Dear Joely: Is She Cheating, or Am I Losing My Mind?

When the facts are thin, but the fear is overwhelming.

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Dear Joely,

I’m 22, and I’ve been with my girlfriend for three years. We met at university over lunch at one of the campus cafes, and we built a close bond from there. I’m completely in love with her.

Lately, she’s been a little distant and needing more time to herself. I understand, because she’s very busy with her new role as an associate wealth advisor. It’s an exciting step for her, and I’ve tried to be as supportive as I can.

Since we got together, we’ve always spent Friday evenings with each other. Over the years that has looked different, but we’ve always been together. Recently, though, she has begged off a few times, saying she’s tired or needs to catch up on work. It struck me as strange for a Friday, especially at our age, but I respected her decision.

Then, the other day, a friend of mine was acting oddly over lunch. It turned out he had something to tell me about my girlfriend. He’d seen her having dinner with another guy, and it looked cosy. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to break the news, but he felt that in my position he would want to know.

I’m gutted. On the night in question, she had told me she was catching up on paperwork and didn’t want to fall behind. I believed her.

When my friend told me, I panicked. My heart was pounding, I could hardly breathe, and I had to go home early from work because I couldn’t concentrate. I haven’t confronted her. I’ve seen her a few times since, but I feel like I’m watching myself from above, and things don’t feel the same. When her phone buzzes or rings while we’re together, I can’t help feeling it’s him.

My heart is shattered. I can’t focus on daily tasks, and I cry at night. I’m embarrassed to feel this way, but I do, because I love her.

Please help me find a way forward.

Yours
Dying inside

Dear Dying Inside,

First, a small but important distinction: your heart isn't shattered. It's terrified of being shattered. And at the moment, your imagination is doing a remarkably convincing impersonation of evidence.

Let's examine what you actually know.

Your girlfriend has been less available lately. She's started a demanding new job. She's missed a few Friday evenings. And a friend saw her having dinner with a man who wasn't you.

That's what you know.

What you don't know is who he was, why they were together, what happened afterwards, or whether anything romantic is going on.

Now, I'm not going to insult your intelligence by suggesting that everything is probably fine. A cosy dinner with an unidentified man, on an evening supposedly devoted to paperwork, deserves an explanation. But it doesn't yet deserve a conviction.

And you've already sentenced yourself to the worst possible outcome.

There's a peculiar cruelty to suspicion. It doesn't need proof to make you suffer. It simply moves into your head, rearranges the furniture and starts answering questions nobody has asked.

Every buzz of her phone becomes evidence. Every moment of distraction becomes confirmation. Every affectionate gesture becomes suspicious because, if she's being unfaithful, surely she must be compensating for something?

You can't win an argument with a story that keeps rewriting itself.

But here's something I want you to consider.

For three years, Friday evenings have belonged to the two of you. That's rather lovely. It's also possible that, at 22, your girlfriend is discovering she needs a little more room for herself, her career and other relationships.

A change in routine isn't necessarily a change of heart.

Nor does loving somebody entitle us to every Friday evening for the rest of their lives.

What troubles me isn't that she wanted time to herself. It's that, assuming your friend's account is accurate, she may not have been straightforward about how she intended to spend it.

And that brings us to the conversation you're avoiding.

You need to have it.

Not an interrogation. Not a dramatic confrontation with screenshots, timelines and the sort of questioning usually reserved for suspects in police custody.

Just an honest conversation.

Tell her you've noticed some distance between you lately. Tell her that a friend saw her having dinner with another man on an evening when you understood she was working. Tell her that you're upset and confused, and ask her what's going on.

Then do something extraordinarily difficult.

Listen to the answer.

Not merely for the words you most fear hearing. Listen to what she actually says.

She may have an entirely innocent explanation. She may have been less than truthful because she wanted an evening to herself and didn't know how to tell you. She may be struggling with the relationship. Or she may indeed be seeing someone else.

I can't tell you which. Neither can your friend.

And here's the uncomfortable part: you cannot protect yourself from an unwanted answer by refusing to ask the question.

You're already suffering as though you've lost her, while continuing to behave as though nothing has happened. That's a particularly miserable arrangement, and one that offers neither of you much chance of repairing anything.

One more thing.

You say you're embarrassed by how deeply this has affected you.

Why?

You're 22, you've spent three years loving someone, and you're frightened that the future you imagined together might disappear. Of course you're upset. Being young doesn't make love a rehearsal.

But please don't confuse the intensity of your fear with the accuracy of your suspicions.

Your feelings are real. Your conclusions are still provisional.

And if the answer turns out to be the one you dread, I promise you this: discovering that somebody hasn't loved you faithfully does not mean you were foolish to love them wholeheartedly.

For now, though, put down the imaginary evidence, stop conducting silent trials every time her phone vibrates, and talk to the woman you've spent three years getting to know.

She deserves the opportunity to tell you the truth.

And you deserve to hear it.

Yours, withholding judgement until the evidence is in,
Joely

Dear Joely: My Wife Wants an Open Marriage. I Want My Wife.

She wants to experience other men. He can’t bear the thought of it.

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Dear Joely,

I'm a 35-year-old male. I have been married for 9 years to a woman who is currently 27. Although she was very young when we met, we have a great relationship. We communicate well, for the most part, we share common interests and friends and we seem to make one another happy.

Last weekend, she kind of dropped into a conversation we were having that she would like for us to try having an open relationship. I was so thrown that I didn't know what to say... I find the idea absolutely abhorrent. She said that she is happy with our sex life, but that she increasingly feels the need to experience sex with other men. She wants to be honest about it.

I'm afraid I didn't handle it as well as I could have. I said something like "Don't be ridiculous, I'm your husband, you're my wife, we're happy." When she tried again to talk about it, I blanked her. It led to an argument and we haven't sat down and talked about it properly. We haven't had sex since.

I thought we were approaching a time when we could start planning to have our first child and she comes up with this, straight from left field. I can't bear to think of her with someone else and the whole idea is driving me to distraction. I don't even know how to have a conversation with her about it without going off the deep end.

I have no idea what to do and I hope you can help.

Yours,
Call Me Old Fashioned, But...

Dear Call Me Old Fashioned, But...,

You're not old-fashioned. You're monogamous.

Which is unfortunate, because your wife has just announced that she'd quite like to be monogamous with you and occasionally naked with somebody else.

I can see why you didn't immediately reach for the family calendar.

But “Don't be ridiculous, I'm your husband, you're my wife, we're happy” isn't going to make this disappear. In fact, there's one word in that sentence doing rather more heavy lifting than it should.

We.

You thought we were happy. You thought we were approaching the point where we would start a family. And perhaps you are happy. But your wife has just told you that there's something significant going on inside her that wasn't included in your version of “we”.

You need to hear it.

Not agree to it. Hear it.

Because I don't yet know what your wife means when she says she “needs to experience sex with other men”, and neither do you. You stopped listening before she got to that bit.

She may be sexually curious. She may have discovered that monogamy doesn't suit her. She may love you perfectly well and still be struggling with the idea that the last new man she will ever sleep with entered her life before she'd finished becoming an adult.

And we probably ought to linger there for a moment.

You're 35. She's 27. You've been married for nine years.

So your wife was around eighteen when you married her, and apparently younger still when you met.

I'm not going to turn you into a villain on the strength of some arithmetic. But nor am I going to pretend the arithmetic isn't sitting there waving at me.

The woman you're married to now has spent virtually her entire adult life as half of a couple. Whatever else she's had — a happy marriage, good sex, shared friends, somebody she loves — she hasn't had the experience most of us take for granted of finding out who we are romantically and sexually as independent adults.

She may now be wondering.

That does not mean you owe her an open marriage.

Please don't let anybody persuade you that recoiling from the idea of your wife having sex with other men means you're possessive, insecure or insufficiently evolved. Some people thrive in open relationships. Some people would rather exfoliate with a cheese grater.

You appear to belong to the second group.

Believe yourself.

An open marriage requires two people who genuinely want an open marriage. One person enthusiastically exploring her sexuality while the other lies awake imagining where she is and what she's doing isn't ethical non-monogamy. It's misery with progressive branding.

But your wife gets to believe herself too.

If what she's telling you is not merely I'd quite like this but I don't think I can happily remain sexually exclusive for the rest of my life, then you have a much bigger problem than whether you can talk her out of it.

That's why you need another conversation.

Start by owning your first attempt. Tell her you were blindsided, frightened and hurt, and that blanking her wasn't fair. Then tell her something equally important: you don't want an open marriage, and you're not going to pretend you might just to keep her.

Then ask the question you should have asked the first time:

“What happens if I say no?”

Not threateningly. Not as a test.

Because her answer matters enormously.

Does she say, Then I'm disappointed, but I choose our marriage?

Does she say, I don't know?

Or does she say, Then I don't know whether I can stay married?

Those are three very different futures.

And while you're finding out which one you're living in, put the baby plans away.

A baby is many things. A relationship stabiliser isn't one of them.

Don't start trying to create a child while one of you is imagining parenthood and the other is wondering what it would be like to have sex with Steve from Accounts. Sort out the marriage first.

You may discover that this is a desire your wife can talk about honestly and ultimately choose not to pursue.

You may discover that something fundamental has changed.

What you cannot do is return to last Friday, when you didn't know any of this.

That's the really rotten part. She didn't just ask you whether she could sleep with other men.

She changed what you know about your marriage.

Now you both have to decide what to do with the knowledge.

Yours, monogamously,
Joely