I caught my boyfriend on dating apps

Last year, I caught my husband on a dating site - actually, it was a swingers' or 'lifestyle' site. At the time, we were recently engaged and (I thought) very happy. 

His online profile had a fake name and age and he’d been messaging both men and women explicit photos. He'd also arranged hookups. When I confronted him, he denied it until he realised I’d seen the messages.

He reacted angrily at first, almost blaming me, but was later very remorseful. He said he hadn’t met anyone, but he enjoyed the flirting and getting people to hook up. I tried to believe him at the time and as there were no other issues in the relationship, we decided to stay together. We had some relationship counselling, but I didn’t find it very helpful.

Six months later we got married. But now, just under a year into our marriage, I feel increasingly paranoid - constantly checking his phone. I never find anything and I know it’s wrong, but I can’t seem to stop. 

I love my husband so much and otherwise our relationship is great. I desperately want to trust him again but I just don’t know how to go about this. We are talking about how I feel and my husband insists he loves me. I just don’t know what to do.

Ammanda says …

I’m not surprised you’re feeling this way. You don’t actually have what you thought you had and that’s a huge shock - it can’t just be set aside and forgotten.

Discovering something like this (quite apart from making sense of it) is highly challenging. But it’s likely that he means it when he tells you he loves you and wants the marriage to work. The problem is that you’re now in completely different places. I can well imagine that he wants to move on from this, whereas you’re looking for answers and reassurance that it won’t happen again. Despite wanting to trust him, you clearly can’t. You look on his phone and find nothing, but the doubts remain. 

So firstly, checking his phone is completely pointless. If he wants to continue getting in touch with swingers, he will find a way of doing that. So my recommendation is that you stop policing him and instead, start talking about what happened differently. Understandably, the way you’re both managing things right now is only adding to the problem and perpetuating a cycle of mistrust and resentment. I doubt that’s helping either of you, so perhaps it’s time to try something different.

Many, many people have fantasies about what they’d like to do/be/have/say/act upon. Sex is no different. Therapy rooms across the country are filled with clients whose partners have ‘uncovered’ a secret that if left to fester, has the power to destroy what they both so desperately want to keep hold of. The trick is to try and understand what all of this is really about. I’m sorry that couple counselling didn’t help you at the time. Often it does, but sometimes people aren’t quite ready to embark on that journey and maybe that was the case for you. It might be helpful next time around but in the meantime, let’s consider the problem you’re facing with your husband.

From your perspective, the worst scenario might be that he secretly wanted to have multiple partners, run away from your relationship and not care how bereft you were or what happened to you. There – I’ve said what’s probably worrying you most . So now that’s out of the way, let’s focus on a more likely scenario. I’ve worked with many couples who faced some sort of ‘finding out all of a sudden’ issue. There is always lots of pain and fear, often accompanied by a sense of betrayal. These are all completely understandable feelings. But it’s helpful to look beyond these and think about what’s happened in a different way. Many people fantasise about sexual situations. For some, it stays solely in their head. Others dabble a little and take the fantasy to another level. Social media equips people to act on their fantasy and potentially make contact ‘just to see what happens’ in ways that were never possible before. Occasionally they do hook up with others who share similar tastes, and yes, sometimes this does lead to relationships breaking down. Often though, the process of getting in touch with others is to satisfy a nagging concern that they may not be attractive, desirable or even likable. Sometimes too, it can be about wanting to get in touch with a part of themselves that they think a partner would ridicule or be revolted by. Given that we all grow up with different experiences of sexual knowledge and attitudes, fantasising about stuff can help us get in touch with things that have felt ‘naughty’ or’ forbidden’ or just plain exciting, but about which we may also feel a sense of shame or fear of being shamed. The curious thing about all this is that they often compartmentalise this side of themselves from everything else in their lives, including their partner. It not unusual to find that someone had almost developed a second persona, known only to themselves. This might sound odd but people are  - well – complicated and perhaps that’s the first thing that needs acknowledging in this case.

It sounds to me like you’re both stuck on ‘transmit’. You tell him how hurt you’ve been and he reassures you he loves you. Unfortunately though this isn’t reassuring you, so maybe changing the conversation might present some different opportunities. Have you ever actually been curious about what he’s done rather than horrified? That’s a challenging question I know but if you understood a little more about why it seemed important to him, what he felt the experience did for him, you might understand something about your own relationship together and whether you might want to make some changes. Now – for the avoidance of doubt I am not suggesting that you put aside your sense of mistrust, join a swingers’ club or even forgive him. But I am inviting you to think together about how you connect sexually and emotionally,  instead of rehashing the actual events. This would be much bigger conversation and would potentially help both of you to adjust how you want to approach and make sense of what’s happened.

I am struck by your comment that apart from this everything in the relationship is great. To be honest, I do find that quite hard to believe because what  is central to everything is your lack of trust. Relationships can’t function healthily where one partner is constantly on red alert about what their other half is up to. You say it yourself, the paranoia you feel now can’t be assuaged by his reassurances and that’s because something very fundamental has been ruptured. This can only begin to recover if you start sharing things at a deeper level. This won’t be an easy task. I’m sure that you simply wish that he’d never done it and things were just as you had always thought them to be. Yes, you can continue to check his phone but eventually, this will reduce you both to a frazzle. Instead, this really needs to be a joint enterprise to work out if there are areas in your own relationship that need attention. Only you can decide if you’re going to trust him again and he has to earn that trust from you. He didn’t do anything illegal but he did engage in something that although felt very exciting (and for many people a harmless and engaging pursuit), it nonetheless left you feeling betrayed and lied to. No one made him do this. I suspect he took the approach that what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt you. Quite possibly he thought of it as harmless fun and in some situations that’s all it is – but not when the result is lies within a committed relationship. I also think that although he denies it, you’re also left with the nagging doubt that had you not discovered the photos, he might have actually met up with someone. 

All of this needs talking about together. Now, potentially, you might discover that he can’t live his life without connecting to other people sexually. Some couples can work this out, but in my experience it nearly always ends in tears for one of them. I say this because I’m encouraging you to ‘dig deep’ and understand your relationship better and that does, undoubtedly come with a risk that you find something that you can’t live with. Then you will have big decisions to make. Having said that though, many people have a dabble and having done so, find that other things are more important. I suspect this is where your husband is at now. 

So, you have some choices here. You can go on phone checking which will wear you down and exhaust you or work on this from the angle I’ve suggested. It won’t be easy, but you tell me you love each other very much and that is often a sure-fire winner to getting through tough conversations.

Ammanda Major is a Relationship Counsellor and Sex Therapist and Head of Clinical Practice at Relate.

If you have a relationship worry you would like some help with, please send it to askammanda@relate.org.uk*

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