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So my AH was home this weekend, and we had a lovely weekend. He had a few beers here and there, and I think I did a good job of not expressing any opinion, verbal or nonverbal, about him drinking. He was never drunk.
Then this morning he took the dog for a walk before he had to leave again. While he was gone, I went through his cell phone. There was a text message to an unfamiliar number (but wiht an area code local to where he is working) that asked "so do you like baseball?" There was no response. I called the number, and the voice mail belonged to a woman.
I confronted AH (but not angrily). Everything of course got turned around on me, how I snooped again and I'm ruining our marriage by snooping, how she's just a friend he met at the bar last weekend. He would hear nothing about how if the roles were reversed, he would befurious if I got a man's phone number at a bar and texted him. I was told to shut up, that I've ruined his life, that I'm ruining our son's life, and that he is thinking about leaving me. By the time he left, I was sobbing and he told me not to cry in front of the baby. He apologized for telling me to shut up, but insisted he had done nothing wrong with respect to this woman.
Now we're separated by this distance again, and I'm trying so hard to detach. I'm trying so hard to remember that I cannot control him or his behavior, and that he probably says these things to me because he knows that he is making bad choices and wants to deflect things on to me. But I can't change the fact that his words hurt me so much, and I'm not coping very well.
I can't tell you how liberating it was for me once I stopped snooping. And I still struggle with it from time to time. But just letting go of it all really is a burden that is lifted.
So many times I will be in the kitchen and my wife will be elsewhere--and there will be so many things I can look at--her purse to see if there is a bottle of booze in there (I've found many in the past), her cellphone to see if there is anything incriminating (found all kinds of things on it), her glass of "diet coke" to see if I can tell if there's is booze in it; although she recently started with vodka and that is much harder to detect. And I think that is the key point--you can try and "catch" your partner in certain behaviors, but they are sick and they will adapt...when my wife's drinking first got out of control, it was a bottle of wine she was drinking...well, it's hard to hide a bottle of wine; now when I do find evidence (and really, it's not from snooping), it's one of those tiny airplane bottles of vodka. My wife adapted her behavior because she knew I was going to snoop. Your husband will do the same. I'm not accusing your husband of anything, but there are many men out there who have 2 cell phone lines...one for everyday stuff, one for the cheating. They adapt their behavior.
You can't control what he does. Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt when he does it. But you can't control it. Direct that energy elsewhere.
Oh by the way, I'm not trying to make you paranoid about the 2nd phone thing! Just trying to make a point that they adapt their behavior as necessary so they can maintain status quo...
Aloha Stephanie...I am sooo grateful for your post because it reminds me of what it "use to be like" before I got into Al-Anon. I was a cop where it came to trying to keep tabs of my alcoholic wife and I didn't what that job. I thought that the solution was her straightening up her act to fit my expectations and that thought was what kept me in trouble cause the problem was my expectations and my attempts to power and control her. Was the problem only her drinking? Not really because while she wasn't drinking I was still suspicious of other stuff and it was all in my mind whether she was involved with other stuff or not.
Detachment as learner from inside the rooms of the Al-Anon Family Groups is an artform and a powerful one. Only one of the things it taught me was to allow my alcoholic wife the dignity of her own choices...good ones and bad ones and the consequences of them all...but I had chosen to be the cop because my happiness and my sadness where her responsibility and not yet my choice.
I hope you have found the rooms of the Al-Anon Family Groups in your area. There are more meeting rooms of Al-Anon than there are WalMarts and we get a better deal from Al-Anon. (Don't know where that perspective came from and am gonna leave it). I hope you have the literature of recovery and are reading it all. How Al-Anon works is our Big Book like AA has theirs. Don't yourself the best act of love and get into the program. That way suspicions won't own you and who you are and how you feel will not be dependent upon anyone else.
wow... that one look at a message on the phone.. or in the email or even a call from someone and my heart skips a beat.. I had stopped looking through his stuff for a while but then started again... some where i think it was the fear of losing him.. I mean i am looking to catch him but wht made me angry was 'then what???'
what would i do if it were true? do i have the courage to leave? im not sure.. do i have the courage to live with it? .. ouch.. well as they say- once bitten - twice shy.. so somewhere i just Don't want to know.. but admitting this made me feel like a loser.. so I rather just say - let him be!
but man it's difficult.. I mean right now- I had called him up and he's sitting with 'my friend' for a cup of coffee cause he had to drop something off-- but i had just read your post before I made the call... and when I heard he was with her- I wanted to be okay with it so I aid 'cool' and spoke about some other stuff.. then his tone changed back to the insulting and rude tone that it always is and i go upset - because he's talking to me like that in front of my friend.. i felt insulted... and i feel like sending him a horrible message right now.. Talk about insanity...
Like the others said (and I am not perfect) but snooping and checking make me so very sick. I feel awful afterwards because really "what next" if I find something? SO now I am working on not snooping. If I find myself feeling like I want to snoop (say on the computer or his phone) I try to distract myself and do something else. Don't get me wrong, I do on occasion snoop, but I feel terrible when I do, so why do it? Take care of you. Focus on you
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You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. -Buddha
The past has flown away. The coming month and year do not exsist. Ours only is the present's tiny point. -Mahmud Shabistanri
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