My husband and I have been married for almost 5 years. He is 32 and I am 23, he is Middle Eastern and I am American. There are several issues in our marriage. The first problem that came up was early in our marriage. He was emailing and chatting with a woman he knew from back home, I was suspicious about it and I found that they were writing very inappropriate things to each other (she is married also). I confronted him about it and he said that she was his ex-girlfriend and in the end I was the one feeling bad about spying on him, I feel it is wrong but had no other way to find out what was going on. Then a little later, I found him on yahoo chat rooms asking women what they look like and if they have cameras. I was mad, but let it go since several times we had gone to the chat rooms together and played around. Other small things happened during this time that I don't think mean much, such as he went to Washington DC (we were living in Northern Virginia) to visit a girl he had taken a class with before she went back home to Germany, but he told me he didn't get to see her before she left. Another thing that was somewhat big in the beginning was his interest in pornography. It made me feel bad at first, but now I see it just as a kind of entertainment when he was bored, except he always went to the Russian sites, he thinks Russian women are very beautiful. Skip forward to last year. In April of 2005, he went home to visit his family. During this trip, I found out that he didn't tell his family that he was married. When he got home, we had a long discussion and said he couldn't tell them because the tradition there would make his family outcasts because he married outside the religion (they are Druze). I still don't understand it, but I respect his wishes of trying to keep his family happy, but telling them wouldn't be telling the whole world, but he doesn't see it that way. Now comes the most recent and the hardest for me to get over. In July, my husband and two of his male friends go on vacation. First, they went to for a few days and then went to the Grand Canyon (we now live in ). He told me they had fun, but when they got back, he and his friends were fighting. He said it was because they didn't help with the financial aspects of the trip (they are both doctors and he is in film school). Until last month, I just accepted this. But then I started going through the cell phone bills and found a lot of text messages from a number in flagstaff . I checked his cell phone one night and I was appalled by what I found. The worst one was one he wrote to her that said, "I wished to sleep with you but gave up on it" along with other things such as how beautiful she is (she's Russian). Then I broke into one of his email accounts that had a different password. All of his other passwords include my name, but the password of this account is her name! I found the emails they wrote to one another and found that he met her in the Grand Canyon and took her and two of her female friends to . As is turns out he was mad at his friends because they weren't interested in her friends and left, then made my husband leave the girls in Vegas so they could come back to for their flights back home. All communication between them stopped August 30, or so I thought. A few weeks ago, he received a text message from her saying that she was in and then in , (he goes to school in , close to ) but she was leaving. He wrote her back when he went back to school asking if she was still around. Before that message, I confronted him and we had a huge fight. He said nothing happened, but didn't tell me he took her to but made me think he met her there, until I told him I knew. I tried to ask him why he would do it, but he just said it was none of my business and that I couldn't treat him like a child. The way he was talking led me to think that he thinks he can do whatever he wants with whomever he wants as long as he's not having sex. I tried to explain to him that it's ok for him to have female friends, but when he keeps it a secret and refuses to say anything about it, it is a betrayal. I am having a really hard time with this and don't know what to do. I have the girl's (she's only 21) email address and phone number and I have been considering either emailing or calling her to ask her side of the story or see if he told her he was single or married. I am also considering calling his friends that went with him on the trip to see what they will say. If you have any ideas about what I could do, I would appreciate it greatly.
2006-10-11
18:43:08
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23 answers
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asked by
lisakotrob@sbcglobal.net
1
in
Marriage & Divorce