Dear Hello:

You are welcome. Three members answered you, I am one of them (anita). In your recent post you shared that you fell in love at 22 and been with that one man (your ex-husband) for 20 years. The two of you grew apart, you fell out of love and had an affair, an affair that led to your divorce. After your divorce, you spent a year “making reckless choices and very lost“. You then met another man (your current husband). You didn’t tell him that you had an affair (concluded by then) and that you spent a year making reckless choices; instead, you told him that you spent the prior year “being low key“.

A year into your current marriage, your new husband (who had an affair himself during his previous marriage, who was still “friends” with the woman he had the affair with, and who had a tinder app on his phone while married with you, from day 1 of the marriage)  “started snooping, broke into my email , computer and dug up information about my past… he went to extremes to dig info on me and it lasted months… he became obsessed“.

You then told him “all the details of my ugly few years before him“, went into counseling and did very well, but your husband has “spent the last 3 years in a place of resentment, anger and guilting me even though I’ve clearly improved myself and grown personally… truly a model spouse – I’ve been patient with him, loving, and humble but he’s given me no credit or support“.

My thoughts: while your affair ended long before you met your 2nd husband, he is still (4 years into the marriage with you) “friends” (as you put it, in quotation marks), with the woman he had an affair with, and he still has the tinder app that he had for months before he found out about your reckless past. I don’t think that he is a man betrayed… because he wasn’t betrayed: you didn’t have an affair on him and he didn’t have the right for full disclosure from you in regard to your past. (I am sure that he did not give you a full disclosure of his past)

“It’s clear he’s used it as a weapon to keep me ‘below’ him“- I agree that he used your past affair (in a previous marriage) and reckless year (before your marriage to him) as a weapon against you, and it is clear to me that he is willing to continue to use it against you. Like I suggested earlier, I hope that you get excellent legal guidance and help in regard to your separation and divorce from him (so that you don’t unnecessarily suffer financially and otherwise), and that you live separately from him as soon as possible.

He is not morally superior to you, and there is no reason for you to accommodate his abuse of you and to allow it to continue. Protect yourself from him as he is not a friend. I think he’s an enemy.

anita