Bttfly, thank you! I will read back through Cali’s thread. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope sometimes and the advice I get here helps me keep my balance. I had a good Easter...I hope you did too!!
Wanted to post an update. So, in my last post I was conflicted on my good conversation with W. As the week progressed, she called and texted a little more and said she missed me and loved me several times. This was a big positive and helped me feel better about where we stood. Still knew that it didn’t mean we were all better, but it helped me accept that it wasn’t just a 1 day feeling from her. Then she got home and things have been going pretty well. I feel like I can tell she isn’t recovered from MLC, but that she is making efforts to make things better between us. She isn’t replaying or cold shouldering me and our time together has been the most normal it has been in a while.
Then, last night I had a trigger moment. Wife was helping D with a project on her iPad. It kept locking and D kept having to tell W what the password was. D kept just unlocking it for her instead of telling the password and W said something snarky about it (jokingly). Well, that triggered me a little because right now I still don’t know the PIN to my wife’s phone since she changed it to keep me out of her phone...and I still don’t know what she changed the password to my cell phone account to. I haven’t brought it up at all because I haven’t needed to and I didn’t see the need. The convo between W and D triggered me though because her not wanting me looking at her phone was never really dealt with. I tried to not let it get to me, but in our convo the other day she said she wanted me to be honest with her and that she didn’t want us to sweep things under the rug.
So, after kids went to bed I said something to her about it. I basically said that it bugged me that she still wanted me locked out of her phone. At that point, after the convo we had, I was hoping that maybe it was just an oversight. Not that she still wanted me out of it but that we just hadn’t discussed it. I was wrong. I clarified that it wasn’t that I wanted to look at her phone, but that it bugged me that she didn’t want me to and intentionally changed her PIN so that I couldn’t get in. She basically told me that it bothered her that I didn’t trust her and that she didn’t want to be in a relationship where she felt like someone was constantly looking over her shoulder monitoring what she was doing. There was a lot of back and forth and although it wasn’t horrible, in the light of how things seemed to be going the last 2 weeks, it wasn’t good either.
Now I feel like I rocked the boat. Things were going ok and now we both feel hurt and emotionally drained. I know that I didn’t cause this and our issues need to be brought out so that they can be addressed, but I can’t help but think that I could have tried to give it some more time before bringing it up. She says that I will say something and if she doesn’t reply the way I want her to I get frustrated. She says that I seem to always be disappointed in everything she does. That isn’t true, and I told her as much...and she knows that she was exaggerating. But, it shows me that things weren’t going as well as I thought if she is not trusting me. It’s weird that she wouldn’t trust me, but I kind of get it. If she feels that I don’t trust her then it causes her to feel untrusting of me. Ex, if I don’t trust her and had access to her phone then I would be looking at it all the time.
Not that the trust is fully restored between us, but I really haven’t been worried that she is out having an affair. I am not worried about what she is out doing. My issues as of late have been more about the way she treats me in general, but that has been getting better. I guess the problem now is expectations. I have been expecting that because things have seemed better that it meant she was feeling better towards me. Turns out she still doesn’t trust me, and I don’t feel like I have earned that at all. I did look at her phone a few times, but even that was months ago. I’ve had to forgive so much and restore trust on my own and I feel like very little of that has been based on any effort of hers.
So now I have to figure out how to move forward after this. I told her that I still wanted to work things out and that it was important to be honest with each other. that this was something that had bothered me and I didn’t want to sweep it under the rug. Now we have told each other how we feel about it, and now maybe we let it go for a little while and get back to moving forward with things. I guess we’ll see how things progress. Just when you think you have things somewhat figured out...
