust someone who is not worthy of trust?