Submitted by Belansky907 t3_10d8gp8 in tifu
Obligatory: This was not today but about 4 years ago, but reading similar posts reminded me of a situation I found myself in.
As the title says, I, M 26, had a day off, and my GF, F 26, at the time (now my wife, but I digress) was working, so I booted up the Xbox for some me time and figured I'd throw a background show up on the iPad for some background noise (just ADHD things amirite?)
Anyways, while playing, I kept noticing FB messenger notices from this one guy popping up. It was not really a huge deal. She had never given me reason to not trust her, and we both had/have friends of the opposite sex that are purely platonic friendships, but something he said in one of the message previews caught my eye and I snooped against my better judgement.
It was quickly apparent that this guy was thirsting after her, and while she didn't respond with anything I would consider outright cheating, she also didn't try to put a stop to it. The things he was saying to her, telling her if her was alone with her he didn't know if he could hold himself back despite her having a BF, reminiscing about their history (he was an ex who lived in another state she had moved from, I later found out), and encouraging her to leave me and go see him to hook-up when we were to be vacationing in that state a few months later, made my blood boil. I wanted to get a plane ticket, find this guy, and beat the ever-loving-shit out of him. I distinctly remember trying to calm myself down with a nice shower at one point, thinking of what he was saying to her, and getting so upset I punched the tile so hard she thought I had fallen over. Again, she wasn't the one saying the stuff her responses were usually short, and sometimes she would try to change the subject, but she also wouldn't shut it down.
I didn't know how to approach it because, obviously, I had breached her trust by reading the messages in the first place, but their relationship was not okay if we were going to continue being together. I casually asked her about him once, and she described him as "just an old friend," which was a lie, and I knew it, but I didn't drag anything more out of her. For months, I stewed over it, to the point I considered ending things with her, I started looking for solid evidence of her cheating on me, but I knew that wasn't fair to her as she wasn't the one fully responsible and, again, she never took things too far on her end.
I finally reached a breaking point, we lived together but everytime I saw her, all I could think about were the messages, my mood would sour, she would ask me what's wrong, and I would say nothing, which was making her suspicious of me. Finally, after several months of anxiety and anger, which was beginning to hurt our relationship, I broke down and came clean. She admitted the true nature of their past relationship and that she knew it was too far, but she didn't want to lose a friendship. She promised to set boundaries with him, and when he continued to break those boundaries, she inevitably ended her friendship with him altogether, which was certainly a show of good faith on her part. I learned that the best thing you can do in a relationship is have difficult conversations and avoided snooping anymore as I realized she clearly put me first. Sometimes, dudes are just gonna be horndogs. We have been married a couple of years now, and we both continue to grow together. While this was a positive outcome, the months of panic attacks, anger, and generally poor mental health were trying and very nearly ended an otherwise healthy relationship.
Tl;dr: was watching Netflix on the gf's iPad, saw concerning messages from an ex, and mentally tortured myself for months before finally confronting it.
Edit 1: yall are wilding out. This was a low point in the relationship. Was it emotional cheating? I mean, yeah, but I wasn't a Saint either. I had been cold and distant. Obviously, communication is not a strength of mine, and while it doesn't justify anything, to the people who say she's doing it again or she's definitely cheating on me I could TELL something was wrong long before I ever discovered the message. Because when you're being cheated on or cheating, you're never as slick as you think. You wear it on your sleeve each and every day. It's very obvious when someone is checked out, and right now, we are both all in. That could change and would suck, but frankly, none of us are getting out of this clean. When one person quits trying, the relationship is dead long before infidelity takes place.